>>down-ranking sites with a lot of ads and trackers more aggressively
This is such an 'of course, why wasn't this done before' move!
Larding up a site with lots of ads and trackers is a blatant signal that it is low quality content attempting to game the search engine site.
It is surprising/not-surprising that Google didn't prioritize this downranking method years ago, as it would have massively improved the usefulness their results; but then it would also reduce the number of pages subsequently displayed using Google's placement engine...
Seems like low hanging fruit for Microsoft to undermine Google, downranking sites with heavy Google ad placements (since MS doesn't have a similarly large ad network that I know of)... and it'd be legit improvement of their results!
This is such an 'of course, why wasn't this done before' move!
Larding up a site with lots of ads and trackers is a blatant signal that it is low quality content attempting to game the search engine site.
It is surprising/not-surprising that Google didn't prioritize this downranking method years ago, as it would have massively improved the usefulness their results; but then it would also reduce the number of pages subsequently displayed using Google's placement engine...
Seems like low hanging fruit for Microsoft to undermine Google, downranking sites with heavy Google ad placements (since MS doesn't have a similarly large ad network that I know of)... and it'd be legit improvement of their results!