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You either play the Organic SEO game or you Pay to Play (Ads). Google as a search engine is now useless when it comes to searching for a tool/software etc because everyone has gamed the "Best software for xyz" etc. But what's the alternative ? None. There are these "review" websites like Capterra/Software Advice/G2 and again you have to pay to play. You can technically get a review from a customer and get listed BUT if you want to be shown on the main page for that category, you need to pay crazy PPC.

Source: I play this game since I run a software business. Would love an alternative but there are none. You either Play the game or you Die.

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From the point of view of someone who spent 10 years running an e-commerce store, and all its advertising, until a couple of years ago. Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead. The hay day of being able to play the game and make a tidy profit is long gone.

Google are playing every trick in the book to extract every possible cent from advertisers, spying on their business and sales to maximise their own profits. Google's visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane. People complain about the tracking of users/visitors, but the tracking of businesses is just as bad.

They probably have better insights into the economy and market trends than most governments and banks.

The penny is dropping, advertisers are noticing, my long term expectation of Google's business are not what they were.

> Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead

And then

> Google's visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane.

Ah, so they have all of the information and yet their ad products don't work. They don't know this?

They appear to work just well enough to keep you hooked while they increasingly eat your margin.

My 2 cents - in the past, there were bigger inefficiencies that advertisers could exploit. So they could buy a click for 10 cents, and profit 25 cents from it. Google has gotten better and closed that gap, so now you pay 15 cents (and due to increased competition, you might only profit 20 cents)

The opportunities are still there in local minima, places where it's too small for Google to optimize. But the trend is clear.

A perfectly optimized ad algorithm reflects the market, and offers little opportunity that isn't present in the business itself.

Costs go up because winners have been found. Like monopolies in capitalism.

Naive question, but if a winner had been found in a given niche, wouldn't there not be as much bidding competition and thus costs would go down?

Concretely: if I am the only pie baker in the world (I won), who else would bid against me for "place to buy pie"?

My unsubstantiated hypothesis is that google has gotten better at cross-promoting - so they could target people who like cake, increasing the market and competition for bids, making prices go up.

Incumbents often maintain large budgets to ward off competition. Competition wins enough to keep bidding, etc. If America is not full of monopolies, the bidding environment stays liquid. There is also the threat of using literal brand name targeting, or conquesting, which encourages your competition to run their own ads to keep you out.

I believe there are some agreements for larger corporations to continue to promote things even if it is not necessary. People with funny money can treat ad markets like billboards.

Another fucked up aspect is that the government often runs ads to promote its own policies.

Much like real markets there is sometimes unnatural activity that keeps it moving.

I've seen this narrative a lot in this thread. But if Googles ad-algorithm was actually good I'd expect to occasionally see useful ads. But Googles ad-algorithm is far from perfect. That's why people use reddit or other community aggregators to find useful products, the search engines just really suck at that task.

If you are like many of the commenters on here who is using adblockers and abstains from social networks, this is precisely why you see shitty ads.

Also if you aren't buying anything by clicking them, advertisers are ignoring you because you aren't a valuable user to them.

You are most likely reaping what you sew. Which shows that the ad networks are actually working.

It's not good enough that Google makes massive amounts of money for each click, the market demands they make more per each click every day. Gotta chase that growth.

Yes. Now the trick is to convince people that satisficing isn’t just laziness or somehow a road to business death.

> their ad products don't work.

It works for them.

They might need to make it work a tad more for their customers if they had to, but right now they apparently don't.

By "dead" the GP means "at the bottom of a race-to-the-bottom." People are paying $4 (to Google) per customer, to acquire customers with an LTV of $4, making them $0 per customer. That's the natural conclusion to competition under perfect information.

Yes. This is what I'm saying.

> They don't know this?

Of course they do, but people pay crazy money for this and it plays the important role in Google's market valuation, so it's in Google's best interests to continue chanting the Big Data Big Money mantra. It doesn't help that the myth/meme is strongly backed by the whole cyberpunk genre, as people love the dystopian themes of "big corporations know everything about you, down to your most secret desires you don't even realize yourself".

