How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
theverge.com
theverge.com
Key paragraph of the article. You don't have to be good at ads when you have a firehose of most of the world's population coming directly to you, telling you exactly what they want to buy/find/learn/read/do in their native language combined with their geolocation and search history. It would be hard not to serve up relevant ads in that case.
Peretti is talking about quality versus quantity: maybe Google doesn't serve up quality ads, maybe they just serve up quantity ads.
As to the question posed by the article, isn't the answer obvious? I don't know if users even "trust" Google's responses now. But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers. As long as Google is still the best way to search up information on, e.g., obscure aspects of Stardew Valley's economy, users who want to do searches about such things will continue to prefer Google. If Google ceases to surface good results for queries compared to e.g. DDG, users will migrate to DDG.
Yeah, I think the only way that would happen is if someone came up with a novel superior approach to search and managed to legally protect it so Google couldn't just copy it. That's a very unlikely at this point.
> But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers.
I don't think I agree with this. Users don't necessarily behave rationally in self-interest: they can be (and are) manipulated, and unwilling to try new tools.
The comment you replied to goes even further to suggest there's no real talent to serving ads at all, and that everything depends upon the audience size. That's not just semantics.
I've seen this term for years but I still don't understand what it means. I don't want to see ads. There are no 'quality' ads. All ads are designed to sell me things period. I don't need anyone telling me about what I might want. I understand ads exist to make money and if they didn't we wouldn't have the internet etc. But there's no 'quality' to them, they're a necessary evil i've come to accept and adapt to over my life. I dislike them, I have no need for them, there'll never be a time I say 'well gee, sure am glad I seen that ad, it showed me just what I didn't know I needed.' Ads exist to sell crap to people, they're not good or bad, they just are. Some are invasive, some are reasonable, but they're all shit.
That said this ended up being the exception to proof the rule about ads being mostly noise, and I agree the world would be better with less of them. And almost certainly the current state of algorithmic ad serving is a disaster.
For that matter, the same goes for motorcycle magazines, and just about every other kind of magazine that caters to a niche market.
Those kinds of ads can be great, even.
fwiw, i generally don't want to be subjected to ads either, particularly for the privacy-invading aspect, but also the time- and attention-wasting aspect too. most ads are absolutely horribly conceived and targeted, especially spray-and-pray email spam.
Anticipating needs of person X, (and serve person X an ad), without any foreknowledge of person X.
a made-up example might be a customer at best buy spending time in both the tv and pc departments and then having an ad pop up on a nearby screen for an intel NUC and/or apple tv (making the assumption you want a tv-connected computer). the ad didn't need to know any personal characteristics about you other than limited, directly observable behavior in the store.
i'm sure people who focus on this every day (i.e., not me) can provide better examples.
You'd have to recognize the face and track it prior to displaying the ad.
if you went that route, you could get away with simpler person recognition (height, width, clothing color, accessories, etc.). or you could just track phones and other devices via wifi/bluetooth (and presumably uwb in the near future).
but you could also just have salespeople on the floor doing the recognition & ad placement part of it, for a lower-tech solution.
i'd actually bet trained salespeople would have better hit rates over algorithmic solutions, where access to large amounts of dislocated data is the main advantage (at the cost of our privacy).
well, to continue playing devil's advocate, we've had hundreds of years of advertising (newspapers, pamphlets, and posters/signs before that) without any kind of systematic data collection, so it's not necessarily an intrinsic characteristic of the advertising business to collect data.
in an alternate universe, if banks didn't have such a stodgy and stifling rent-seeking business on the movement of money (transaction fees on everything), microtransactions might be the preferred business model of many online businesses that are now dependent on ads.
Perhaps you're saying I already know about electric cars and Kissimmee and kubernetes, to which I'd respond, yes, probably via ads. Maybe a commercial or sign or web ad, but also maybe through a TV news spot (pr campaign) or magazine review (expenses paid) or web article (with affiliate link).
This doesn't seem especially civil.
> If you search for "cheapest gasoline" it's not unreasonable that an ad for an electric car might be interesting.
Interesting to whom? The parent comment doesn't want to see ads. So no it's not likely to be interesting in this context.
> Or if you search for "Orlando hotels", an ad for generally less expensive hotels in Kissimmee (the next town over) is more valuable than a perfectly literal result.
For me, personally, no I would find that to be an annoyance.
> And if you search for "k8s cluster deployment tools" then you probably want as many ads as possible, so your evaluation doesn't fail to include a comprehensive set of options.
Again no, I would want 0 ads in that case. Have you read about k8s cluster deployment tools? It's hard to find any useful information because even the results that aren't literally ads are fluff blog posts with little content. I don't want the fluff posts, but I can comb through them. I certainly don't want the ads.
> Perhaps you're saying I already know about electric cars and Kissimmee and kubernetes, to which I'd respond, yes, probably via ads.
