Well, sure. Google is a machine that turns small text queries into internet links. It does this remarkably well. If manually penalizing sites gets you solid improvements beyond what automated or clever methods give you, it is bad engineering to not do it. What's the argument against this? Sure, it makes engineers feel icky to have manual anything, and it's not nearly as scaleable or reliable as some hypothetical automated solution. The issue is that the hypothetical automated solution doesn't exist. I'm sure they have 500 of the smartest, most capable people in the world working on this every single day, that they haven't found it is good evidence that the solution is not obvious.
Surely a fully automated, self correcting algorithm exists to penalize spam sites and shitty content farms, and whoever comes up with it will be heavily rewarded financially for doing so, either because they will make major inroads in the search space, or because there will be a bidding war for the technology. That nobody has come up with it outside of Google either says it likely is outside of the engineering ability of humans to do it at the moment.
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Is manually penalizing the ranks of spam sites solid engneering too?
Well, sure. Google is a machine that turns small text queries into internet links. It does this remarkably well. If manually penalizing sites gets you solid improvements beyond what automated or clever methods give you, it is bad engineering to not do it. What's the argument against this? Sure, it makes engineers feel icky to have manual anything, and it's not nearly as scaleable or reliable as some hypothetical automated solution. The issue is that the hypothetical automated solution doesn't exist. I'm sure they have 500 of the smartest, most capable people in the world working on this every single day, that they haven't found it is good evidence that the solution is not obvious.
Surely a fully automated, self correcting algorithm exists to penalize spam sites and shitty content farms, and whoever comes up with it will be heavily rewarded financially for doing so, either because they will make major inroads in the search space, or because there will be a bidding war for the technology. That nobody has come up with it outside of Google either says it likely is outside of the engineering ability of humans to do it at the moment.