Quote:
Originally Posted by woj
I agree, what you said is all true, but it's not a shocker at all... since they did the IPO, it was obvious that the objective will become "we need to beat quarterly estimates every quarter"... that's just how the game works, pretty much all companies are run like that...
for a while they managed to increase revenues by innovation, but lately, my guess is that that started to dry up... so they kinda became forced to diverge a bit in order to keep increasing revenue...
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No argument there.
I (and most people I think) just thought they'd be more "elegant" about it. Google has many properties and 100x more secondary business relationships than that, they monetize their data & services in ways the average consumer can't even comprehend - I just figured they didn't need to augment the income stream by blatantly crowbarring crap into their search results. It just feels.... clumsy.
But my negative experiences as a webmaster informs my opinion of the SE quality as a user, if nothing else because I'm primed to notice the shitty irrelevant results even when I'm not on the clock. Do regular users notice it? If they do, will it become enough to look for alternatives? Not sure.
The other question is whether search engines in general will be obsolete in the near future due to proprietary apps & networks (another symptom of the closing Web). Perhaps Google knows this and is looking to take advantage while it lasts, knowing that emphasizing search engine quality over profit won't serve them long-term.