It seems like Google often rewards low quality results: Sites with tons of ads or where I'm being shilled to buy a product that I'm looking for information on because I already have it. It's so bad that I've half-concluded it's due to misaligned incentives - keeping the user looking at the search results keeps Google collecting ad revenue and steering users to crappy sites full of ads also keeps Google collecting ad revenue.
Maybe this is my chance to repeat something I asked the DuckDuckGo CEO today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32366664): Are you doing anything about SEO spam?
It seems like Google often rewards low quality results: Sites with tons of ads or where I'm being shilled to buy a product that I'm looking for information on because I already have it. It's so bad that I've half-concluded it's due to misaligned incentives - keeping the user looking at the search results keeps Google collecting ad revenue and steering users to crappy sites full of ads also keeps Google collecting ad revenue.