There are ways to learn about things without someone paying for the right to say them at you when you don't want them to.
But, hey, he's absolutely entitled to live his life ignorant about viable options.
Discerning the intent of a search is completely orthogonal to whether to serve advertisements.
Search engines are generally not great at discerning the intent of a search. For example they frequently return irrelevant results that don't match key words even when you ask for a literal search. This has been discussed a lot.
But that's an unrelated issue to whether the search should return advertisements in addition to search results.
However, when browsing the web in 20+ years I have never seen a useful paid for online add. That’s an inherent product of the medium where the only point of an add is to be less useful than the content I am looking at.
Supose your GPS added advertising. so it’s priority is not the best for you but what’s best for 3rd parties. That’s what online adds are, they take something useful and inherently degrade the experience.
I know this is picking on your example rather than your general concept, but this is a great example of how advertising is harmful. McDonald's has done incalculable damage to the health of Americans, and even if you don't go there, seeing the arches sometimes will get your kids yelling in the back seat, "I want to go to McDonald's!" This isn't helpful to us: it's helpful to McDonald's.
* Company creates thing people like you want to buy.
* Company knows if you know about the thing, you will want to buy it.
* Company knows you don't know whether a thing like their thing even exists, so you have no reason to search hard for it.
* Company upfronts the money to defray your search costs, knowing it will be paid back when you buy the thing. This is called advertising.
I am constantly learning about things I would have enjoyed if I had known about them. It is damn hard to make people aware even that you are giving away free lunch. Advertising breaks down that needless ignorance.
Might be fine for your use case, I donno.
GoDaddy and NordVPN, for examples, are garbage products with highly effective advertising. Seeing ads for these products actively harms people, because it prevents them from finding better products like Gandi or PIA.
No, I still don't want to see an ad. It's not unreasonable that a search result for electric cars might be interesting, but I want results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the advertiser that serves themselves.
> Or if you search for "Orlando hotels", an ad for generally less expensive hotels in Kissimmee (the next town over) is more valuable than a perfectly literal result.
No, I still don't want to see an ad. A search result for a cheaper hotel in Kissimmee might be valuable, but I want results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the hotel that serves themselves.
> And if you search for "k8s cluster deployment tools" then you probably want as many ads as possible, so your evaluation doesn't fail to include a comprehensive set of options.
No, I still don't want to see an ad. I want to see search results of a comprehensive set of options, but I want those results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the hotel that serves themselves.
> Perhaps you're saying I already know about electric cars and Kissimmee and kubernetes, to which I'd respond, yes, probably via ads. Maybe a commercial or sign or web ad, but also maybe through a TV news spot (pr campaign) or magazine review (expenses paid) or web article (with affiliate link).
No, I'm saying that I want to discover products that are the best for my needs, not products with the best ad placement. I want tools that serve me, instead of serving the best-funded advertisers.
Literally none of the cases you describe are what I want. Ads inherently give inaccurate information.
I agree with your point though: from a user's perspective there's no such thing as a quality ad: ads are inherently bad.
The Internet is very good at overlay networks. Search engines aren't even required. If you want Google's features then they ask that you pay their price. But if you don't want to play with the rest of us, you can host on your own, you can choose to browse via a free web directory you and others like you maintain, and all that.
It's all there for the taking. It's just that the rest of us derive utility from being part of the network that's growing.
Google is a literal barrier to entry when it comes to running a web based business - if you can't secure traffic you die and traffic breeds more traffic so it's price is highly inelastic. It's (essentially) the same issue as market driven healthcare if you are dying then prolonging your life (generally) has infinite value and the market price for treatment becomes as much cash as you can get your hands on.
No one is taking the ability to make a smaller web away from anyone. But that's the nature of the small web, it's small. And maybe your business can't sustain itself on small. That's just incompatibility of what you want and physical reality.
You know what people say on this website about blocking ads, right? "Your business model is not my problem". It's true.
I get what you're saying and I sympathize. It just isn't compatible with the other guy's view. In a "smaller web" your business wouldn't even exist.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
But let's surprise them. I personally would be willing to pay up to 10k per decade of my remaining life expectancy to opt out completely. Upfront payment, right now. A package deal including Amazon would be even better, maybe for 50% more?
I think at one point people need to put a price point to their privacy, otherwise nothing changes. The market has no incentive for this change right now. And yes, that would mean that privacy is a luxury for people who can afford it, which is not what I would like to see, especially since I remember the times when you had privacy by default when going online. But I can't imagine how it can become a fundamental right under the current market conditions.
Google did actually run this experiment. They aren't stupid and lots of people say they'd rather pay money directly rather than see ads. Because of Google's place in the ecosystem they can actually implement that.
So they did. It eventually became Google Contributor and never really launched properly. The early version of Contributor was a lot more pure than what eventually launched. It let you set a budget and compete against yourself in the ad auction, so publishers were getting the same amount of money for their content as before. I tried it out when I worked there. You could set a fake budget and Google would pay for you to see empty boxes or pictures from your own photo albums instead of ads. A few things became apparent.
