For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads
twitter.com
twitter.com
I was immediately turned off, so I pulled up DuckDuckGo and Bing, entered the same exact query, and both engines returned the song I was looking for in the first result. I laughed out loud.
I then thought to myself, "I wonder how many pages I would have had to flip through in Google to find this result." Eventually, I found it. It was the 68th result on page 7.
They add more than just Bing results as they mention but it's the main provider. You can also confirm by checking results for different queries.
They only hire the best of the best!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185229
It's easy to judge but AFAIK if they prioritize order it's possible more searches come up with bad results than good. That doesn't mean they shouldn't try to do better but we, or a least I, really have no idea which is better, on average, order dependent or order independent.
and DDG, first result
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=like+you+didn%27t+care+I+do...
I have no doubt there are edge cases where Bing/DDG outperform Google, but most of the time I have better luck with Google.
I'll add that I could have been more clever with my query. For instance, if I surround the lyric in quotes, Google returns the right result first.
Original query: like you didn't care I don't know why lyrics r&b
Improved query: "like you didn't care I don't know why" lyrics r&b
At the end of the day, I'm not frustrated with Google. I use it every day and it saves me lots of time. It just amuses me that in some cases, other engines that probably use simpler search algorithms are objectively better. And in this case, I think it's fair to expect Google to produce the right result on page 1.
"packages not in the aur"
rake "invalid session id"
"pacman -Qm"
arch "The pgAdmin 4 server could not be contacted"
"previous definition of HTML_NAMESPACE was here"
illustrator "print preview" is darker
systemd Loaded: bad-setting "has a bad unit file setting"
Don't fully understand what is going on here. Safe search is disabled. Worse results would be expected, but zero results seems like an excessive amount of censorship. Other similar search terms work fine.
But they probably know that I never klick on ads unless specifically searching to buy something
Google results for lyrics used to be filled with hundreds of scummy SEOed sites that stole content from each other. I wonder if some SEO-blocking algo change has had the effect of blocking all song lyrics from google results.
Google Search is aptly named, for finding something relevant and without ads plastering is almost impossible.
Anyway, I am happy with DDG now.
Does showing Google Adsense ads actually result in a higher ranking in organic search results?
It makes total sense for their business model, to the detriment of users. I've just never considered that before.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/genius-law...
It kinda gave me insight I to why Google is sucking so bad. Give us the option at least.
It's gone to absolute shitter and it's just not worth using outside of a very narrow set of circumstances(when you actually do want to buy something I guess?)
For one, google now encourages and helps SEO - it's no longer a taboo term that leads to lifetime blacklisting - so google is publicly explaining and apologizing sometimes to SEO's (and others who listen/watch/read john mueller and co)
secondly in reference to the bad results and SEOs ruined google - um no. Google ruined google. Google went to war against SEO and disappeared much of the good on the web as collateral damage.
Google also got creative with ranking things based on things that push youtube up and other google properties for many results - as well as news type publications - which means for many queries it's now pay to play - pay adwords to rank 1st page or lose 90%+ visibility. And many good sites can't afford to pay per click to be on the first page.
Google is giving you results it wants you to think are 'good' - which has been pushing many of the results we actually want far and away. (Which interestingly sends more traffic to google properties adding to their value, and forces other to pay for adwords or not be seen by most in the world)
in my humble, and yet biased, and not very broadly researched (fairly focused), opinion.
The problem is that Google is no longer a search engine for the world wide web. It is an app that can answer questions, that happens to also have a web front end
What the actual F has happened to google search results for programming issues?
I used to be able to google a question and get, more or less, a right answer from a forum or stack overflow.
Recently, many coding tutorial websites have clearly figured out how to hack googles pageranks and now instead of one 'right enough answer', its 5 clone 'tutorial' websites, with all the same crappy answer that isn't actually what I was asking. Like I can't use google for coding questions any more. Not like I was able to previously. Also, Stackoverflow with bangs from ddg are broken and it thinks I'm a robot. No answer except to go to SO directly and search.
Defining search aliases or custom search engines in the browser with URLs like '''https://www.google.com/search?q=site:docs.python.org+%s''' is probably the reasonable thing to do.
Spurious garbage SEO programming sites showing unhelpful code snippets in particular have had a big productivity hit on my coding.
I wonder what the people working on those sites think about what they’re doing.
What's the point in having different search engines if they copy each other's search results?
I guess we’re not the customers. Use duckduckgo or something else.
The Majority.
The only one I know of that at least plans to have a simple two-way relationship with search users as their customers is Kagi. Currently it's in free beta with a waitlist (took a week for me). When they go live they intend it to be a paid, subscription service with no advertising. So far I've found it good, and I'll gladly pay when the time comes.
