A long time ago, I started treating downvotes as a critique of my writing. My first response is always to edit the post to express my ideas more clearly, my second is to consider if the comment is doing little more than inflaming passions for no benefit to the community. In the latter case, I tend to delete the post.
This is a case where I posted in a rush. The basic idea that Google's ranking algorithm is optimized to serve Google's interests first and those of its customers second is the only possible way for Google's officers to fulfill their legal obligations to the shareholders they serve.
The key to understanding this idea of the best search ranking algorithm is that people who query Google's search engine are not Google's paying customers. Google Search's paying customers are almost exclusively advertisers.
The best search results Google can produce are those which maximize their revenue. Not enough traffic directed to ad buying customers and advertising dollars may go somewhere else. Sure too much obvious selling might drive queries elsewhere but the threshold for tolerating advertising keeps going up. So many people take tracking across sites for granted that Google can push a "weather" search onto an advertising affiliate's site and still meet the expectations of the data point making the query. There is no objective reason other than income for ranking secondary sources above the primary source, "weather.gov".
This is a bit simplistic, and I'm not saying that to be rude.
It's true that searchers don't pay Google money, and advertisers do. But Google is running a platform. In the past I've compared it to an information marketplace. And the goal for Google is to make the market run as efficiently as possible, otherwise they risk losing one side.
Searchers don't pay Google, but they do (presumably) pay Google's advertisers, who pay Google. If you lose the searchers, you lose the advertisers.
Now of course there is a balancing act, which you allude to in your last paragraph. But there are plenty of easy examples where Google returns no ads even though they could. A search for "how old is barack obama" just returns the number (or Wikipedia), without ads, even though I'm sure there are advertisers out there who would pay for an ad to be shown.
So obviously it's not universally true that "the best search results Google can produce are those which maximize their revenue." Perhaps adding some subtlety to your argument would help me understand exactly what you're saying.
All abstractions are simplified. That's what makes them both abstractions and useful.
For example Google Search might be considered a marketplace, but such an abstraction might lead a person to lump buyers and sellers into amorphous blobs and ignore the heterogeneity within each group. Ford and overstock.com are different sorts of advertisers and thus Google's business comes down to segmenting end users.
Plain and simple the most valuable end user segments are people who not just tolerate tracking and targeted advertising but who actually derive value from it. They are valuable not only because they click through and buy stuff but because they validate Google's claims that its business of tracking users and pushing ads and tailoring search results toward commercial interests and away from the long tail is objective.
Long tail results are not revenue generating and Google has simply removed bit by bit the end user's ability to specify them. Sure spelling correction is useful, until Google search refuses to respect quotation marks and simply renders some terms unreachable. Local search is useful, until a person wants to search across borders or outside their local language.
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A long time ago, I started treating downvotes as a critique of my writing. My first response is always to edit the post to express my ideas more clearly, my second is to consider if the comment is doing little more than inflaming passions for no benefit to the community. In the latter case, I tend to delete the post.
This is a case where I posted in a rush. The basic idea that Google's ranking algorithm is optimized to serve Google's interests first and those of its customers second is the only possible way for Google's officers to fulfill their legal obligations to the shareholders they serve.
The key to understanding this idea of the best search ranking algorithm is that people who query Google's search engine are not Google's paying customers. Google Search's paying customers are almost exclusively advertisers.
The best search results Google can produce are those which maximize their revenue. Not enough traffic directed to ad buying customers and advertising dollars may go somewhere else. Sure too much obvious selling might drive queries elsewhere but the threshold for tolerating advertising keeps going up. So many people take tracking across sites for granted that Google can push a "weather" search onto an advertising affiliate's site and still meet the expectations of the data point making the query. There is no objective reason other than income for ranking secondary sources above the primary source, "weather.gov".
Occam's razor just cutts that way.
This is a bit simplistic, and I'm not saying that to be rude.
It's true that searchers don't pay Google money, and advertisers do. But Google is running a platform. In the past I've compared it to an information marketplace. And the goal for Google is to make the market run as efficiently as possible, otherwise they risk losing one side.
Searchers don't pay Google, but they do (presumably) pay Google's advertisers, who pay Google. If you lose the searchers, you lose the advertisers.
Now of course there is a balancing act, which you allude to in your last paragraph. But there are plenty of easy examples where Google returns no ads even though they could. A search for "how old is barack obama" just returns the number (or Wikipedia), without ads, even though I'm sure there are advertisers out there who would pay for an ad to be shown.
So obviously it's not universally true that "the best search results Google can produce are those which maximize their revenue." Perhaps adding some subtlety to your argument would help me understand exactly what you're saying.
All abstractions are simplified. That's what makes them both abstractions and useful.
For example Google Search might be considered a marketplace, but such an abstraction might lead a person to lump buyers and sellers into amorphous blobs and ignore the heterogeneity within each group. Ford and overstock.com are different sorts of advertisers and thus Google's business comes down to segmenting end users.
Plain and simple the most valuable end user segments are people who not just tolerate tracking and targeted advertising but who actually derive value from it. They are valuable not only because they click through and buy stuff but because they validate Google's claims that its business of tracking users and pushing ads and tailoring search results toward commercial interests and away from the long tail is objective.
Long tail results are not revenue generating and Google has simply removed bit by bit the end user's ability to specify them. Sure spelling correction is useful, until Google search refuses to respect quotation marks and simply renders some terms unreachable. Local search is useful, until a person wants to search across borders or outside their local language.
But not abstractions are factually wrong, like you original premise was. Big words and complex sentence structures don't make up for that.