One is Google doesn't serve all or even most of the ads on the internet. So I still saw a lot of ads. This made the experience feel pretty pointless.
Another is that this model is completely infeasible. The internet economy is huge. Just a week or so of browsing rapidly blew my test budget of a few hundred dollars. To see no ads on the internet served by Google I would have needed to pay a large multiple of what I paid monthly for TV, mobile and Internet connectivity.
You say you'd be willing to pay $10k per decade? Forget it. If you're a heavy internet user that'd buy you less than a month, not a decade.
Finally, this didn't opt you out of search ads. That's because Google has strong experimental evidence that ads on search are good for users. One of the longest running A/B tests the firm ever did was selecting 1% of users and disabling search ads for them. What they found was a long term trend where those users simply used Google less than normal. Without ads the results were less useful so they did the obvious and searched less. Why would Google let you pay to make their product less useful for you?
But I wasn't talking about just the ads, I was talking about the tracking to optimize those ads. I don't care about the ads. Show me ads, I ignore them anyway. I just don't want to be tracked to build out my personality profile for the rest of my life, because I don't know who will get access to that data and what it might be used for. Show ads based on my search term, not based on my browser, email and location history. They will have the same effect as the optimized ones: none.
Just keep in mind, the cohort I was talking about, was the one that will not be monetized. It is the cohort that still sees ads, but will never convert. So I'm not sure why I would buy my own ad space for an amount of money that is based on the usual conversion rate, when my conversion or click rate for my sample of n=1 is zero all the time. My profile correlates to zero spending, it is not worth the average ad price.
Google Contributor kind of proves my point about the efforts required being too costly. It was easier to inject a person as a buyer for their own profile into the merchandising system, than to rework all the tracking tools and the analytics that runs on it to stop tracking that specific person. So yes, my $10k is still not enough.
> Why would Google let you pay to make their product less useful for you?
Because I value privacy as a principle more than a slightly less useful product, and I would pay for it. But apparently I can't afford it.
It was easier to inject a person as a buyer for their own profile into the merchandising system, than to rework all the tracking tools and the analytics that runs on it to stop tracking that specific person.
No, they did it that way because otherwise it'd have reduced publisher earnings who would then have gone to other ad networks with no Contributor programme. How do you set the price of not seeing an ad otherwise? The price of seeing it is set by auction. It had nothing to do with tracking which can be disabled by anyone here:
https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662922?hl=en-GB
and here
https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
Tracking isn't actually the big hammer people imagine it is. That's a fiction invented by journalists. It helps a bit but only really basic stuff like "show German people ads in German" or remarketing (show people ads for products they were looking at buying very recently). That's why it's OK to opt out. You become worth a bit less and you'll see more irritating ads as a result, but very few use this option.
Because I value privacy as a principle more than a slightly less useful product, and I would pay for it. But apparently I can't afford it.
Go disable ad tracking then. The options have been there for many years.
I'm surprised more companies don't take this in house. 20 years ago little small town newspapers and radio stations had their own in house ad sales. Seems like a no-brainier for web news to sell targeted ads to their customers.
Of course this is not data, but the parent post has an interesting stance.
Or they are optimizing to fleece dumb advertisers or I am extreme outlier.
Instagram however, a service that I hardly use, manages to present ads that look interesting again and again.
But from a consumer point of view, is it better to be targeted in a loose way by people guessing about your demographics or an exact way by people who know your demos? And as a publisher, how the hell are you supposed to make content if all the money is gobbled up by the platforms?
I think we should return to status quo ante by just banning the collection of targeting data. We know that the old ad ecosystem worked because we observed it working, and we know that the new one sucks because we observe publishers going bankrupt and privacy being violated.
I suppose a lot of people here know how real time bidding networks work but I was mind blown the first time I saw that.
I always try to click the non-ad link, as I like the sites that I remember the names of and I don't want them to have to pay the troll toll, but sometimes I accidentally click the top link and I feel bad (only very very little, though) about it. Yesterday, I accidentally made Hackaday pay the toll.
I refuse to say that that is being good at ads. It's kind of slimy, forcing sites to do SEO to put themselves at the top of the list when someone is searching their name. I've actually switched over from chrome to firefox (on the machines where I have the option) because of this (and the fact that the top ~7 search results for many queries are SEO'd garbage).
But the bigger problem is that you have to scrutinize every billing statement from them, and then when they start charging you for things they shouldn't be (every 2 or 3 months), you have to spend a couple of hours on the phone with them to get it straightened out. Until the next time.
[0] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/01/08/centurylink-to-pay-...
There are LOTS of search engines to choose from that are freely available. DuckDuckGo is pretty great these days.