They can grow their market by offering 10 free searches a day, and I think that would be enough to entice a lot of folks to switch.
Offer a paid API, and I'd bet they'd have a real growth story.
I hope they give me a easy way, to set my own priorities (but I would choose that option).
You can choose to boost particular sites, or to down-rank sites with trackers.
When did you apply? I filled out their survey at the end of december and haven't even received a confirmation email. I tried again a few weeks back with a gmail address, and still nothing. So I guess at least it's already at Google-level customer service.
There doesn't even appear to be any contact email aside from the discord which is also invite-only. Kind of soured me on the whole experience.
That makes this situation even weirder. Why not just re-send them, considering that they should have the collected email address sitting right there? If it's a typeform issue, then some sort of message on their site would have been nice. I mean it's one thing if this was a free product, but the fact that they are planning to provide a paid search engine but can't manage the task of sending email invites and don't have any contact address* just ruins any enthusiasm I had of being a customer.
* I realize the founder has his email listed in the FAQ page, but emailing the founder for an issue like this seems quite gauche. And besides I did try reaching out on social media but didn't get any response.
On the 70 searches point too, if you search for "business news" and then click the news360 tab to get news results, I believe this is actually counted as 2 searches so would get charged at 4 cents if in the overages category.
When I searched up I thought maybe $5 a month, or possibly $10 at a push, but $30+ will be too much for mass market adoption in my opinion. I also think there is an inevitable situation that someone searches a lot and suddenly finds themselves getting a $100 bill after they signed up for $10 a month!
Unfortunately there isn't a way around the price too from an architecture perspective because it's a high cost engine to run - the costs are driven by the fact that Kagi uses the paid Google and Bing api's, then adds a bit of it's own index and instant answers, but the Google and Bing API's both charge quite a lot per request (c$0.015 per request).
Search quality is usually pretty good (until it isn't), and it's getting better as it's manually tweaked to meet common queries, but the maps search is pretty much unusable. The search doesn't seem to "understand" queries in the same way Google does, particularly ones that are semantically hard (despite the results coming from google, Kagi reshuffles them). The founder, Vlad, seems pretty great though and is very active in the discord community. I really wish them luck, and particularly that they manage to crack the cost/pricing challenge they have.
However I have gone back to Google with adblock as my daily driver as I just didn't get the same quality of results, and found myself going back to Google enough times to make it frustrating. I appreciate it is a beta though, and that it will only get better over time.
Our $10 plan is likely going to give the user 1,000 searches. 80% of users search less than that monthly, even average HN users (who are majority of our beta users). We will also have pay as you go option ($1 per 80 searches) and $30/mo for people who want to support Kagi.
I would argue that our monetization strategy is valid as it is the only one that at least has a chance of making the business sustainable. Whether enough people would pay (which is what I think you were getting at) is another matter.
Yes our Maps is completely broken now. But at least we are building our own Maps (together with our own Search and a Browser, not an easy feat). The vision is ambitious, I'd love a world where at least a portion of it is realized.
Do you intend to make the search limit a daily thing, or will it only apply over the whole month?
For me at least, I have spikes in my search behavior, like when I'm working on some difficult project, while on other days there's not much going on. While having a search budget would maybe get some getting used to, I could see myself working with it if I had a way to plan ahead.
It would help if there was UI support for this, similar to what mobile phones have in the "Mobile Data" settings (data used/remaining, usage graphs and so on). I'm also on the beta right now, but haven't seen anything like that when looking just now.
Monthly for sure, even passing unused one to next month.
We are building a UI for consumption data right now :)
I suspect 80% of your users also are not daily-driving though, are also using other search engines at the same time, and have not set Kagi as a default on all their computers and their mobile devices (which I did!). In order to do that I had to change my mobile browser from Safari to Firefox, which is part of the reason I suspect most people have not done this.
1000 sounds like a lot more than 33 a day - particularly when if it is a search with a lens applied that drops to c16 per day, or a search that then clicks through to images.
I also think that the people that are willing to pay for search are likely to be the 'power users' which use search more. If your target market is 'people who are willing to pay for search, but don't use search that much' I suspect you will be limiting the market that find the subscription valuable.
> I would argue that our monetization strategy is valid as it is the only one that at least has a chance of making the business sustainable. Whether enough people would pay (which is what I think you were getting at) is another matter.
I think the problem is a monetization strategy is only valid if people are willing to pay for it. Anyone can create a monetization strategy that is designed to cover costs, but it's not going to lead to a sustainable business unless it generates more value for customers than the fee provides.
My point being, there is a lot of potential for "show the same search results again, because the user re-searched 5 minutes later" and "show the same search results, but filter locally on an additional word" too.
