Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcampbell1 | Hacker News Reader

The one that will actually get them in trouble is running ads on top of navigational queries to a trademarked brand.

Here is Jason Fried of Basecamp openly accusing Google of a shakedown racket: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016

Of the 100,000 or so people that actually give $2,700 to political candidates, I'd think this is their biggest gripe with Google, and likely the issue that is going to cause Google the most problems.

The more interesting thing to me is how quickly goodwill just expires. Google search is among mankind's greatest achievements in the past century, along with the free gifts of quality email, youtube, android, etc. It is an interesting thought experiment of how to keep a brand burnished in the eyes of the public given goodwill decays so rapidly.

View on HN

Google Search has gotten worse in the past few years in my opinion. It seems biased towards newly published content and content from the top 100 sites or so. Before it felt like you were grepping the internet, but now it feels like you're at an airport newsstand. It will frequently re-write your queries for you if you are searching for uncommon things, and putting it in quotes doesn't always fix it.

The worst is the blog spam that reaches the top of Google's search results.

I don't think it's a coincidence that those poor quality results are given precedence when they also happen to be littered with, and optimized for, Adsense ads.

Yes, they changed how search works - try using "google verbatim" for the old behavior.

There are many searches that have so much SEO optimized crap content in the results that it is impossible to find any actually useful content.

I've stopped using Google for searching for various generic terms and instead search nearly everything as site:reddit.com 2019 "search term".

Sometimes I get mildly useful information that stands out from the page after page of pagerank gamed garbage.

Now, searching reddit.com for solutions has other issues (notably using Reddit on iOS via Safari, is, as of 9/2019, almost entirely impossible), but that's where I'm at currently.

Have you seen Google Image search recently? They have updated it such that when you click on an image to select/expand in view, the selection is now presented in the top right hand side of the page. But the selection is not floating with your scrolling - so selecting anything below the fold means you end up scrolling back and forth between the top of the page and your previous position. Honestly not sure why they changed it. Terrible.

Using image search on mobile is a truly a painful experience

Amusingly, at least for me, a search for [basecamp] now gives me no ads.

> ... the issue that is going to cause Google the most problems

I am certainly biased because I seem to see more negative HN Google comments than positive ones. But, I'm starting to wonder if taking money from Google will cause politicians problems in 2020. Will we see candidates bashing each other for being too cozy with Google? Could taking Google money even become a third rail?

And Cal AG Xavier Becerra is a test case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20944284

Would be more effective if he titled it "Dont click this ad | Click the first organic result below"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com