And it probably even work by some small but statistically significant margin, compared to some arbitrarily picked baseline, so they can even back this up if necessary.

The king is naked, though.

If online ad campaigns did not bring sales, a lot of people would stop doing them. There are other advertisement media; there is organic-looking product placement, there is overt product placement and "influencers", etc.

Still, people buy a lot of AdWords and similar, and occasionally I see a relevant ad I click. BTW ads within Facebook are usually of much better quality (for me as a reader), likely because they can correlate.more sources inside FB.

You occasionally click on "relevant" ads? I'm really curious why you would do that? Personally, I'll go out of my way to make sure that I don't buy anything referred to me by an ad, on the grounds that advertising is a vile and parasitic industry.

Not OP but presumably they click a relevant ad because it is relevant...

I relatively often click on ads for new electronic musical instruments, even though I rarely buy them. These are just interesting things to see, some actually novel.

I sometimes click on ads about things related to IT and programming, if they mention something novel and important, just to be aware of the landscape, and what potential competition are pushing.

I see ads relatively rarely though, because I run uBlock Origin. So the ads I see are usually placed in context with some care, not just randomly tucked on to an unrelated webpage. Most of the ads are really poor, as I can see if I use an unprotected browser.

If everyone in the world pays once for a product that doesn't work, you still get rich. They don't need repeat business, when they control they narrative. If they want to promote results touting the benefits of buying G-Ads, they can.

> If online ad campaigns did not bring sales, a lot of people would stop doing them.

I've done the math on this for a few small companies. I an thoroughly convinced that this is just not true for many companies. The vast amount of sales attributed to online ad campaigns are sales that a company would have gotten anyway even without the ads.

> The vast amount of sales attributed to online ad campaigns are sales that a company would have gotten anyway even without the ads.

This is a simple test. Turn off all of your ads for a year, compare against the previous. Write a blog post about it, destroy the industry.

This has been done, in a way.

Some time in 1980s Coca-Cola decided that they have enough of an iconic status, and they don't need as much advertising on expensive large surfaces. They prudently lowered such advertisement a bit, and checked. Shockingly, they noticed a decline in sales. They reverted to the old policy.

Even with all that data/information, Google still cannot find a more sustainable business model. Despite the countless number of sustinable businesses humanity has produced, so-called "tech" companies just cannot find one. These are not creative people. "We'll just keep on playing eavesdropping intermediary ("middleman") until we have undermined every business, every government and society along with it." Sounds great. Good luck.

That’s the case mostly for Twitter, meta and google that only/mainly live based on as revenue.

Amazon, Microsoft, Apple are more diversified.

With those companies, even with their non-data collection, non-advertising services business units, they continue to move more and more into personal data collection and advertising services.

Of course they do, soulless investors see monetisation options and go “free money when?”

They don’t care about good name and long term viability. As far as they’re concerned they can just sell when the stock tanks.

Advertising is in itself a sustainable business model, hovering around 1% of US GDP for the past century[1] (p.37 figure 3). Google really just needs to defend their position within the ad market to remain sustainable.

[1] https://www.bea.gov/index.php/system/files/papers/WP2017-9.p...

Id argue that advertising is am emergent side effect of money/commerce. Once you can produce goods for money you need people to be aware you are selling that product.

That being the case unless we stop using money their business is quite sustainable.

Right now we have a push-based ad model with a low signal to noise ratio. People are force-fed garbage in the off chance that in a moment of weakness they might accidentally make a purchase not in their best interests. The mutually beneficial aspect of what you're describing (informing people of goods and services at some Pareto optimum which they would actually benefit from) could just as easily be satisfied with a pull-based model, and the low SNR is an artifact of letting de facto scammers pay for the privilege of scamming people.

Similar background. Agree completely with your second paragraph.

What’s the best alternative for those adspend $$ in your view?

> But what's the alternative ?

Since ads are a red queen's race, wasting people's attention and assuming we don't want to outright ban them then the next best alternative is to tax them heavily. How about 0.00001 cent per pixel-second-view?