If Google/Bing give "1000 results per search", then there is also value in storing that single search too. I guess:
- I'm not sure how the API works, so I can't add much value here
- But, even though it adds local cost for storage and DB, caching searches per user could reduce costs in some scenarios
Because, while I love the idea of paid search... I think I do 100s of searches per day, so if you pay for each page of search results, and winnowing down results with additional terms....
> But, even though it adds local cost for storage and DB, caching searches per user could reduce costs in some scenarios
There may be some opportunity to do this, and caching results would be a good idea, but most forms of caching are explicitly banned from the Google and Bing API T&Cs. Some caching is allowed in some circumstances, but this will limit the usefulness of caching to reduce costs.
> Because, while I love the idea of paid search... I think I do 100s of searches per day, so if you pay for each page of search results, and winnowing down results with additional terms....
Agree with this - and at your usage levels plus $1 per 80 searches plus the $10 fee for 30 / day, you will be talking about $40+ per month, or $480 per year - enough to buy a new Macbook every 2.5 years :)
But IMO having been on the discord group the founders have got themselves into a trap of thinking "Charging per query is the only way we can make the sums financially work because we use both the Bing and Google APIs, thus we will need to get users to accept to paying per query".
The proposed pay per use is an independent tier, not on top of any other.
Pay per use is on all tiers if you go above the quota, the quota just changes based on tier. It’s been made pretty clear on discord that none of the tiers will be ‘all you can eat’.
A bottom PAYG tier is different to what I last heard although it doesn’t actually change the monthly cost of $40 for OP though.
There are people willing to pay for it, the question is will there be enough. A doomed monetization strategy would be one where people are willing to pay for it, but you lose money on every transaction.
> 1000 sounds like a lot more than 33 a day - particularly when if it is a search with a lens applied that drops to c16 per day, or a search that then clicks through to images.
Not sure where you got this from. Search via lens does not cost as 2 searches. It is costing 1 search and we are making changes in the future where it will count as less than 1 search.
So far I've been quite pleasantly surprised. I didn't need to de-prioritize anything yet, and most of my queries are technical. I would pay for it, but like you say, I'm not sure how much.
5$ for unlimited searches is something I'd go for without even thinking. For 10$, I already question whether is it actually better than using searx where I get comparable results. I can get a VPS cheaper than than and run my own customizable searx instance for that cost.
I'm not doing anything fancy, but I don't want to think about the query count. You can stack-up hundreds of searches per day sometimes, just because you're looking up something interesting, then do next to nothing for days.
I'm not saying I wouldn't pay for more, but I don't see the gain.
I definitely see the problem with the API cost of the underlying calls though. That feels like a huge argument that having your own index is important to compete in the market.
A Google size index that is potentially able to replace google results would probably cost $100m-$1B to build. We have a fraction of that built for noncommercial results (try Noncommercial lens in Kagi to see how it works).
I guess kagi is currently running at a loss?
My best guess is at about $0.5 per 1,000.
> I guess kagi is currently running at a loss
We are in beta and not chargining any money, so yeah by definition we are running at loss.
Unfortunately, I’m sure they rake in magnitudes more cash from ads than they ever would from subscriptions.
I do believe we should pay (a reasonably small amount! :)) for products that companies provide. It’s the “free” model that got us into this mess.
It is inevitable. It's coming. Algolia? Please?
Disclaimer: I work for Google but in no way related to search, business models, or product decisions. My words are my own.
Whatever it is it's really annoying because usually these results link to another search on a shopping site and more often than not those results come up empty anyway.
Like you see in the cached textlines: "Buy reptilecandy here, low prices!!" or something, and the URL to the site seems legit, trustedstore.com/reptilecandy/ but if you click on it you just get to the shop top page with no reptile candy in sight.
Clicking on one of the sites linked in the search results gives:
https://www.zazzle.com/reptile+candy+favors
And on their shop page it seems they have a section called "Reptile Candy & Favors". But if you click on the category above, Candy & Favors, there is no sub-section list so the sub-section is probably entirely dynamically generated.
So there's something weird going on, I wonder how those dynamic categories end up in googles search excerpts. Can they pay google to inject non-existant pages and sections into the results? (the search result in question was not marked as an Ad though)
If you are not logged into some of these sites you can't actually get to stuff either. Annoying.
Not sure why they are allowing them to take over the rest of search though?
Though this kind of goes to the related question: why Google don't allow you to setup your profile to nuke domains from consideration when you search, I do not know - it would completely divorce them from any responsibility for search result manipulation and make everyone happier.
It's so bad you'd almost think google has a stake in pinterest at this point.
Such a blacklist could be limited to one's personal account though but, I guess, since there is no monetisation benefit for google they don't care to offer it?
