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people have been saying this! to my mind it's a combo of: - more ads, more internal promotions of other Google stuff, more infoboxes - the task of finding new information via Google search is a niche one - most searches are just wayfinding - Goodhart's law has destroyed PageRank @radiatoryang/1435123454307541002Permalink Look on archive.org
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lemme explain that last bit. PageRank is the OG Google algorithm - basically, figure out what pages are worth showing not by looking at the page, but by looking at what pages are linking to it.Permalink Look on archive.org
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except nowadays, people don't really "surf the web" (follow links from site to site), they just Google for stuff. instead, one of the main functions links have is just trying to do SEO, trying to get Google to rank you higher. built for machines, not people.Permalink Look on archive.org
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this caused a big problem when social networks came along, and people could post links on other people's websites. lots of spam, just trying to sway Google. so people invented a special thing you could put on a link 'rel="nofollow"' to tell Google to ignore it.Look on archive.org
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another way to look at this is that by linking to other sites (and then letting Google scrape you), you were performing labour for Google. Google was learning valuable info, for free. rel="nofollow" is a way to stop that from happening.Permalink Look on archive.org
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(the labour, for the social media sites, here means a much harder task dealing with spam. which is one of their biggest problems!)Permalink Look on archive.org
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nowadays, of course, people don't really have personal websites, they have social media accounts. and these are useless for Google when figuring out page rankings (idk, does Google secretly follow the nofollow links?).Permalink Look on archive.org
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if you do have a website (I do!), you also probably get people emailing you, asking if they can just place a link on your page/write a post for you/etc. that's the labour filtering through.Permalink Look on archive.org
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all of these pressures placed upon the system of linking to other websites... well, they mean that PageRank doesn't work very well any more. its not a useful signal. and that's one reason Google results are bad, and are unlikely to get better.Permalink Look on archive.org
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"Goodhart's law" is a name for this pattern. "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." or, more generally "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."Permalink Look on archive.org
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basically: if you build a system on something that's just associated with the thing you really care about, your system will destroy the association. goodbye, "linking to other websites". it was nice to know you.Permalink Look on archive.org
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I hadn't even thought of this wrinkle... @alexhern/1435176397035778052?s=19Permalink Look on archive.org
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ah, points to me for guessing this change: @MattieTK/1435187805081178114?s=19 nofollow is just a hint now, as Google needs more data & is happy to shift some of the spam-fighting load onto social media sites.Permalink Look on archive.org
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Google even acknowledges that this means there'll be more spam to be caught by human moderation on other platforms.Permalink Look on archive.org
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I was thinking this! @davemakes/1435183397521874946?s=19 specifically, how long til it makes sense to go back to a thoughtful human curated directory of nice websites to go to for specific purposes. Not that I'd trust Yahoo! to run it...Permalink Look on archive.org
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