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Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

wrong! they don't match

I was just searching for "quill", a javascript editor. I clicked the first result without really looking (after all, i m searching name, right? ) - and it took me to some competing product called fro-something. I wasted my time, their money , yet google still made money.

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I just tried search for "quill" in incognito, and I got quill.com as the first hit (both ads as well as organic result) - apparently there's a company called Quill Corporation (quill.com). It seems reasonable to return that as the first hit. quilljs.com is 5th hit on the first page. "quill javascript" has quilljs.com as the first hit.

This seems reasonable. What's your suggestion on how to make this better ?

just checked my history, my first result was "froalla", happened more than once

(the query must have been "quill js" or "quill editor" cant remember -- it's an example of the infamous 'google® tax' - an obviously keyword-targeted ad)

Here's another one:

https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&client=firefox-b-m...

It is a search for "express-http-proxy" "logging" but at leat I got maybe one relevant result and a bunch of wildly unrelated ones, despite doublequotes.

Do you have an example of a page that is a good result for that query?

There was one among the top 10 when I did the search.

As for most of the rest of the first 10, null would have been a valid, more correct and generally better result!

I actually wasted several minutes on one of them right away since I haven't still gotten into the habit of verifying every single Google result to se that it actually is what I asked for and not whatever filler Google decided to use this time. Not that it should be necessary, - they had this sorted back before 2010!

Seriously: why can't Google or DDG get this right anymore?

This sounds like exactly what the grandfather post (by wasdfff) was discussing. A competitor advertised their product based on the keywords you searched for.

You didn't buy their product, but Google helped them get your gaze briefly.

What is search but a list of adverts associated with your keywords?

Google can do without this "google tax", and imho they should. It's unethical , and it's not like a competitor putting a sign next to yours. The user is literally searching for a brand and is instead driven to click another. At best the competitor should be an ad on the side in this case. Considering how (especially in mobiles) google is often used as a kind of DNS-autocorrect in the omnibox, this behavior is unethical on the same level as websites with popups. A rich company like google would not normally allow it to itself, they can easily dispense with such sleaziness. The fact that they can do it unpunished is indicative of a monopoly position.

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