Then people will only put up ads when there's some real value in it, not just to keep up with the competition.

That's a really good idea. We need regulation to prevent prisoners dilemma situations to the detriment of all.

Cue the blurry ads lol.

Half the stuff I search for (old magazines) doesn't even appear in Google's SERPs any longer.

I resort to Duckduckgo and Brave's searches among many others. Even things like Yandex give much deeper dives now.

I just recently started using DDG is there any intuitive way to block the MSN links? Probably wouldn’t be too hard to get the original article url anyway tho.

And I’ve been pretty impressed with Brave search so far. Promising

DDG should introduce anti-bangs so you could do like "!!msn weather for my town" whatever and it would pull from anywhere that is not e.g. MSN.

There is no alternative. People talk about alternatives but everyone I've checked is even worse. Bing, DDG etc. All give complete garbage results. Perhaps not as gamified, but usually that just means you're going to a wordpress of a less competent admin.

Back to webrings! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

(This is a joke (or is it?))

I also think (hope), that reach/scope reduction is a possible counter-reaction as the winner-takes-all empires enshittify beyond repair.

From food to manufacturing to music and other cultural endeavours: making communities small(er) might be an interesting counter (r)evolution.

Without deciding whether your particular mention of webrings was a joke or not, the nostalgia for them that has been cropping up lately is a little bit puzzling to me as someone who remembers well those days. Because webrings themselves were often full of just pure junk, not to mention broken links, or websites that hadn’t been updated in years but we’re still “under construction” (with the de rigueur gif of a hardhat or something).

With its brokenness, those days were more enjoyable to many. The web was more interesting with the variety. Personal sites were a place for each mouth to speak. Today's sites are a place to be force fed pure junk.

Oh, no, I certainly agree that the old web was a better, more interesting place than today’s. By far. If you invoked webrings simply in order to invoke the old web, I totally agree (as opposed to invoking webrings per se). I just pushed back a little bit because even back in the day I didn’t like webrings. :)

I like webcomics, the scruffy sort, just one person a website and a dream. The best part of these little comics is where they will have a list of links to other comics they like.

This feels like one of the last bastions of the true web left, the small web that is actually interlinked, not the dead ends you find in your ecommerce or social networking sites.

But it too is disappearing fast, I for one will miss it.

> But what's the alternative ? None.

And gob help you if you dare search for alternative to _____.

That page is certainly useful to find alternatives , I like I can filter by FOSS

Which of the ten Google result pages full of Alternative to___ pages are you talking about?

https://alternativeto.net/ Sorry I thought it was obvious its been there for 10y at least

Before the Great Reddit Strike, adding "reddit" or "inurl:reddit.com" helped in that regard pretty well.

Given that the Reddit strike was an almost complete failure it still works well.

Several niche subreddits are still offline.

I wouldn't say it was a failure per se.

Old content is still there, but new content is of noticeably lower quality. Many subreddits have moved to minimal moderation or stopped it altogether. Engagement in places I used to frequent like /r/Games (which didn't even participate in the strike) is both down considerably and of lower quality.

Reddit, like Twitter, is too big to fail overnight, but they are essentially zombies at this point. Their growth potential has been neutered and their most valuable users (the 1% making 60% of the quality content) are actively toying with alternatives.

Oh yea. We have seen that one gamed like crazy :).

I find the site AlternativeTo.net usually helps me find good options.

I'm always kinda surprised that this site is still ok, they even clearly provide links to the tools actual pages.

The alternative is places where people congregate. Google used to be a great place to find relatively objective information, but being ad driven it’s all gone to commercial advertising. Word of mouth (IE searching with “[…] Reddit”) gives far better information.

> Word of mouth (IE searching with “[…] Reddit”) gives far better information

Used to. Now that advertising believe their salvation lies in forums, wadding into the big ones increasingly feels like entering the water at a British beach after the privatisation of Thames Water...

