The Google search I made a minute ago

Few months ago I finally accepted that Google is a business that will adapt itself to serve the majority of people that use it, including finding a business model that makes them keep afloat (like adding ads, filtering results, etc). I have been banned from this 'majority of people' group by committing the most scary of the acts: I got old. I don't care about empty blog posts, pages about celebrity gossip, SEO filled articles about that one thing you should definitely change in your life, etc. Seriously, people are learning to game the search engines before they learn how to write anything of value! And it kinda works because by the time I realized the emptiness I have already clicked "Accept only required cookies" and closed two ads on the most creative positions they could come up with! And they will be more creative with the X button next time, I JUST KNOW IT!

Pay attention to the comments around this community and others and you won't go a month without reading a comment or a post complaining about Google Search. For one, the other services google produces are good and I pay for some as I find them valuable. Second, I love the past of google search, it helped me a ton. Third, I know that Google Search is such a popular thing that you'll always find someone complaining about it, I get it, but it is my feeling that present-day search for google has been rotting away slowly for the past years. My Google-fu was envious back in the day and if you remember or used that term before then you are probably getting old too, sorry, but do join me in my mid life crisis and let's long for the good old days!

I now use Kagi search. It is not perfect nor updated as often as Google Search but I pay for it out of principle: I hope that more people will do it, and since only people who cares about search would do such an unnecessary act, it will probably get optimized for weird people like me.

A very idealistic situation would be showing SendCutSend first and then having an accordion of “businesses like SendCutSend” that you could expand and show all their competitors and then companies can bid on top billing.

To me this is fantastic, it makes ads genuinely useful. There are times when I want to find other companies that provide similar services and Google would know by virtue of me interacting with the accordion that I specifically am open to them.

But I think what would kill the change in the boardroom is that ad buyers would hate it even if it had the same or better conversation rate’s because you can’t see the ad like a billboard.

Yeah, ads can be a real pain. Before HNers come in and start criticizing Google, can we have a honest discussion about the best pricing model for search engines these days? Subscription-based search engines like Kagi and Neeva are generating some revenue, but I'm not convinced they'll be profitable in the long run. Kagi is still struggling to pay the dev team's costs [0].

[0]-https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months

In a game theory class I had we studied the auction system google uses for keywords I was surprised to learn they earn something like 50-100 billion dollars a year doing it they sell the top three or four results for any keyword across geographic regions for pennies but it all adds up

Honest question do you guys believe that without ad blocking Google and others would cut back because they could create the same shareholder value while serving fewer ads?

Although many websites like Google is a business at the end of the day, it is quite disappointing to see that there isn't any non-commercial areas on the web.

"SendCutSend" lists it first as I'd expect vs searching two common words.

At 90% zoom the ads alone take up the entire screen on my MacBook's display.