I don't know how technically hard this would be to implement. Or what business model will resist adding it. I just know that most of my web searches are NOT me trying to buy stuff. They're usually looking up information.
Like, how does the load sensing algorithm work on my LG washer? No chance I'll ever find out by searching the web. Only 200 links to different places I can buy a new one. Or maybe some videos explaining that the feature exists, and "oh and would you like to buy one?"
Maybe I want to know if my GadgetMaster 3000 will work with my WidgetWanker Mark II. Nope, but here's 100 places you can buy those, or maybe the THINGDOODLE brand of knockoffs.
Ok, I'm ranting. Point is: give me a way to restrict my search to only those pages that aren't selling anything. Maybe the heuristic is that the page hasn't changed in 6 months, or uses outdated tags like <marquee>, or some fancy semantic analysis of the page copy. I don't know. I just wish search results weren't so utterly dominated by e-commerce sites or affiliate spam.
The primary purpose of ads isn't to get you to buy something. It's to plant a brand in your brain so that next time you do want to buy something, you'll think of the brand.
Ads are very good psychological manipulation.
Of course those are also really ads in a sense, but somehow there’s got to be a way to provide a real search engine that doesn’t show only e-commerce sites. I’ll pay for it!
Here's a thing that I am absolutely convinced happens. Ad network tracks purchases. Ad network track ad impressions. Ad network correlates the two and finds that 90% of people who saw the ad also bought the product. But they conveniently "forgot" to check if the ad impression was before or after the purchase.
I'm confident this is happening because the only times I see ads for anything I'd be interested in buying is after I've already bought the damn thing.
But do they at all take into account the fact that probably about 50 out of 100 ad impressions lead to an "I'll NEVER purchase anything from the purveyor of this ad-spam shit!" reaction?
> A built-in load sensor automatically detects the laundry load and a microprocessor optimizes washing conditions such as ideal WATER LEVEL and washing time. Turbo drum washing (option) When "Punch + 3" washing wings turn, the washing tub turns in the opposite direction.
I accidentally searched for this:
load sensing algorithm work on my LG washer?
Adding "how does the" to the beginning of the search gives this as the second hit:
> Water level sensing in LG washers is done differently from how you may be used to seeing it done in other brands. Whirlpool, GE, Electrolux and others use an air tube connecting an air dome on the tub to a pressure sensor with a physical diaphragm or transducer that "feels" the water level increase as an increase in pressure inside the air tube.
Which seems more promising, but I didn't click through.
I've watched it at work and as best as I can tell, it takes inertial mass readings by wiggling the drum using a specified current, and measuring how far the drum oscillates. Or maybe it predetermines the amplitude and measures the power required?
I'm just guessing. What I want to find out: is either of my guesses close? Is there something else I'm not seeing? Why does it do this 4 times in a row? (In between "wiggles" it will rotate the drum a few times to—my guess—redistribute the load and get an average from the four readings.
Maybe its rose-tinted glasses looking at the web of yesterday, but I have this sneaking suspicion some nerd out there has an entire website devoted to arcane appliance details like this. I would very much like to find and bookmark that site!
Hopefully DDG and others don’t turn into that tho
As long as you click on an Ad, google makes money, regardless if you buy something or not.
Duckduckgo hasn't been any better for me lately. It seems like search as a whole is failing to respond to the latest round of SEO tricks. It takes a lot more work to find what I'm actually looking for, regardless of which engine I use.
Hey now, SEO spam is often packed to the brim with high revenue ads.
Google, even after all its attempts, is still a one trick pony. They have to grow at least 20% year over year to justify the market cap. They weren’t able to create a two pillar company like Amazon (AWS + Retail) so what do uncreative master executives naturally turn to? Of course their only cash cow.
“ Rabban! I place you in charge of Arrakis. It's yours to squeeze, as I promised. I want you to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze!” - Dune
> Trending: "Turkey inflation rate" > See search results
I've already put a lot of effort into purging as many categories of Google spam notifications from my phone as possible, but they just keep adding new categories that I have to track down and opt out of individually. And the only way to silence them from the notification itself is to block all notifications from that app/service.
I paid good money for this phone — just stop with the OS-integrated spam! It's a never ending game of spam whackamole with Google these days. I guess various product owners are incentivised to increase "engagement" or whatever, but right now they're just increasing my engagement with Apple's product pages.
(The wireless charging stand is a different story. It has a fan, and the only way to disable the fan involves running some system extension that requires deep kernel integration with the factory version of Android. Other than that, it's been remarkably trouble free.)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/yoke (definition 3a)
Perhaps it no longer indexes as much as it used to, at least for noncommercial content.
