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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

I honestly think discussing search quality with relation to Google these days is almost irrelevant: Nobody is looking at the organic results. Nobody.

On a given Google search, you have one to four ads, maybe an AMP carousel, and a knowledge graph box. Somewhere is the end of what fits on your device screen. Past that is the first real search result.

Google is making money because everyone thinks the first ad is the first search result (They're nearly indistinguishable, visually, and studies have demonstrated non-technical users can't tell them apart) and then everything below the ads that fits on screen is packed with links to other Google properties.

We are at the point where organic search results are nearly the "page three" of Google Search: Somewhere nobody goes anymore.

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That's sad to hear. I'm so used to auto scrolling down to hit the real results.

I think this is an important piece that is often overlooked when discussing search. I wonder if all the ads magically disappeared one day if people would view it as a positive or negative change in what they perceive as relevant?

DuckDuckGo's organic results are just as good and the 0-2 native ads above the organic results can be permanently disabled with 3 clicks on their own site: 'Settings > Advertising > Disable Ads' and intentionally made easily identifiable to respect ad blockers.

Meanwhile, Google search traps me in a loop of the top ~5 ad spenders in a given industry VERY frequently.

Used the phrase "public records" anywhere in your search query? Now the first page is all click funnel blog posts by the same 5 background check companies and ancestry.com.

Mentioned the term "VPN" somewhere in your 10 word query? Clearly you wanted a page full of sales funnel blog posts by the same 5 consumer VPN providers with big marketing budgets.

Want to disable Google Search ads? You can't. You can only make them less targeted, until the ToS changes in a month, and only if you log into a phone verified Google Account.

Want to use an ad blocker on Google Search? Too bad. Google's native ads continuously define the state of the art in evasion of end-user controls through endless evolution and complex adversarial misdirection even within the same browsing session.

Just use DuckDuckGo, and disable ads, and donate. It's a much better user experience (even with ads).

I guess one could argue that is the actual ranking algorithm. Descending order of how much they are willing to pay. If you aren't paying, you are tied for last.

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