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If Google really cared, dropping all pages with affiliate links, would get rid of 99.9999% of the junk.

And no, I don't care about the tiny, tiny number of legit reviews with links. I doubt I'd see them anyhow.



I frequently dream of building a search engine that for this very reason penalizes any type of advertisement. This problem goes way beyond product searches. Every time I look up a how-to for pretty much anything, programming, video games, fixing house stuff, all search results that aren't user provided like Stackoverflow or Reddit, it's always stuffed with useless info that anyone having the problem already knows about ant that's clearly just there for SEO or to create more space for ads. Non-verbatim example from yesterday: search: "Outer Wilds Echoes of the Eye underground lake stuck bell" result: "Echoes of the Eye is the first DLC for Outer Wilds...blah...find artifact to enter the dream world...blah". The top, ideal answer should be a single sentence and maybe a screenshot.

Of course disincentivizing ads would never fly at google and an ad-free search engine would have a hard time being economically viable.




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