The Google Squeeze

> Search for something generic like "computer" and you can see an example of how hard it is to get information instead of ads.

To be fair, "computer" is such a generic term, I can't even imagine what you expect to see when you search for it.

That is not the thesis of this article. In fact, the opposite. The article claims that despite the increase in advertising, for the given exemplar (hotel search), the ads actually make Google more useful compared to the ten-blue-link baseline.

meanwhile a startup can focus on building a great product, sometimes while not needing to be profitable.

Amazon.com took advantage of this, with Jeff Bezos famous quote of, "Your margin is my opportunity".

The overlap between the HN crowd and the crowd following influencers is probably minimal, but as far as a % of the platform, I'd wager most people are going through these soft ads unwittingly.

And don’t give me duckduckgo, that one regularly ranks spam domains and typo domains higher than the real results

Panel for computer sales at top. A maps menu showing computer shops near me. A Bestbuy link. Another panel for computer sales. Walmart, amazon, newegg. A wiki. And another sales panel.

The increase appears to be dramatic. I signed up for YouTube Premium long ago simply because I couldn't stand the occasional ad anymore. I recently was at a friend's, and I wanted to show him a particular cooking video that I liked, on his iPad. It was a 16-minute video and it was interrupted three times by an ad. mid-video. Unbearable.

The thing is, through Premium, I was actually looking forward to discovering new music with the YouTube Music app. Was I wrong. The recommendations are crap. They are repetitive to the point of nausea. I have a few hundred "liked" songs, but the recommendations are heavily skewed towards a few, mostly recently "liked" songs.

This has actually lead to me dreading marking a song as "liked", as it inevitably leads to this repetition and, much worse, to unending recommendations of the same artist's other songs, even if I "dislike" every. single. one. of. them.

I’ve noticed that I use Google a lot less now because all the ads and baloney stress me out. Turns out a lot of the stuff I used to search for isn’t that important.

I'm also finally noticing ads when watching YouTube on Chromecast. There used to be zero ads (which was a little confusing) but now there's ads.

#1 in my list would be anything from w3 domain. God bless their souls but that thing is the SEO plague

Last week I saw an SAP ad over a twitch stream showing on a wall monitor in an esports bar. That’s either the smartest targeted ad ever (3 out of our table were software types who would be involved in an SAP purchase decision), or just some campaign manager clicking a box that means “put my ad anywhere you want.” The next ad was for twix.

I think if we face a downturn where all of a sudden there’s not money and smart people are trying to spend on ads that have real return, these platforms will really get slammed. I’m not sure what multiplier it is. But I think their leverage in the “BS ad” domain will be more than 1x whatever the downturn is.

I just discovered the "reddit"/"hackernews" trick while doing this for actual content I want to read.

As far as I'm concerned I will never recommend Jumpcloud or any other service I find doing this.

First I get a large map card with a couple of stores with computer in their names nearby. I don't know how useful that is since I don't have a real search intent.

Next I get the computer page for best buy (I am in the USA) and the computer wikipedia article.

I have just tried duck duck go. I just get a full page of computers on best buy, amazon, etc

I don't think the google results are any worse than the ddg ones here.

If anything, trying to match with a 2 nearby places which are partial matches (computer in their names) is relevant.

And at least it gives me the wikipedia article. On ddg, it can be seen on the right side widget or at the bottom of the second page

Google has recently launched one of its biggest updates (BERT) which should improve the understanding of your keywords tremendously. By utilizing the power of NLP (Natural Language Processing) technology, it will now be able to provide more relevant and accurate search results for everyone.

You can read more about the update via the company's blog: https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-language-unde...

I'm not sure what you expect. I mean, yeah. I have to put OSRS in any search for "murder mystery" to get the result I wanted. But that's not a huge deal.

Who searches for generic "computer" that isn't a 70 year old lady probably looking for a new computer. Google in that scenario is just serving up what they're most likely looking for.

And heck, it's not like the wikipedia link was that far down. It was under a couple of store links and then bam. Wiki for computers.

When you say useless does that mean you think the gap between Google and (other engine of your choice) is narrowing ? Do you see yourself switching to say Bing for better search results anytime soon ?

I see ads panel for computers, followed by wiki, videos about computer, questions, map with computer shop and list of links related to computer terminology.

I don't use ad blocker. Still get relavent results.

