I've noticed that the usefulness of a web page is inversely proportional to the number of ads on it. This means that a good heuristic to rank pages for a search engine is the number of ads: the more the ads the lower the ranking and vice versa
@gabrielesvelto add affiliate links to the ranking algorithm in the same way and you've got yourself a search engine full of only the good stuff.
@fancysandwiches Plus lunatics who self-publish their lies, don’t forget.
@KimSJ yes but compared to detecting ads and affiliate links that's much more difficult. Affiliate links are largely the reason the web is filled with garbage websites these days (e.g. you search for "hammer" and there are a ton of "best hammer 2024" websites that are all effectively useless). Those garbage websites are making money via affiliate marketing programs.
@fancysandwiches @KimSJ I think spam in results points to the search engine being garbage, not the sites.
