Probably because many of those domains are the same who contains most of their ads?
The rest is a bit tongue-in-cheek but I also can't think of better explanations:
Maybe because letting people block useless sites automatically means useful sites end up on top and giving the best results on top would mean users only stay on Google for 2 seconds and don't come back for that particular query while showing a mix of useless and ad laden non sense is pure brilliance:
- user need to stay longer on front page to decide which result to click => more ad exposure
- user goes to ad laden site => more ad exposure
- user comes back to try another result => more ad exposure
- user tries another etc etc
The whole thing seems to be a balancing act of how extremely bad they can make this slot machine before people revolt.
That said I'm open to alternative explanations:
- maybe they aren't that greedy, everybody smart just left as kt became harder and harder for non-SJW and those who are left either don't have time or are unable to fix it and it currently happens to work extremely well economically in the short run so nobody looks into it?
- or maybe as someone mentioned the other day everyone's search results are adjusted by an end-to-end optimizing AI which gets a digital dopamine hit everything an ad is shown or clicked and all good Google engineers have been struggling for years to get it back under control without breaking the cash cow in rhe process?
I like this line of thinking, that there’s something up with the paperclip optimizer. Google has always insisted that search engineering is different from ad auctions but I don’t buy it. If there’s a KPI for “dwell time” on the sponsored search results that ads up as you come back and try a different link, that would dive bomb the usefulness of the page.
