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The new evergreen is refreshed sludge for bottom dollar. College kids stealing Reddit comments or moving around paragraphs from old articles. Or linking to linked blogs that link elsewhere.

It's all stamped with Google Ads, of course, and then Google ranks these pages high enough to rake in eyeballs and ad dollars.

Also there's the fact that each year, the average webpage picks up two more video elements / ad players, one or two more ad overlays, a cookie banner, and half a dozen banner/interstitials. It's 3-5% content spread thinly over an ad engine.

The Google web is about squeezing ads down your throat.



Really makes you wonder: you play whack a mole and tackle the symptoms with initiatives like this search engine. But the root of that problem and many many others is the same: advertising. Why don't we try to tackle that?


Perhaps a subscription-based search engine would avoid these incentives.


Let’s go a few levels deeper and question our consumption culture


Exactly.

The only reason people make content they aren't passionate about is advertising.




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