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Comment by olyjohn | Hacker News Reader

I saw this myself months ago with my father. He calls me up, and tells me that Google is only showing him ads, and he can't find any actual content. I figured it was some kind of malware he installed, but nope, I get over there and it's exactly like this screenshot. The entire first screen of results was ads. Then when I scrolled down, there weren't Google ads, but just a bunch of SEO spam. Wasn't gonna waste my time figuring it out, so I put him on DDG, and his problems were solved.

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lol, OK what was the query? let's see the DDG and Google results side by side.

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. >_>

I'm on a 13" Macbook Pro, here's what a Chrome search for "Salesforce Integration" with my adblocker turned off looks like:

https://i.imgur.com/AkQWJeF.png

100% ads.

DDG for the same search is better, but not by much:

https://i.imgur.com/pcpxr4l.png

what's after the fold? Why do you crop it so it only shows ads? so ridiculous. Google will almost never show more than 5 sponsored ads or some combination of 2-3 ads and sponsored modal. same is true with Bing, DDG, Startpage, etc.

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

https://imgur.com/a/A1bxnVQ

I'm on a 15" macbook pro and also only see ads below the fold. Is it difficult to imagine that most users around the planet aren't working with 27" monitors or whatever size it is you have?

Yes, I just posted an image on a 13" laptop on DDG showing the entire page being ads.

I suspect you misunderstood what folks are up in arms about. No one is claiming that Google is serving an entire page worth of ads. They're angered that the entire above the fold section, typically on a laptop, is entirely ads.

It is nice how passionate you are, though.

Also, appropriately, your screenshot of DDG does not showcase all ads.

I didn't crop it.. that's the point.. on the native resolution of my computer, doing a search for that specific term shows 100% ads after clicking "search".. Obviously you can scroll past them, maybe that's why you're confused?

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...

> 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."

Again.. "the whole screen" which implies everything you can see... Not everything that exists.

I agree. Should I make another post stating how DDG only shows ads on the entire screen as well?

It seems that all of the search engines just suck huh.

>The title of this post and point of the twitter thread is:

>"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?

You don't know what a screen is? It's the glass thingy above or beside your desktop computer, or on the inside of the lid of your laptop computer.

Sheesh.

I think when people are saying "the whole screen is ads", they mean the _visible_ screen. The person took a screenshot of the first visible screen and it's all ads. You can even see in the tweet that the tippy top of the next result is a non-ad, but all visible results were ads. Even one of the parent comments says "...Then when I scrolled down, there weren't Google ads, but just a bunch of SEO spam", implying that there were non-ads if you scrolled.

So I think there's just a communication breakdown here.

You didn't even read my comment you replied to. Did you not see where I said that I scrolled down past the ads to look at all the totally legit SEO spam?

> Did you not see where I said that I scrolled down past the ads to look at all the totally legit SEO spam?

meaningless because that's an subjective thing.

Maybe people don't reply because they don't care about proving it to you, or they don't care about replying to some snarky-ass comment. I saw what I saw, and don't care if you don't believe it.

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