Using the Google of 10-years-ago on the Internet of 10-years-ago, or using the Google of 10-years-ago on the Internet of today? Because I imagine doing the latter would just result in an endless wasteland of SEO-optimized content leadgen pages.
The good thing is SEO optimized content is relatively trivial to distinguish from the snippet, and other search engines like DuckDuckGo feel far more reliable and consistent without being overrun by SEO junk.
Not really, not for most people, especially for farm sites like eHow. If you ask how to make a tequila, you'd get an SEO-optimized eHow site instead of say, an authoritative page of the world's top tequila expert.
If DDG was so good, people wouldn't need to use !g for tail queries so much. Too much anecdotal claims every time these issues come up and no objective quality evaluation.
I mainly use !g for the "stupid" queries, actually. The ones where I would actually prefer Google's AI second-guessing me. Also "local"-type searches. I don't voluntarily give Google my location[0] but if I type the city name too, it works fine. Actually I just tried and DDG does it just as well and gives a map and address too, so I may go for that next time.
Except for lyrics, DDG is quite good at that and often even presents the proper "zero click result" straight away (though usually the lyrics are cut off at a point and I still need to click).
On the other hand, the vast majority of my DDG queries are !bangs for other sites, because I know what site will have the page I'm looking for. Usually !w for Wikipedia (and the other wikipedia stuff like !wnl and !wt), after that probably one of the image searches !gi/!yi/!bi, then !imdb, !discogs and !whosampled. Oh and occasionally !hn, of course :)
I believe that DDG would have had a lot harder time getting as successful as it is today if Google had retained its old "AND" search engine behaviour (as explained above, keywords used to have an implied "AND" between them).
[0] I only log in to these types of big "social" things using a private tab, for GMail and to get my personal YouTube suggestions and subscriptions. It's a bit of a hassle to use the 2FA Authenticator code every time after I closed my browser, but it's worth Google not tying everything I search to my account, or getting "bubbled".
> If DDG was so good, people wouldn't need to use !g for tail queries so much.
When I resort to !g Google usually returns nothing interesting either and the most promising links are usually marked as visited, since I already clicked them from DDG.
I'd venture that most people are happy with the eHow results. Those wanting more depth may have to look through 1-2 pages of results, but I don't think most people want/need "tequila expert" level depth when searching for that. I'm not saying this is correct or "desirable," just saying that's one justifiable explanation for this behavior.
The important point is that it's orthogonal to search.
You can make SEO-penalization as complicated as you want without affecting search. The only thing search should be able to deal with is a SEO-penalty which is just a number.
Is your point that SEO-penalization is just a sorting implementation concern? I think Google does far more than that - perhaps removing/banning sites or categories of content that are deemed to be gaming their system.
