>It is a cursed problem no matter how you look at it.
But the funding model is also extremely blessed: you have a stream of people telling you every page load what they're interested in at that exact moment, and it's not hard to match them up with advertisers for those keywords.
And arguably the SEO parasitism problem is worsened by their monopoly -- to the extent that optimizing a site for one engine deoptimizes it on on others, the stronger the lead engine #1 has the more incentive there is to game it.
But the funding model is also extremely blessed: you have a stream of people telling you every page load what they're interested in at that exact moment, and it's not hard to match them up with advertisers for those keywords.
And arguably the SEO parasitism problem is worsened by their monopoly -- to the extent that optimizing a site for one engine deoptimizes it on on others, the stronger the lead engine #1 has the more incentive there is to game it.