Microsoft is even is making a search engine now, I've heard! /s
So, Google could theoretically be terrible at advertising and yet still make insane profits from it. Just as Comcast’s internal IT systems might be a mess. This is why monopolies tend to be less efficient over time, nothing is forcing efficient operations.
Hey man, i googled that chick in marketing last night and found her facebook account. Really??? well i binged her and found her pornhub account. Bing... Find what you really are looking for.
Do we know what the data says about it? Statistics on uptime, ping, speed, customer response turnaround...
This seems like a reasonable start to build a case against Comcast:
I included my anecdote simply to question the narrative.
What I'm looking for is proof.
The one in Palo Alto goes out a couple of times a week and is quite slow.
Luckily they haven't implemented the mooted usage caps: last year I was traveling for a few months but somehow managed to transfer tens of GB over the network in the sierras, according to Comcast's site.
They have a lot of good network engineers but the work at the edge is inferior.
Google's competitors are literally a click away. Google couldn't get away with Comcasting the web.
Did anyone besides Google sales and marketing people actually believe that?
"When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own brand name, you’re forced to pay up if you want to be found. It’s a shakedown. It’s ransom. But at least we can have fun with it. Search for Basecamp and you may see this attached ad."
https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016?la...
This is about incrementality. Google/advertisers are well aware of this fact and have been doing lots of ablation studies to understand advertisement's effectiveness. Don't underestimate the industry; you may spend millions of dollars but not billions of dollars without good justifications.
I don't know the exact numbers (and I wouldn't be able to tell it even if I know it) and it heavily depends on the type of particular ads (e.g. brand ads will show much less incrementality), but the general consensus is that more than half of those ads can take the credit for conversions. Given that conversion tracking and attribution is not perfect, it's fair to take the money.
This generates revenue for Google with virtually no added value.
See: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 and the SS in the reply: https://twitter.com/webiyo/status/1205534848192045056?s=20
Basecamp seems to generate more free advertising from playing the victim in the media than they lose from whatever they complain about.
Social media sites offer the ability for everyone on platforms to pay for primary placement now. This is a big conflict of interest in how posts are shown to users, and why very protected/secret algorithms are now applied to creatively show posts to some users and not others on all of these sites and services.
Once a company like Google has cornered the search market,and they also have tentacles everywhere through their collected data form other sources (e.g. google maps, gmail, google trends, Android, etc) there are few ways of backing out. They are now deeply ingrained in our society, and they'll know about anyone who is inventing an alternate path before it even happens and possibly operate in an anti-competitive manner. This is the modern realization of Skynet in a way I guess. :/
At the end of the day, how can we trust companies that manipulate us to boost profits? We simply can't, and we shouldn't really allow monopolies to get this big and embedded into critical services.
WSJ: Facebook Overestimated Key Video Metric for Two Years (2016)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-overestimated-key-vide...
Google's ads make good money because:
(1) The overture model for running a search ad market works well (Google acquired and adopted a mature system). (2) targeted ad markets get better with scale. The larger the market share, the smaller a& more targeted a segment is. (3) Ads are also search results. Over time, Google has nudged users to select ads... on high value searches.
On that last point: The value of a click varies in orders of magnitude 18c for this one $12 for that one. In the early days, this meant you could buy clicks for pennies. These days, Google limits the supply of low value ads and increases the supply of low value ad clickers.
On average, users might even see or click on fewer ads than 10 years ago. On high value search terms, advertising prominence & click-throughs are through the roof.
If Google is "playing dirty," this is where the incentive is highest... and achieves the goals which Google has strategically used to grow revenue for years now.
Playing dirty is even a weird term here. A newspaper may have a journalistic ethos whereby ad-selling squares don't get to editorialise journalism... whether they stick to it or not. By what ethos is Google not supposed to let ad selling concerns influence organic search?
So ad-selling squares don't get to editorialise journalism.
Search is (automated) journalist. Why would you think otherwise? If a search treats users as mere eyeballs to trick and hijack instead if inform well engine, then users learn not to trust the search engine, same as any other kind of journalist
At least for my company, we run blackout experiments and measure/estimate the incrementality of the ads.
The price of AdWords has certainly gone up, but the value hasn't declined.
Because if you don’t, a competitor will and that is where the article takes the turn into talking about the new layout, occlusion, etc. It’s an interesting discussion about trust and how far Google can push before that trust is broken. However, I’m almost certain I’ve had this conversation a decade ago.
I don't know if this is because SEO has poisoned their index, or if I'm not googling "correctly" anymore.
Pretty good for me. Gives me Battle Royale.
"whos the african warlord who has that laughing gif"
Top result is video of "Idi Amin laughing on a boat". Just the thing I was thinking of.
Pretty good.
"whats the name of the principle that two particles csnt have the same characteristics"
Pauli's Exclusion Principle as the top result. Great.
Google has always worked really well for me.
It wouldn't be so terrible, except that Google is extraordinarily bad at geolocation.
