I think they do have at least some incentive to rank good results highly. Why use a search engine if it's no good at finding relevant stuff?
And if no one is using the search engine, who's gonna see all those ads?
Of course, they do have other incentives too, some of which are directly conflicting with high quality search results, as you point out.
I suppose one could argue that their near-monopoly in the search business has allowed them to be somewhat negligent on the quality of search, but now that there are a few competitors at least somewhat worthy of the name, one can hope high quality results will be a higher priority.
Anyway, I'm holding out hope someone will one day manage to train a LLM to distinguish between quality content and SEO bullshit, and then put that to use in a search engine.
I'm not well versed enough in the current status of LLM's to make a prediction on how hard that will be, but my impression is that we're a fair ways off from any LLM being able to do that well enough to be valuable.
I'd really love to be proven wrong on this one, if you're reading this and have some relevant experience, consider yourself challenged! (feel free to rephrase this last bit in your head to whatever motivates you the most)
And if no one is using the search engine, who's gonna see all those ads?
Of course, they do have other incentives too, some of which are directly conflicting with high quality search results, as you point out.
I suppose one could argue that their near-monopoly in the search business has allowed them to be somewhat negligent on the quality of search, but now that there are a few competitors at least somewhat worthy of the name, one can hope high quality results will be a higher priority.
Anyway, I'm holding out hope someone will one day manage to train a LLM to distinguish between quality content and SEO bullshit, and then put that to use in a search engine.
I'm not well versed enough in the current status of LLM's to make a prediction on how hard that will be, but my impression is that we're a fair ways off from any LLM being able to do that well enough to be valuable.
I'd really love to be proven wrong on this one, if you're reading this and have some relevant experience, consider yourself challenged! (feel free to rephrase this last bit in your head to whatever motivates you the most)