> Within a week, tens of thousands of SEO specialists will be on the case, reverse-engineering the magic and figuring out how to get their crappy sites back to the top of the rankings.
The Google competitor will have a human nuke their entire domain or business (based on a manual index of banned products/brands) from the search results forever, or have by default a bias against ad-filled websites which would remove any commercial incentive for those websites to exist in the first place.
That kind of manual intervention doesn't scale though. The only way it can work is to have community-curated lists of bad domains, similar to adblock lists, that users can upload to personalize their search result.
Somehow a distributed community of unpaid volunteers manages to keep the entire advertising industry (where billions are at stake) at bay by curating adblock lists. I'm sure a company can achieve the same. It will never be 100% perfect, but it will surely be better than what we have now.
But yes, supporting community-supplied adblock-style lists would be a start, and Google isn't even doing that.
The Google competitor will have a human nuke their entire domain or business (based on a manual index of banned products/brands) from the search results forever, or have by default a bias against ad-filled websites which would remove any commercial incentive for those websites to exist in the first place.