Right now, Google thinks my work computer is in southern New Mexico. Google thinks my personal computer, right next to it, is in northern Nevada. Google thinks my mobile phone, in between the two, is in Los Angeles. All of those locations are hundreds of miles wrong.
But it gets even worse when you want to know about something in a place other than where you're standing right now. It's like nobody inside Google has ever done any trip planning in their entire lives.
Apple Maps has the opposite problem, though. If I want to search for a German restaurant near my location in the United States, it will show me places in Germany.
When I search for "peking duck recipe" show me a recipe for peking duck, and don't show me "local" restaurants which are 300 miles away.
Not necessarily. The great unwashed masses may not be searching for ecommerce, but people not searching for ecommerce may not be monetizable.
Let's say we run a basketball web site that has a search engine. People sometimes type the word "travel" into the search bar.
We can show them results related to the rules violation of "travelling," and/or results related to physical travel such as "trusted partners" who provide charter trips to playoff games.
It could be that we know that 90% of the searches for the word "travel" are for the rules violation. But the remaining 10% are the ones that click on ads. And we get a kickback when someone clicks on an ad on our site.
If all we care about is the web site's revenue, we might choose to prioritize showing travel to basketball games, even though we know it's only relevant for 10% of the users who query the word "travel."
It may only be 10% of our users, but it's 100% of our revenue from keyword searches for "travel." So we show the monetizable results, and maybe--if we are feeling generous--we'll show a little line, "Showing results for travel to games. Click here to search for travel (violation)."
--
TL;DR: We don't need to assume that Google is trying to provide good search results for everyone. They might be trying to provide the results that maximize their immediate revenue.
I don’t even notice that it’s not Google anymore.
I don't believe that it's the masses looking for e-commerce sites. I think it's that Google wants people to click on e-commerce sites because it makes money off of those ads. And even if someone doesn't click on a sponsored link to an e-commerce site, that click still reinforces in their mind that Google is the place to start shopping.
There was a comment on HN yesterday where someone wrote something like, "Did you know there are countries where people who want to buy things just go to amazon.com directly and don't search for their item in Google?" I was floored. It never occurred to me that if I want to buy something at amazon.com that I would involve Google in any way. But there must be legions of people who do this, or that person wouldn't have made that statement.
At the same time, I think that Google falls down at this kind of lead generation because it allows so much automation that it can't be trusted.
I just put "rocket to mars" in Google and the top results are ads for Wal-Mart and Michael's.
To be fair, the duck isn't much better. I just put "f-14 fighter jet" into Duck and got an ad for "Fighter Jets For Sale near you" with a link to an auto repair shop.
Oh, I tried an alternate approach and it didn't work... Search bing for Google and you just get a second bing. https://imgur.com/a/YntBiYc
Maybe they changed that stance at some point?
It sounds like what you're saying is that it acts more like a typical full-text index now? I suppose it's better than nothing, but still not what I would like to see happen.
Even worse, sometimes instead of striking them out, it substitutes them with "synonyms" that are anything but. For example, if you search for FreeBSD, you sometimes get results where "linux" is highlighted as a keyword. I'm pretty sure that this is some ML crap doing this, because the more obscure the term, the more likely it is to get it not just wrong, but hilariously wrong, even to the point of meaning the opposite.
It's a must if you're a developer searching for some obscure error message, yet still most people don't know about it.
That hasn't worked for me for a long time.
This isn't always honored. Google has been inconsistent with this for at least two years. It's noted on HN every time someone brings this up.
This is IMO very power-user-hostile.
I just noticed that with "Verbatim mode" enabled, Google doesn't even try to estimate the number of results available. I find that curious.
I've seen people say this, but it still seems to work for me, and is even documented here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?visit_id...
> I've actually moved to other search engines because the quality of the results have gone down dramatically.
Agreed. It also reminds me that the old engines weren't so much bad or that Google was better as the quality of the old engines degraded with time (may that be from the index being poisoned, paid inclusion of results, or something else).
Switched to DuckDuckGo a few months ago and haven't looked back, the results pages are much cleaner, like the old Google results.
One blatant issue with Google (& DDG still often does not get right) is the search for a specific busines - using the exact business name and sometimes even town - I expect their listing to be at the top. Instead there's piles of Yelp & listing pages, and I often cannot even find the actual Item for which I'm searching - sometimes have to go to the indexers, hunt for their posting of the intended [website], and go that way.
Opportunity for someone to get it actually right...
I switched to Duck Duck Go a few months back, at first for privacy reasons, but now find myself preferring that search engine's results for most things.
[0] https://searchengineland.com/8-major-google-algorithm-update...
Please search engine, listen to this: it's ok if you don't have any results for what I'm searching. I want to know fast when there are no results, so I can try other queries. I don't want to open a dozen of pages before realizing you didn't had any results so only gave me garbage.
Thinking briefly on it, the main thing I leverage Google for is phonebook like information or getting a quick definition/spellcheck.
