Your point is good but I'm not sure I'd say very good given how easily the same SEO spam domains can stay at the top of search results for ages simply by scraping someone else's content. What I'd be most interested in knowing is what their success metrics are defined as — for example, how much of a problem does Google's management consider it if someone searches, finds the answer they were looking for on someone's Stack Overflow rip-off, and stops searching? I could easily believe that a significant amount of what we're seeing here is that they're focused on some kind of user frustration metric which doesn't include things like damage to other businesses.
Yes, I've noticed this particularly with technical results. A lot of sites seem to have scraped StackOverflow and GitHub issues, put a crappy ad-loaded interface around them, and somehow out-rank the original SO/GitHub content.
It's like the bad-old-days of ExpertsExchange, which somehow was never delisted by Google for its shady SEO tactics.
You just have to look at Google's profit motive here. Their motive isn't to provide quality search results. Their motive is to show users ads, either in the search results themselves or on the destination sites via their ad network. The SEO spam sites aren't a bug, they are a feature of Google's profit algorithm. Google's search quality will never improve so long as their motivation is to show you ads. Why should it? Competition may help here, either by an outsider like the OP suggests, or via breaking Google up with anti-trust enforcement, or both (my preference).
As a user, your best personal and ethical move is to install an ad-blocker, to make ad-based business models less viable, which will help promote business models that don't abuse the customer.
>" The core problem, I guess, is that search engines view all their results as ads. That’s why they got into the ad business in the first place. "
This seems a bit overly cynical. Some search engines only served ads, but they're long gone. The survivors are those who dedicated themselves to finding links which were responsive to people's search intent. They seem to have gotten into ads because it was the best business model in this market.
> It's like the bad-old-days of ExpertsExchange, which somehow was never delisted by Google for its shady SEO tactics.
This is really what made me suspect that Google was teetering on the edge of the MBA death spiral: these problems run for years when they'd be easy to block, which suggests to me that whatever metric gets you a bonus / promoted doesn't include things like that which are long-term threats to their core business even if it's selling a lot of ads short-term.
> A lot of sites seem to have scraped StackOverflow and GitHub issues, put a crappy ad-loaded interface around them, and somehow out-rank the original SO/GitHub content.
Some even made slideshows of SO screen captures and put that on Youtube, with a fake video or spoken intro to make believe an actual content will be discussed... A number of shameless people would go any length to grab bits of money anywhere and anyhow, and I've hit those links a couple of times.
