Do you think mainstream search engines someday will provide a “commercial search” and “non-commercial search” buttons side-by-side? SEO/ad gamed and non SEO/ad-gamed?
I dream of the day, but unless the government makes it a requirement I don’t see them doing it as it could undermine their business model to some extent (although I think people who want to buy will make use of the “commercial search”)
>Do you think mainstream search engines someday will provide a “commercial search” and “non-commercial search” buttons side-by-side? SEO/ad gamed and non SEO/ad-gamed?
If we put on our computer science hats on to attempt an algorithm to classify the "commercial" from "non-commercial", what would that look like?
Distinguishing ads that are disguised as innocent posts vs authentically innocent posts is a very hard problem. What would the AI machine learning rules be?
Let's take one example thread that's currently on the HN front page: "Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?"
Was that post submitted for discussion to spur sales of the new Raspberry Pi 4? Or was it a genuine question free of any hidden commercial intent? How would a computer algorithm know? Likewise, how would we, as humans, be able to truly know? To me, the thread doesn't seem like it's advertising-motivated. But do you trust my judgement on this?
Notice that Google includes that very HN thread in its results. Should the hypothetical "non-commercial" search button include that HN thread or not?
Here's an example of the opposite effect where people misclassify something as commercial when it isn't: A HN user accuses me of selling something[1] even though I actually wasn't! I just happen to view hundreds of videos about entrepreneurship and I keep copious notes. It was easy to share my notes with HN readers. I have no commercial or even personal affiliation with any VC.
I guess I’m wondering if we could see a return to a more no frills SERPS like we used to see with Page-rank or
Altavista
I don’t mind the ads, but I do mind the content farms and useless fluff that ends up on the first SERP of a query. Or links to pages with no substantive content related to a query except SEO.
I dream of the day, but unless the government makes it a requirement I don’t see them doing it as it could undermine their business model to some extent (although I think people who want to buy will make use of the “commercial search”)