That is exactly right! I use it as a reference material, calculator, or map. There is no other use for google search due to optimization nonsense.
For anything in-depth, I use technical resources and databases available through my local public library.
Can you speak more about this? Very curious about this as I would like to try myself.
This is in-depth knowledge, as it requires reading and synthesizing journal articles, and understanding themes. This obviously doesn't work for quick questions like what is the square root of 6, but for more higher ordered concepts in my specific field, it's highly valuable.
Does that answer your question?
I've personally switched to https://duckduckgo.com/lite (wished it was available in dark-mode, may be I should write a greasemonkey script) and make it a point to change search engine defaults on all phones in the household and remove or disable google-search and chrome apps.
For most basic searches, ddg/lite works just as good and is lighting fast. I do find myself !g redirecting searches to Google which admittedly does a remarkably better job at answering certain class of queries. I used to search on startpage.com, before it sold to an ad-company, which proxies Google search results minus the tracking and ads.
Speaking of proxy search engines, there're various searx mirrors too, but I haven't yet used them.
By this I mean that it's possible the main reason Google Ads are useful for companies is because Google has reinforced a sort of negative Nash equilibrium by allowing competitors to squat on organic results by purchasing ads against those better results. I.e. So the best organic results lose user share & clicks because Google lets competitors set ads against them. Given this situation, those targeted by their competitors have no choice but to try & outbid their rivals. Meaning Google Ads are only useful to companies because they exist at all, and assuming minimal gaming of the organic results system with SEO, both companies and users would be better off if there were no ads and the best most relevant results won out on their own merit.
It's sad state of affairs we're in if we can't even imagine finding out about something without that knowledge being forced down our throats.
We are not discussing your personal advertising experience. Nor even the general technocratic audience of HN's advertising experience.
The context (set by the OP of this branch) is also that perhaps there is a case of perverse incentives going on, one where we have reached an unhealthy, but relatively stable equilibrium of the majority having the impression of needing Google ads where there would be no such need if they didn't exist.
You responded by saying the majority would indeed confirm that they would not want to be left without ads (an unsubstantiated but plausible claim). But there are clearly people who choose to opt out of ads completely, myself included, and I don't see myself as missing out on anything. So I'm asking whether I am missing out on something.
> but then Google was always ugly until relatively recently
Google was originally and for many years extremely elegant in it’s simplicity. There is nothing ugly about getting people exactly what they need instantly.
As for the main thrust of the article, I’ve already found Google’s results mostly untrustworthy. For some time search results have been so dominated by adverts that frequently the results I was looking for are buried under the fold. Search is a simple task and for 99% of searches there are at least 2 competitors who serve 90% fewer adverts per page. For the other 1% of searches I’m 3 keystrokes away from getting Google’s search laden results as a second opinion.
What, no ads?
This is no longer true. DuckDuckGo definitely has less obtrusive advertising now versus Google. There are fewer adverts per search and adverts are better labeled. Ads have gotten so pervasive, on a typical Google search, organic results are frequently below the fold.
The reason I started using Google (and made it my home page) over 20 years ago wasn't because of the quality of their searches, but because their home page was a plain white page that loaded instantly (in contrast to Alta Vista and other search engines that were loaded down with all sorts of animations and advertisements that took forever to load). Even after I got broadband I stuck with Google for many years because their searches were clearly the best. In the last few years (especially the last year), their search quality has fallen off a cliff and there is just no compelling reason to stick with them.
Ecosia: https://www.ecosia.org
Duckduckgo: https://duck.com
Yandex: https://yandex.com
Cliqz: https://beta.cliqz.com
Qwant: https://www.qwant.com
Startpage: https://www.startpage.com
Searx: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx
Bing: https://bing.com
Resources to build your own:
This is a great feeling. Thanks for the Yandex tip.
But then again, this is the same FTC that has proven unable for decades to rein in the MLM industry, whose blatant scamminess makes Google look like a Boy Scout. So I am over here not holding my breath at all that they will ever draw a line. Google will just keep making that "Ad" label smaller and smaller and fainter and fainter, and the FTC will do nothing other than maybe extracting a tiny fine in a settlement every 10 years or something.
I went to Bing, and had a similar issue. But after its personalization kicked in, I haven't had to go back to Google more than once or twice a month, and in general, I'm happier with my results when I compare the two.
YMMV, though. I trust Google less than I trust Microsoft for search, because the company and its employees seem to lack a "save the world" pathology which I keep getting hints of whenever someone pulls back the curtain on the company's culture. I can intuitively understand a corporate Megalith like MS's interest a lot more easily, so I'm more comfortable deciding whether or not I'm getting a good response from Bing.
But as a daily driver, unless you're really concerned about Google, I don't think there's any material advantage to making the switch.