Arguably this is because there is still "full" organic reach possible, and the users govern the subreddits. If there were to be a major throttling of organic reach such that the only way to get prominent visibility on Reddit was to pay based on reach, or mods lost the ability to control and curate their communities, I wouldn't be surprised to see Reddit drop in quality and user base.

That said, yes, there is definitly a downward spiral where placing more ads drives your viewership away, which in turn lowers your revenue and makes you place more ads, which drives away viewership, etc.

This isn't really a problem with 'ads', this is a generic problem of management driving a thriving property into the ground in the name of short-term profit.

I tried this. The wikipedia page for "computer" was the second result. Above that, oddly, a store page for "computers" at Best Buy. Above that, some suggested questions like "what is a computer?" ("A computer is a machine or device that performs processes, calculations and operations based on instructions provided by a software or hardware program.") And above that, at the top, several advertisements and a map of where the advertising locations are.

I don't understand what you think should come up in a search for the word "computer". I already know what a computer is, and I think it's safe to say that's true of almost everyone using the internet.

On the plus side, it has been very cool chatting with people from all over the world doing the same things, and getting compliments (like, actual comments, not just likes).

It seems that if you don't tailor your search terms perfectly all you get is ads, clickbait youtube videos, and review sites built to push a product.

Those SEO'd pages are optimized for generating revenue, so they're packed to the brim with Google ads and referral links.

Prioritizing such pages generates revenue for Google, too.

I know 80 to 90 percent of the results.

Google was useless. It is as if some subreddits, like one of mine, no longer exist.

Duck returned great results. And some new, unexpected results.

This kind of thing, along with hidden result links has forced me off Google search.

For fun, in my own head, they are Noogle now. NO Google.

Search Noogle for Nosults.

Not surprisingly, Google is still better for shopping searches.

edit- DDG bangs for those who were unaware: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

If you can form a sufficiently specific query, Google is still exceptionally good at returning useful information, with few ads or infoboxes or anything else other than organic search results. If your search terms are too generic, Google essentially gives up and just serves you ads instead.

Consider the trend in ads for ad supported sites as an indicator.

The customer is the ad buyer. They want more of those. They have maximized product supply. They can't produce more product, they can only resell existing products by more ads in search results as a ratio plus more ads on the organic links.

There is no measurable financial incentive for them to show you organic results without adwords.

Nearly all the changes since have been along those lines. Google thinks the only reason to use the net is to shop. The results you get, that are prioritised make some sense in that context.

It's just made it useless for all those times you don't want to book a hotel, buy a phone etc.

You get what you measure. Google grew this monster themselves with pagerank and monetizing links.

I think what finally killed their search quality is the fact that there's no longer a public human-curated network of websites to draw meaning from. Most content on the web is bulk-generated crap, personal blogs and websites are rare, and many passionate hobbyist communities are hidden from crawlers in places like closed Facebook groups.

There was an economics paper published recently making an argument that we have more to fear from shitty AI/robots than good ones and I think it's spot on. (In other words, they're good enough to justify firing the person who used to do the job, but they're objectively worse at the job. What ends up happening is aggregate wealth goes down because not only are the jobs gone, but the job itself is being done less efficiently than before.)

The point where Google (and Yelp and a bunch of other services) started to turn was when they stopped just being a thing you go to when you need them to being things that get in your face to anticipate your needs. They're bad at anticipating our needs in any way that's actually useful for us a lot of the time, so it ends up putting a lot of cognitive load on us to make sure the apps/services are working as intended. Instead of just using technology as a tool as we need it, we end up needing to babysit technology that's being fussy, opaque, and unpredictable. And babysitting is the best case scenario, in other cases it's being outright hostile.

I mean all the seo’d sites have self labeled themselves as having worthless content. You really just need a search that filters them out.

They're aiming for the "80" part of the "80/20 rule", and in the process are really good at answering natural-language queries but very bad at keyword-ified queries. So many people use their service for answering otherwise basic questions that it's become a basic-question-answering system. I suspect also, under the hood, that when the user leaves the search page and never returns they consider that a successful serve and reinforce that sort of behavior more. Whereas I leave to search the same thing on other engines because Google became useless for my job, which requires specific answers to technical questions. So I think there might be some built-in positive-feedback loops that are reinforcing this sort of behavior. Either that or peoples' queries really are that boring, all the time.

Here's a thought I had while reading your comment...

what about a hybrid of HN/lobste.rs/reddit and old-school hierarchical lists. Basically, a place where people can upload websites and such that are relevant to a search term.