I scroll past all ads out of habit[0], so honestly this doesn’t impact my Google usage. Wish I didn’t have to train that muscle, but here we are. :(
[0] my pihole breaks the links anyway
Also with pihole, you almost never run into the dreaded “it looks like you’re using ad block!”.
That said, pihole or any DNS level blocking is pretty weak compared to what uBlock Origin and provide. Like a parent commenter said, it doesn’t prevent you from seeing the google ads, it just keeps the links from working. Most big sites know not to make their ads so easily blocked.
While I still find Google useful, especially Google Scholar, I've primarily moved to DuckDuckGo for most casual searches.
Use DuckDuckGo it’s a lot better with relevant search results and privacy friendly.
When the pain of watching ads becomes greater then the pain of setting up a way to block ads.
Blocking ads will become the norm.
They're doing this to themselves.
There is virtually no actual news on these sites anymore unless it is click bait that elicits a lot of comment.
I'm beginning to think that google are doing the same.
Actually, a good majority of my searches are site:reddit.com {product I am looking for}, or site:news.ycombinator.com {some tech thing I want to find again}.
I think there is a comparison here to how inbound telephone calls, or to some extent email, have been made useless by marketers. Google searches for "Phoenix {thing}" tend to be almost all yelp/yelp clone spam.
edit: this made me actually look in my history. It seems that by far the thing I am using google for the most is image search. Second from that is spelling/grammar sanity checks.
I find it easier than typing out “site:” especially since my browser allows me to just start the URL and then tab into a search on that site.
FB used outrage as a way to increase engagement and it worked for a while, but now FB is increasingly a non-desirable place to hang out. Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content. When Apple added restrictions that cut off oxygen to FB, FB started a PR campaign to paint it as one grave injustice. It seems like that was met with a collective shrug. Who cheers for the bad guy?
All that is to say, it seems like Google has been in this value extraction mode for a while and I don’t see what the long term plan is. They don’t seem to be innovating much, but are instead intent on squeezing as much money as they can from their existing assets. And while that may work in the short term, FB has shown tech giants are not invincible. I’ve seen a lot of talk online lately about how bad the quality of search results have gotten. If a credible competitor emerges, I think a lot of users would gladly switch. If/when that happens, Google better hope they don’t find themselves in FB’s position where they can’t acquire their way out of their rut.
> Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content.
Tiktok does this very well. I usually end up feeling good after using TikTok. On the other hand Twitter makes me stressed, FB is not much used by my friends age group or only used for memes, and Instagram is now showing me two ads every three stories that is really a pain to use.
Users defecting from FB have a number of options, driven by their in person network, search doesn't. How do new search engines communicate that Google is turning up the (ad/spam) heat and they need to escape the pot? Search results are subjective (that's why Google uses human raters), so what does it take for users, en masse, to start questioning their search results quality and/or excessive number of ads?
Reading that line I just realized that google lost me as a YouTube viewer in the past two weeks. I used to follow a bunch of ~100k subscriber channels that produced content every couple of weeks on building things and how to build things. I'd generally watch one or two 10-30 minute videos a day.
They've cranked the ads through the roof to the point that I'd see the same 6 second Liberty Mutual bit three times before the video even got through its introduction along with a couple other ads.
I now realize its been days since I even went to the site. So I guess for this n=1 we've found the limit.
Also, why are you not using uBlock origin?
Ended up getting an ad blocker on my iphone and deleting the app. I now have to use youtube.com and settle for 720p, but it's far and away better than the shit ads it served.
Don't get me started on the relevancy of the ads.
I, at least, have never seen that 1080p option on the mobile site.
There is the Scottish electrical engineer, that although his accent is really thick, its refreshing, but with the adds for cell phones/no and FHP/no.
Now, if they would only stop with the censorship. When in the history of mankind have the censors ever been the good guys?
I mean.....removing pedo or gore content from Youtube is still censorship. Just the kind that we probably all agree with. The way you view censorship(and censors) mostly depends on whether they remove content you want removed or not, and that line can massively vary even in western societies(for instance I love the fact that in Germany any nazi-related content is actually criminal, but many Americans gasp at the very concept - however the line is there even in America, but it's just placed in at a different point).
It's not called censorship when it is the right and reasonable thing to do. In many cases, it is simply decision making done collectively by society. For example, we don't tend to allow blatantly religious proselytizing in public schools by teachers. Is that censorship? Maybe? Is it controversial? Not really.
Education is actually a good example -- as decisions are constantly made in terms of what is and is not made available to students. It's easy to find decisions that are blatantly wrong -- for example, banning "A Big Mooncake for Little Star," which is a book about a little kid eating a cake. (But there are other choices that are obviously correct, such as banning books in school libraries that are blatantly misleading.