It's what happened with Google initially. I remember the late 90's search engine landscape. Result were hit or miss, but one of a few search engines would usually give what you needed, so you had to try a few: Yahoo, Alta Vista, MSN, Hotbox... there were even sites the aggregated a few engines to provide results from multiple: I don't remember the name, but there was one such that had 4 quadrants, each one a different engine and you'd get results from all 4. It was my default for a while.
Then Google came along, and I'm not sure it always provided better results than all of the other engines, but it consistently provided results that were good enough that you didn't need hop around much anymore. And as we all know, virtually in the blink of an eye they dominated the market.
This is why I think they can be dethroned if they go too far down a path of weakening their results. Just a bit too far, and a competitor with a little momentum and word of mouth network effects could really gain a toe hold. It's a long shot, but over time.... there was once a time IBM seemed unbeatable. It took years of chipping away from multiple competitors, but they had a big fall.
Dogpile? Looks like they are still around, but a quick test shows it to be even more full of ads than Google nowadays.
I do search for stuff a lot, but to be honest I know perfectly when it will be a stackoverflow page I want, or a wikipedia page, or it will have that link to maps.
I can't remember the last time I searched for something and I didn't already know what domain I actually wanted to end up on.
Yeah. Plenty of people do.
I know I do when searching for PDFs because DuckDuckGo randomly ignores "filetype:pdf" when it feels like it, and also sometimes ignores word in the the query that are within quotes.
It's also not great with localised results, at least in many parts of the world.
My first preference is DDG, but it's not perfect.
Yes, most people will search for 'insurance quotes' and click an ad.
So the modern internet in general, I suppose. Corporations in spam. Never mind, it'd be unreasonable of me to expect anything else.
Over the last ten years, my non-bot traffic has dropped to a tenth of that, and at the same time, my ability to find similar websites has disappeared. Now I see nothing but resume-padding blogs with generic WordPress templates, and pages of empty corporate bullshit.
Google SERPs are the one form of advertising I don't mind and are most effective because:
1. Unlike pretty much every other form of online advertising, you have the benefit of user intent in that they actually want to find something and an advertised result may be what they're looking for. Most other forms of online advertising are deliberately intrusive because attention = $$$; and
2. Google ads are paid for on a CPC basis rather than CPM basis so Google is incentivized to show you something relevant to you and your search rather than just churning impressions (like those pages that split an article into a gallery of 11 pages; ad impressions is why they do this).
But a key part of this is user trust that Google clearly differentiated an ad from an organic search result. I wonder what short term metrics and thinking went into this. I'm sure there was a short term topline revenue gain but it's one of those things that you're not actually increasingly value, you're just cashing in your brand's value for cash now.
But hey I'm sure a bunch of people got promoted, so it's fine.
I've started treating google more like the Yellow Pages; a good source when you WANT ads, i.e. you're looking for a tradesman in your area, or a restaurant to go to. For organic search, it's rubbish.
Edit: the dumbed down search has begun on youtube as well, YT routinely ignores what I searched for and just shows me videos related to what I was watching previously. I search for guitar amps and get videos for DIY kitchens, because I was looking at that stuff last night. Beyond moronic.
They claim ads “keep the internet free”. “Free” from paying sure, but free from questionable untruthful ads, con artists Ads, and Horrible content that is monetized by ads that shouldn’t be?
Google will say those are “hard computer science” problems they are tackling. The reality is they tackle the problem as long as it doesn’t impact revenue and put just enough resources on it to make it look like they care. Or retroactively share data and say they are ahead of the problem (like YouTube CEO on 60 minutes).
How a trillion dollar company of the Self proclaimed worlds Smartest people don’t know a pedophile ring is using YouTube kids comments Section is reckless. Why google even needs to monetize Kids content is pure greed. Do kids really want to see an Ad or benefit from it? Maybe to burn into their habits that “Ads are just part of life”
Life With Google in charge of the worlds Information.
Who in the hell is in charge of search at Google right now? What a god awful job. The engineer in charge should be fired for such an abomination.
Only time I hit up Google is if DDG has trouble understanding what I’m after
It seems that world has fallen prey to the mindset, "Screw customer experience, let's extort the maximum amount of money we can."
Technology companies are no longer in the business of making things easier, instead they are in the business of making the most amount of money they can, while not loosing their business entirely. If these companies actually valued the consumer/customer in the past, they've certainly moved beyond that point.
... Declared the news site, in a paragraph sandwiched between two ads carefully disguised to look like legitimate content...
You can debate about whether you believe the message, but there's no reasonable argument that you should believe the messenger.
WTF, journalism. Seriously.
Google's results are now nearly all ads above the fold. The ads are also deceptively marked.
Really scummy tactic. The sort of thing you'd expect from crappy credit card companies.
If this is the direction Google is going to take under Pichai, then I'm out.
Until about negative-ten years from now.
I don't think that's the case. I mean, in some case yes there are companies buying ads when they would have been among the top search results anyway. But assuming that many ad creators are probably savvy enough to know where they rate in organic search results, they're likely not targeting adwords where they'd be high in those organic results.
