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Comment by winternett | Hacker News Reader

Google takes a cut when those companies pay for ads on the platform. It's the old switcheroo...

For many years Google had run their search engine as a trusted source for indexed search with advertising subtly placed. Now that they are dominating the entire search market, they are skewing results to anyone who pays for promotion with them under the table, and it's not clearly apparent to users.

I can't tell you how many times I've tried to find a restaurant web site on google and it's buried under direct links to door dash and other order online services that add surcharges. It's so bad now that the only way I can ensure that I'm not being overcharged for no good reason is to order by phone or directly at restaurants. There is very little value added to so many online businesses now because of twisted Internet schemes like this.

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> Now that they are dominating the entire search market, they are skewing results to anyone who pays for promotion with them under the table, and it's not clearly apparent to users.

Slightly off topic, but as an example of this, I did a search for the manufacturer part number of a brushed DC motor the other day. It was just a randomish string of characters like S-5672 or something, and under image results and all the results were completely unrelated pictures of an entirely different brushless motor that I had recently purchased. The seeming effect of this is that Google knew I was looking for a specific product, and chose to show me a competing product instead, despite them not being comparable.

I have found their search to be less and less useful for things like this when it used to be great. Even searching in quotes has gotten much less "exact". If you really want to do an exact search you have to quote it AND now also check a box for "exact results" in the little search options dropdown.

The lesson is don't use Google search in a browser where you have their login cookies. Set up an extension that wipes their cookies when a tab is closed. Restrict logged in Google activity to a separate browser or profile that won't be used to build a behavioral profile.

Be aware of platforms publishing a 'proxy' phone number so they can still collect their fees: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/6/20756878/yelp-grubhub-comm...

Why? Do you also beware of restaraunt waiters collecting a fee for bringing you food you could get directly from the cook?

If you want to undercut an affilate referral, go to the restaurant ditrctlry instead of a third party leadgen site.

> If you want to undercut an affilate referral, go to the restaurant ditrctlry instead of a third party leadgen site.

The whole issue is that the leadgen site is pretending to be the real restaurant to collect a fee. This isn’t just “why complain that DoorDash takes a fee when you use DoorDash”. It’s “company X is pretending to be restaurant Y in order to add a fee while providing no value added”.

> Google takes a cut when those companies pay for ads on the platform.

> I can't tell you how many times I've tried to find a restaurant web site on google and it's buried under direct links to door dash and other order online services that add surcharges.

That's definitely true, but that's not what's being discussed.

> Now that they are dominating the entire search market, they are skewing results to anyone who pays for promotion with them under the table, and it's not clearly apparent to users.

Do you mean for restaurant results specifically or all Google Search results? Big difference if both.

It's fascinating to me that the search results page on mobile is often three-ish screens of non-website links. Instead, it's ads, answers, images, and other random stuff. These things are either monetized or scraped from someone's website.

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