Whether something is considered censorship is often a matter of perspective.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/germanys-laws-ant...
I also like having access to YouTube music but like so many things with streaming, you're not certain to get continued access to stuff you like. I've started buying MP3's of songs that I like again so that I don't have to worry that Google will stop carrying the music any more or raise prices on YouTube Premium to a level I don't like.
I have less and less trust for the big companies that provide these services so I'm focusing more on self-hosting and some form of ownership. It's not just MP3's. I'm also making sure that I'm using FOSS for my note taking (Joplin), backups (duplicati) and other such things. Some of this stuff is too valuable to me to risk losing access to.
I’ll probably look through the Patreon pages in a few weeks, see who I still care about, and see if they have alternative video feeds that aren’t so ad littered. Those can remain, the rest I’ll cancel.
Popular sort was a great way to find what a new channel was about
> further evidence to long $GOOG tbh
To be fair, everything in Monsters, Inc. was made up.
Once they do that they become lost to Google forever.
Perhaps the only holdout is mobile. But otherwise ad-tech is poisoning the well for themselves.
It seems the most profitable users don't care and typically engage with the ads. Or they used to before apple came in and lowered the quality.
Arguments about ethics/ads aside
TikTok has by far the best recommender system I have ever tried. After an hour of use the system had correctly narrowed down my interests of exoplanets, space exploration, technology, and startups.
However that also means TikTok is the most hypertuned echochamber. I hope people don't get their political views from TikTok.
[0] https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/tiktoks-algorithm-leads-...
“ We defined “prominent far-right figures/prominent far right talking points” posts as those that contain prominent far-right figures such as Ben Shapiro, Alex Jones…”
“ We defined “racist/white supremacist” posts as those which… support white supremacy by using white supremacist talking points such as “white pride” or “white lives matter.””
So do white lives not matter? Seems like whoever wrote this hates themselves and is racist.
I mean, it's nice and noble but the vast majority of people don't follow you and corporations don't care as long as you don't become a social and political landmark. If you go quietly for sure it doesn't matter to their bottom line.
People generally give stuff up for prosaic reasons, instead such as: too many ads, favorite content producers moved to another platform, content they like becomes paid, their social circles don't consider the platform cool anymore, etc.
>.., favorite content producers moved to another platform,..
This was my grip against youtube, it wasn't merely a principled stand. Numerous independent content creators that I had followed and subscribed to on Youtube have been either censored, demonetized or blocked completely in the last couple of years. It doesn't matter to your bottom line until you censor, discourage, or otherwise drive away enough people where it does start to matter, as Facebook found out a few days ago. Perhaps Youtube/Google is such a monopolistic revenue juggernaut that it can continue to censor, demonetize and ban content creators liberally and without any coherent standards and still churn out a profit. We'll see.
And keep in mind that content creators have their own interests ($$$, fame, etc) not all of which align with their viewers' interests.
My guess is the reason there are so few competitors is economics. You can't get investment as long as Google stock is a sure bet. Few will pay for your service as long as Google is answering their questions. Advertisers aren't interested as their money is more effectively spent on Google. Therefore you can't build an audience sure to lack of revenue/capital.
Also, Google isn’t a person. I wouldn’t expect someone to understand what I’m trying to say if I yelled “site Colin stackoverflow.com fizz buzz” at them either.
The bigger issue is that Google didn’t even interpret “viper” as any form of “viper” at all and instead corrected it to a nonsense word that’s a company name.
Shout it at me and I'd be fifty-fifty whether it's a snake or a car (the Dodge V-10) you mean. But I'm a car nut; I'd assume for normal (English-speaking) people the snake would be the obvious default meaning.
There was no meaningful competition, either from alternative media distributors or between broadcasters to see who could offer more actual content per hour. It wasn't until streaming came along that cable TV finally started dying. This isn't a huge issue for cable companies, since most have pivoted into operating as ISP's and streaming itself. It's only a matter of time before cable TV is no longer offered as a service by the companies created to offer it.
Google's search engine has few competitors. Even the search function on many websites is inferior to a google search restricted to that site. The ads in google search results can be scrolled through in seconds, although Google constantly plays games to make it harder to tell where the ads stop. Their search algorithm is now suspicious in how it sorts the non-ad results of many searches. All of this is annoying to users, but is it annoying enough to force users onto other search engines? Google appears to be determined to find out just how much spam is too much.
Will DuckDuckGo or other alternatives to google gain traction as a result of this? Probably some, but probably not much. They likely won't make much of a dent in Google's bottom line until they offer something compellingly superior to Google, just as streaming is superior to broadcast TV.
Like a check in if you found what you were looking for, give a penny. Or potentially not what you were looking for, but something that you are happy you found. Thus giving back good info to the search engine and only pay a nominal amount when you get what you want.