I.e., competent users of google advertising are, by definition, users that avoid paying for results they would have gotten otherwise.
In my case this leaching appeared to Google as if /we/ were trying to game the system with link farms (we were not). Google penalized us in 2011 and we've yet to recover.
The point: when you use Google search you're often served sub-standard results, as over time generations of ranking penalties has lead to lower quality sites ranking higher.
We don't need two. Which is better? Edit: we've got https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144210 now.
https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1220768238490939394
Maybe Yandex?
I think more Americans have been scammed by Verizon, Comcast, or AT&T than have ever even heard of DuckDuckGo! I have plenty of tiny class-action settlement checks to prove it.
They do offer Youtube Premium without ads but the search engine space is really different. Microtransactions are not here yet.
So, even if they could increase revenue per power user (RPPU?) it would do irreparable harm to their ad-supported model (for non-power users) in the long term.
Besides adblocking is a bit of a cludge.
What's more, Google has been shown to be ideologically driven when ranking its results. Including, for instance, down-ranking news sites with left-leaning or socialist views such as the World Socialist Website, Common Dreams, Democracy Now and others as part of a concerted scheme with other information controllers like Facebook to marginalize ideological viewpoints counter to their preferences.
One can only speculate how much "meta-googling" (googling google to find out what it's up to) is rigged and cherrypicked.
There is mass hysteria about Google in general. They aren't the privacy nightmare the pitchfork wielding folks would have you believe. That said, they inspire others that are indeed nightmares. The entire third party tracking industry is a nightmare. And it was already, before Google. (Google bought doubleclick, don't forget.) But people see Google doing it and want to get in on it, nevermind the internal controls and oversight. So the net net is that it's a bad thing -- nobody can be trusted to hold so much PII.
I'm switching to Bing. DDG never did it for me. As an aggregator of other engine's work, I do not enjoy their business model either.
Wait, so they aren't collecting as much information about me and my use of my machines as they can anymore? When did that change?
To the extent they do collect as much data as they can, they limit it to identify you as a unique user, not you as a specific person. In the cases they necessarily identify you the person (e.g. Google Pay where they know who you are), they firewall that data and do not make the connection to you, some anonymous but unique user. They do an excellent job of not pulling a FB and selling the raw data. Their internal controls are extreme. They "quickly" aggregate and anonymize the data so that they can sell their customers (ad buyers) demographics, not individual people.
They could collect much more information than they do.
That you can say this make me think that we are using different definitions.
Have they also stopped buying real-world credit card usage and correlating it with your other actions?
> To the extent they do collect as much data as they can, they limit it to identify you as a unique user, not you as a specific person.
That doesn't really make it much better, in my opinion.
> They do an excellent job of not pulling a FB and selling the raw data. Their internal controls are extreme.
I never thought they did sell raw data. Having strong internal controls is wonderful, but a bit beside the point in my criticism. I object to the collection. How the data is handled post-collection is a separate issue.
Thank you. This is a really great example of pitchfork-ism. People want to see things that aren't there. Their desire to see those things blinds them to what is actually happening.
Google doesn't and never did what you are implying. Yes, they correlate those 2 sets of information. But neither side of the transaction (CC, Google) knows or can know the identifying linkage in the other direction. It allows the vendor (advertiser) to get conversion rate of online ads to real world purchases, without revealing who purchased them to any of the 3 parties. It isn't that Google or the CC issuer has to anonymise the data after they correlate the linkage, so as to hide the linkage from the advertiser; no party has the other piece of data in the first place, thanks to homomorphic encryption. It's actually a wonderful application of technology, being decried for completely wrong reasons. We need more of this specific technology, not less. (to the extent we need this at all)
> I object to the collection.
As do I, and I stated as much. My anti-complaint is that there is a huge backlash against Google when Google aren't the bad guys. There is a whole industry of actual bad actors -- doing "bad" things with the data they collect. vs Google that treats the data as sacrosanct, and they use it to actually provide a service to you. The other folks are simply stealing your data and reselling it for their own ends, without providing anything useful to you.
Look, I'm not saying Google is great, or even good. As I said here and elsewhere, they are evil. But evil people (entities) can do good things. We (collectively) have all agreed to Google's business model. And Google is acting as a responsible steward for the information they collect. There are much, much worse actors out there that are far more deserving of the spite that is sent in Google's direction. (only re: privacy specifically ... again, they are generally evil and deserve to die the death that will come to them and none too soon)
OK, but that's beside the point. The point is that they collect information about me without my consent.
> There are much, much worse actors out there that are far more deserving of the spite that is sent in Google's direction.
Let's say this is true. That in no way means that we shouldn't complain about Google as well. I direct my ire at all companies that I consider abusive. That some of those may be more abusive than others isn't a free pass to the less abusive ones.