I can't tell you what they are, but there are probably internal Google incentives to filter and internal Google incentives to not filter, and the ones to not filter are probably stronger.
Almost all the interesting factual websites are not ad-monetized. The SO spam etc are all scraps of the factual websites with ads injected. If google simply deprioritized ad-supported websites the search results would be much cleaner, but the part of google that sells the ads on sites instead of in search results would throw a fit.
We'd need to get some humans in to rank the results, but that's not a big problem. "How well does this web page answer this query, on a scale of 1-10?"
With a collection of ranked pages, we can answer other questions as well. I'd be interested in running the same test but for google analytics, not google ads, as I think there might be a misaligned incentive there too.
It's worth bearing in mind that the stackoverflow clones may actually answer the query just as well as the original site - that is, it might be our definition of "a good result" that's out of whack (because we have an unnecessary bias towards the original source). I doubt this, but again it's something that's testable.
But the same websites show up in e.g. DDG (through Bing), as far as I know neither DDG nor Microsoft make a dime from ad-supported websites like Google would, why are these results not nuked similarly to what Kagi is doing?
:path: /pagead/viewthroughconversion/796001856/?random=1695374589838&cv=11&fst=1695374589838&bg=ffffff&guid=ON&async=1>m=45be39k0&u_w=2704&u_h=1756&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.geeksforgeeks.org%2Fc-plus-plus%2F &ref=https%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F. <<<< What does this do? &hn=www.googleadservices.com&frm=0&tiba=C%2B%2B%20Programming%20Language%20-%20GeeksforGeeks&auid=68284397.1695374483&data=event%3Dgtag.config&rfmt=3&fmt=4
Hence providing the same incentives to keep shitty sites like geeksforgeeks in the results.
I guess also geeksforgeeks is incentivized to report these references, so that search engines and other linking services will continue to show their links.
To reproduce: 1. Go to duckduckgo.com and do a search that will turn up a geekforgeeks website 2. click on the link 3. watch the network tab as requests are made to googleads.g.doubleclick.net and check the path.