Google’s revenue model has been at odds for far too long with identifying and weeding out SEO spam. I don't mean 'spam' here in a derogatory way, but rather everyone who has a legitimate and interesting product and has had their back against the wall and was forced to play the SEO game and become a 'search spammer' As a result 'spammers' (again, pretty much every site these days) 'won' because it was and still is the only way to survive.
Honestly, I suspect that if you deprioritize pages with ads, referral links and sponsored content in search results, this problem will mostly solve itself.
The glut of garbage on the web comes from people trying to make a quick buck online, and I suspect Google is happy to show that content because the garbage is laden with Google or their partners' ads. Even content that doesn't have ads, but encourages visitors to buy products, is valuable to Google because they can use that information to show users more ads or funnel them into buying products via Google Shopping.
If I were presented with an information search product capable of being aware of my specific needs and adapting itself for these needs, I could probably convince my higher-ups to actually pay for something like this. I really wish I could get the same experience doing medical research as the one I get when searching programming related questions, which often return detailed explanations on stackoverflow, actual documentation and other valuable content.
On another and somewhat different note I'm from a specific European country and I've noticed searching in my language in topics related to my country is even worse. If I'm searching for important information regarding something specific for my country, like taxes/institutional affairs, the google search is basically unusable because the results are infested with obnoxious endless clickbait/GDPRconsent/cookies/garbage/websites. I vividly remember how search results in my country used to return forums and conversations, but from what I understand everyone is on FB groups which aren't displayed. There is so much out there being talked about that doesn't seem to 'exist' in the eyes of a search algo.
Weird times.
(perhaps that's what you were going for?)
Google (and near equivalents) feel a bit like Windows GUI when I want Linux cli for a) quickly going to a site I already know, b) answering a question when I have a bias about where good answers will be found, c) picking one thing from a long list
I feel there's already an equivalent with a few rough edges but a power tool I can be productive with.
Any product that aims at Google's entire market is only going to turn into Google, I need an ecosystem of tools so there will always be one that is aimed at my use case.
It feels like there's a common sentiment around this so there may be room for a new business model or open source approach.
One thing is bang searches, like duckduckgo has. So if you already know the site you want to search, and they have decent search then you can use their search directly.
There's an open standard for advertising your local search but it feels a bit forgotten like RSS Vs twitter. You can find lists of sites that advertise this search in the Mycroft project on mozdev.
I think Firefox has a non standard extension for search suggestions too.
If the sites don't have decent search, you can get a site specific search via Google or whatever, but it feels like site specific search for code related things would be a good niche. Like Google, you don't need to own the content, just index it better by adding intelligence from context.
You can even aggregate across a few different sites, like official docs plus official discussion, email archives, a Reddit sub and so on as appropriate. Yes you'll miss the long tail, but you'll have limited the scope so much that there would be a lot for value in exact searches for errors and other similar things.
Possibly language communities could build their own index?
The same for discussion sites seems possible and other general groups of search tasks. Wikipedia is a good target too.
If you built a good one you could then offer it to the sites to use as their internal search too, in a virtuous cycle.
On that note I'm going to go look up what Algolia does in this space.
Searching for the same phrase in DuckDuckGo, the 2nd result pointed to a Samsung forum thread [1] which, while pointing to doing things with a Samsung account, said it started working by itself in 1-2 days, which it did.
Setting aside the fact why Android would behave like that, the search results in Google were so low quality and awful... While this is just an anecdote, it seems for quite a few types of search results, their quality has dropped hugely. Is it due to people hijacking the results by using clever tricks? Or has Google's algorithm starting to hit some sort of limit in terms of the amount of content that needs to be indexed and ranked? I don't know. But something definitely seems off to me.
[1]: https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/other-smartphones/my-pat...
Unlike new search engines, google doesn't have to scrape and analyze the web because Chrome shows them what people want when they are searching for a set of words.
Since Bing/DuckDuckGo doesn't have the same level of manipulation, I would assume that SEO spammers have managed to influence Google by faking browser feedback.
I would assume that there are thousands of artificial Chrome instances that fake active users and flood Google with wrong user feedback.
Thousands of artificial Chrome instances, or maybe just hundreds of Chrome extensions running on millions of instances engaging in a DSEO attack each individually well below the background noise floor. If that browser feedback is easy enough to fake then the visit pretender SEO wouldn't even need to poison an extension, they could just run it from any site they can get to run some JS on.
thus removing one of the major reasons to use Yandex.
I am totally concerned though that the non-adds results are those where the interests of the company behind the search results and my interest are deeply leaning towards the interest of the company instead of mines.
