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Comment by a1371 | Hacker News Reader

I think people are missing the actual issue here. Google used to have a clear distinction between what's an ad and what is organic.

In these screenshots you have to pay good attention to see the top result is an ad.

To keep their conversion numbers up they had to constantly reduce the difference between the ads and everything else. The fact that they can do this and we are so used to it that we don't first identify that as the culprit is quite interesting.

I have ran a few Google ads in the recent years and the people who come through them, some of them, clearly have no idea that they have clicked on an ad. This might be good for business but I think it does more harm overall.

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I see people do that all the time - inadvertently click an ad because it's one of the first few results that pop up. Not only that, the number of ads shown before the real result has increased too! Just the other day, my boss did a Google search for a common product and was shown at least FIVE ads before the first real result and had to scroll to see that result. I remember the days when you would see one or two ads and the real result as the first thing you saw after a search, not seeing only ads until you scroll down.

It's not enough. I used to always skip the ad of the canonical site I was looking for to avoid incurring them a cost when I knew what I was searching for.

But it's often no longer possible. The actual search reasult you want is the ad and the link is no longer duplicated in the organic search results.

So you have to click the ad.

you also have the option to not use Google and use DuckDuckGo or Bing instead

> You also have the option to not use [ad-funded search engine #1] and use [ad-funded search engine #2] or [ad-funded search engine #3] instead.

Do you have an example of this? I haven't seen it.

Disclosure: I work at Google but not on Search.

they used to have a yellow background, then a blue button with a white "advertisement" text in it, and it just got more and more subtle over the years. Now it's two characters of text

On mobile, the text saying Ad is the same size and position as favicons for regular search results, too.

The actual issue for me is Google allowing an ad to say gimp.com that is not gimp.com. Even if you see it's an ad and are interested, you are now at risk on Google.

While this isn't the root issue it is definitely a major concern that should be addressed. It's deceptive by nature.

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