Say you wanted to know about "how to make bread". You would first check if this query is already defined, creating it if not. Then, you could comment/post links on the topic, and see other's links sorted by some hybrid of upvotes/downvotes and human moderation/curation. The point would less be about having a discussion, but more crowd-sourcing "what pages are most relevant to this query".

From the perspective of a user who doesn't participate, this looks like a hierarchically sorted collection of queries/topics and links relevant thereto, sorted by relevance.

Years ago I could Image Search a frame of a film and get the film title almost every time, now I get a generic "Street" or "Man" search term and then a bunch of photos that have streets in them with a similar color palette which are never from the film.

They've got so excited by the tech that they can identify an object or setting that they've forgotten just finding the same image elsewhere online and using the context of the web page would give a better answer.

This is "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives" from their original paper about Google in 1998 [1]:

> Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

> Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

[1]: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

A friend rented out her place to a tenant who was a total nightmare and then he went and made a yelp page for her as a person, because she's a real estate agent, defaming her on yelp (not for real estate business, but for being his landlord). So there's now a yelp page with her face on it and angry "reviews" from this tenant and his partner, and she has no way to remove it. Yelp refuses to do anything.

Amazon product search usually works for me but I often use google to make sure there isn't a better price somewhere else on the internet. So I end up repeating my search terms to Google anyway.

But the complaints are mostly that Yelp's policy is inconsistent. Its review filter removes good reviews and keep bad reviews, at times, and the customer service is terrible. And the ratings are subjective and mostly useless and still used everywhere on the site regardless.

The same applies to Google/YouTube, Amazon, etc. though, so I'd say you're just seeing the availability bias; there been a fair number of positive success stories about YouTube, Amazon, etc. posted on HN whereas business owners on Yelp are too small audience-wise to get a lot of traction.

The only real competitor to Yelp is Google; maybe Google boosted up negative news stories on Yelp but it could just as easily be the newspapers themselves fanning fake controversy.

Sorry couldn't resist.

>it breaks the user expectation that Google search will give you the best results from the open web,

That expectation is no longer true. That probably died a decade ago when Android started gaining steam all over the world. And certainly not true for those who don't remember the world before smartphones or when gmail offering unlimited storage was "big" deal.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6175006?hl=en

The uploader specifically had to add "ad breaks" to the video for that to happen.

The best feature is that you can compile a playlist, through search, manual selection, etc., and save that locally to disk. Then play through the selection(s) as you like.

You aren't limited to playback through mps-youtube, as you can also use other tools -- mpv with its '--ytdl' flag will play YouTube (and many other sites') content, including from a saved playlist of URLs (see above).

There's a lot of good and useful content on YouTube. The platform itself increasingly gets in the way of that. I also don't want to be personally tracked or have my history recorded, so I (all but) never make use of the service whilst logged in. Given that I've ceased logging in to Google at all since the fall of G+, that's pretty much a certainty.

As others have mentioned, using podcast apps directly is another excellent option, and one I've been increasingly making use of.

(History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps FTFW!)

Create a virtual architecture, what would traditionally have been called a Virtual Machine before the term was overloaded, comprised of a simple instruction set and memory mapped devices (ideally simple enough that you could write an interpreter for it in an afternoon). Write an LLVM backend for it. Sandbox it by default so that it isn't even allowed to pull data from anywhere other than the same socket it came in on without permissions, or play sound, or anything an advertiser thinks is a good idea. Don't over-complicate the rendering by forcing some kind of automated re-flow crap, just provide the relevant display metrics directly to the program (resolution, px density, viewing distance, orientation, etc.) and let it choose how to best represent itself.

Things like that.

Fix the incentives. Install an ad blocker on every device. After much whining, the business models will adapt.

Swipe down on the home screen and type some stuff, and you get “Siri suggested websites”. It also answers basic questions and gives previews of relevant parts of the sites.

Booking Group websites (booking.com and agoda) are still doing great in 2019 as the article states, because they don’t suck

They used to have a clean, easy to use site that was useful. As they've optimized and metricized the site to death, it's impossible to use. Harder to use == shittier reviews == lower visits.

Then they started engaging with you afterward. I was on vacation and looked for a restaurant near some I-95 town, and ended up getting spam emails about "Rate your stay in Stony Creek, VA!", "how was McDonald's in Lumberton, NC". Then I stopped using the app.