In clear text: Content of sites disguised as original content yet serving no other purpose but linking to Amazon or sites which display a ton of adds served by Google.
https://www.google.com/search?q=web+hosting
And, surprisingly, the [ADS] search results when I'm logged-in versus when searching anonymously are different!
Any company that relies primarily on ad revenue is built on a house of cards. It can be highly profitable, but it is fragile.
Coming soon - "Ad Infinitum(tm)" Google search results pages, which start to slowly scroll 5 seconds after being displayed...
For any other query use duck/bing.
I find duck better for general stuff and bing better for programming stuff.
For streaming websites or controversial content use yandex as they bring up random blogs and small unknown websites.
Disclosure he and I agree on what is going on here :-)
It's amazing to me that people are still donating content to these platforms.
And set up protonmail today.
I've just about had it with google's bullshit.
https://twitter.com/krebs_adrian/status/1488173888068542466
https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/ (Note: the url of this page is /honestresults/)
Why the hell am I getting targeted?
The worst thing about youtube is, when I do a search, it intentionally throws in videos that have absolutely nothing to do with my search.
Try Bing, as it's been well regarded.
Seems like flame bait
so yes, it's acceptable. use ad-block if it's not to you.
Running other software to make search usable is also not acceptable.
Combined with your misinformation spread in other threads of this topic, your actions appear to be shilling.
Don’t use Google, or any search engine for that matter, I’d you don’t like ads. Try out Kagi or Neeva.
Edit: I now see 3 ad results after disabling uBlock origin, but still far from the entire thing being ads. I didn't think it removed ads from the search results themselves (since I see 'sponsored ads' occasionally in my search and things). My bad.
Here's "mattress," which has ads that extend beyond the fold: https://i.imgur.com/Z9dGSKR.png
Those two I just took. I mercifully cannot replicate this one anymore, but here's one for "indeed" I took in December, where LinkedIn had an ad that took up my entire laptop screen: https://i.imgur.com/x7g5Uo3.png
I can't replicate OP's specific one, but remember that ad buy is very dynamic. I do get the top two positions as competitors, one of which is seen in OP's link as well: https://i.imgur.com/hYjaWm4.png. I certainly do not think this post is fake.
And yes, people are shocked at the amount of ads google is pushing.
I swear people always say nonsense like this and when I ask for specific queries they stop replying. Check my history if you doubt it.
I don't doubt you saw ads, but Google very strictly limits the percentage of the screen that can be ads or percentage of results. If you can find a single query in which every result on the first page is a sponsored ad I'll send you $5 via Venmo right now, no questions asked.
people just like saying 'omg all my screen is ads' and then they crop their screen showing like 20% of the screen on a 1080p monitor. >_>
https://i.imgur.com/AkQWJeF.png
100% ads.
DDG for the same search is better, but not by much:
this scenario of all of the results being ads is nonexistent. again if anyone can show me a reproducible query in which all results are ads, $5 - easy.
omg DDG 100% ads !111
It is nice how passionate you are, though.
Also, appropriately, your screenshot of DDG does not showcase all ads.
Nobody's saying the search results are only ads, they're saying that the only results that are shown to consumers without some action on their part are ads...
The title of this post and point of the twitter thread is:
"For some searches literally the whole screen!! on google is now ads."
It seems that all of the search engines just suck huh.
>"For some searches literally the whole screen!! on google is now ads."
And that's what you see in the screenshots. What's the problem?
Sheesh.
So I think there's just a communication breakdown here.
meaningless because that's an subjective thing.
Just dark patterns. Sad it used to be a good search engine.
https://i.imgur.com/CFeWDY1.png
As for your question, there is no point in trying to replicate results for the same query, search results and the displayed ads can wildly differ for the same query based on a large number of factors.
Guess nobody wants it on iOS and they are going with the "spam the user until they comply", like they do with YouTube Pro. They are the digital equivalent of an abusive partner that doesn't accept "no" as an answer.
Well, maybe I don't want to watch ads so that binary-tree-inverting MIT/Stanford graduates could get their 6-figure compensation packages for participating in a natural monopoly?
I am paying the same for youtube, which is a platform that takes content created from others, adds ads to it and the make me pay to remove them than for Netflix, which partially produces its own content.
I sometimes think that youtube premium is the best idea to make money without doing anything else than make you think that they are helping you to clean the crap they have created.
I'm also pretty sure that data collection is still on, meaning that you'll get tracked and ads elsewhere (such as on Google.com) based on tracking your youtube premium behavior.
{{citation needed}}
>less money than they used to So many things changed on the internet in the last few years; I don't see how you can reasonably attribute lower total incomes by creators specifically to ad blockers, as opposed to stronger competition or different consumer behavior.