Not really. Thinking that Reddit is not gamed by marketers or bought/sponsored influencers in 2023 is just completely wrong. Any kind of aggregated rating is gamed, whether it’s Amazon or Reddit or Google or yelp

At best you’ll find one very opinionated guys recommendation which may or may not match yours

> Thinking that Reddit is not gamed by marketers or bought/sponsored influencers in 2023 is just completely wrong

I didn't claim its free of gaming, but I am claiming the quality of search results for "x" vs "x reddit" is notably higher for the latter in most cases that I personally use search for.

> You either Play the game or you Die.

And given the game is won by the highest bidder, all of the surplus created by technical progress goes to advertising which, as you point out, adds zero value and, in fact, detracts from rational agents making optimal decisions.

This is /exactly/ the kind of market failure where those of us who prefer smaller government want to start talking about appropriate regulation.

So crowdsourced black hat SEO indeed beat Google’s ”thousands of the most intelligent and well-paid engineers of the planet”.

>But what's the alternative ?

https://metaphor.systems/ is pretty good for exactly this kind of thing. The way the search algorithm is designed also make it extremely difficult to game.

except it does not search that well...

The alternative for users is Kagi, which is superior to Google for search results.

For businesses, there is no good alternative to Google. Many are investing a lot of effort and money in social media, but the returns are very low compared to Google.

I’ve been heavily considering the 1k Kagi but the limit thing has been giving me pause.

I’ve yet to try to trial tho so that should help give context how quickly I burn thru 100

I've noticed that there's a huge misunderstanding among people interested in Kagi: You're not banned from searching after passing the limit in your plan, instead subsequent searches will cost 1.5 cents each. So nothing to sweat.

Nothing to sweat, except money, of course. Not everyone has an open-ended budget.

Yes, I tend to forget about the plight of the commoners when sitting at my enormous hoard of several hundred cents.

You can put a hard budget limit so you're not financially ruined if you go over those $10. And there's ultimate $25 all-you-can-eat plan, too.

Oh I’m aware, but thanks. It’s more so the mental burden of second guessing if a search is “worth it” that would arise. Like I said tho I’ll use the trial to best figure out my process.

And also yea three cents for every two searches over the 1k monthly limit is pretty trivial lol. So nvm that shouldn’t b something to give me pause

I add "-best" to my searches. It helps.

> Would love an alternative but there are none

If you are trying to sell a product, I know one weird trick: Just make a product that people enjoy, and they will recommend it to others.

No need to pay for advertising, no need to play the SEO game. The only marketing you need for a decent product is a website with docs and a download button.

This works especially well if you have some sort of freemium product, because then the 90% of people who use the free version still act as multipliers.

I don't know if it works for all businesses, but it's worked for me over the last decade or so.

I cant speak for any site other than G2. We have multiple unpaid products that appear appropriately in their lists and quadrants. The question one has to ask themselves, just like in SEO "is my profile optimized" and try work out what their automations expect rather than paying for placement.

Is there no search engine that outright bans all commercial content?

There are plenty of searches where I want to find what real people are thinking, not what some company's article says. This kind of thing could easily be crowd-sourced a la SponsorBlock.

their ads are not worth it. they have become way too expensive and results are not good

In contrast what is your top of funnel strategy for social proof?

What would a fair review site look like?

Hey @codegeek, have you tried SaaSHub? It's goal is to be more "objective" compared to Capterra & G2. Yet, it's questionable to what extent that is achieved.

I use https://alternativeto.org to find tools, might be useful.

How much of your time do you spend “playing the game”?

I do have a small team but I am constantly involved ensuring that Google is not being mean to us and the game is all about trying to stay on top 5-10 results.

Your bio welcomes strangers to chat, but, no method of contact! =]

How can I get in touch?

Sorry just added. Feel free to reach out.

It's been a couple of weeks, and I unfortunately still have no desire to engage with Twitter, ha.. — can you forgive this, is requesting an email a dealbreaker?

Is there nothing like ConsumerReports.com for software? A service trying to just write impartial reviews for the sake of the reader?

I've been using reddit for this purpose

site:reddit.com is your friend, even with all the stuff that's happening over there

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