If people start making search engines again and there is more competition for Google, I think things would be pretty sweet.

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nephihaha 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are other search engines, they've just been marginalised. Even something as mainstream as Bing has been pushed to the side.

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tokioyoyo 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because of the financial incentives, it would still end up with people doing things to drive traffic to their website though, no? Maybe because the web was smaller, and people looked at it as means "to explore curiosity" in the olden days it kinda worked differently... maybe I just got old, but I don't want to believe that.

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n1xis10t 16 hours ago | parent [-]

By “doing things to drive traffic to their website” do you mean trying to do SEO type things to manipulate search engine rankings? If so, I think that there are probably ways to rank that are immune to tampering.

Don’t worry, you’re not just old. The internet kind of sucks now.

	▲	makapuf 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Google was neat in that you didn't see the content keyword spam either on the websites or the portal home pages. The Web was already full of shit (first ad banner was 1994? By 1999 you already had punch the monkey as classy content), but it was more ... organic and you could easily skip it.

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PunchyHamster 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

it's few orders of magnitude harder given the amount of SEO spam prevalent, and that just gonna get worse with AI