New ways we're tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Google’s announcement of new measures to combat spammy, low‑quality content in Search is met with deep skepticism from users who say results—especially for things like recipes and product advice—are still dominated by ad-heavy, SEO‑driven pages. Many argue Google’s ad business fundamentally conflicts with elevating cleaner, faster sites, and note that AI‑generated content is only worsening the noise. Alternatives such as Kagi, Perplexity, self-hosted crawlers, and old‑fashioned cookbooks or personal recommendations are frequently cited as better ways to find trustworthy information.

Recipe search as a quality benchmark

  • Many commenters use “brownie recipe” as a litmus test for search quality.
  • Common complaints: long personal stories, intrusive modals, newsletter popups, autoplay videos, and ads splitting the recipe.
  • “Jump to recipe” buttons are seen as a band-aid for fundamentally bad design; users resent needing to hunt for them.
  • Some argue these long recipe pages exist mainly for SEO and ad impressions, not user needs.
  • Others note that some users actually like the stories and context, so the “spam” isn’t universally disliked.

SEO, ads, and Google’s incentives

  • Several comments argue that Google’s ranking and ad systems created the incentives for SEO-heavy, ad-laden content.
  • There is skepticism that Google will penalize sites that use many ads, since Google profits from them.
  • Some suspect Google’s own scripts/ads are excluded from speed/quality penalties, while competitors’ might not be.

AI-generated content and spam

  • The policy update is read as Google admitting it can’t reliably detect AI vs human content, so it targets “low-value content at scale” regardless of origin.
  • Commenters say this doesn’t address the core issue: huge volumes of low-quality pages with ads that only need modest ranking to be profitable.
  • Some note irony: Google is also testing tools to help publishers generate content with generative AI.

Alternative search engines and tools

  • Kagi is frequently mentioned as a paid, ad-free alternative with better power features; some users are enthusiastic, others find the hype suspicious.
  • DuckDuckGo, Bing, Perplexity, and “just asking an LLM” (ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini) are common workarounds.
  • Some prefer “site:” searches targeting trusted recipe or technical sites, or relying on books and YouTube instead of web search.

User controls, filters, and curation

  • Strong desire for:
    • Advanced filters and “pro”/power-user modes.
    • Per-user domain blacklists (uBlacklist, uBlock filters) and the ability to hide sites like Pinterest, stock photo banks, eHow, Quora.
    • Date filters (e.g., exclude post-2020 content) and exact-match operators; several lament that older Google operators work worse now.
  • Interest in self-hosted or curated search (e.g., custom crawlers, YaCy) for specific domains or niches.

Skepticism about Google’s changes

  • Many see this as a belated, PR-driven response to competitive threats (LLMs, alternative engines) rather than a principled quality push.
  • Repeated past “we’re improving search quality” announcements fuel doubt that this update will materially fix spam, recipe pages, or ad overload.