Google ad exec: “it is a worse user experience to not have ads on the page” | Hacker News Reader

Google ad exec: “it is a worse user experience to not have ads on the page”

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83 pointsr721109 comments

I believe this quote explains the situation well; "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

I like this one too:

> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Damn, now I feel like a fool. Of course google is in the ad business, but I never considered that they could compromise the quality of their results to boost up ads, but it's absolutely possible.

The central defining quality of Google search was that they didn't do that. That's what that quote refers to. Google wasn't the first search engine. It wasn't the best, at least not initially. But Google, the first decade, refused to destroy it's own relevance for a buck, and all the others did. From Yahoo to Altavista.

It now appears it was a delay tactic. 2-3 ads on the side, next to 10-20 "organic" search results, like Google in 2005, was great and nice. And it's certainly true that occasionally the ads were useful. The ads, like the search results, were high quality.

Now Google barely has one organic search result visible. I just checked for the search "credit card", which I know is bad, but ... The first organic search result is the fifth, with only 2 results actually visible when you do the search, both "sponsored". 3 and 4, not on the first page, are sponsored too. And if you don't want commercial search results for that search (excluding wikipedia that seems to get very special treatment) the first organic result, the first result not trying to get you to put yourself into debt ... well, I gave up after scrolling though at least 20 pages. It just isn't there anymore.

Hell, it isn't even that long ago that in-line ads were on the first page of Google ... now they take up 80% of the space on every page of Google results. So organic results have been banned from the 2nd page to at least the 21st page or so. There's no more point to "Googling".

Google now really does look like Yahoo looked in 2000. And last year they did layoffs, just like yahoo. What I don't understand is how investors fool themselves into believing the stock price won't do the exact same thing. 5-10 more years and Google gets sold to Verizon for 10 billion. And why? Because no manager at Google will risk their career on getting 1% less out of their customers than they did last quarter ... and they do that like everyone else: by accepting every last dollar every last scummy advertiser makes to Google.

I think it can be true in some situations. If you think of magazines, it would be a disappointment for Rolling Stone to contain no ads. Same for camera magazines.

News content really doesn't benefit, though. Just clickbait stuff.

> If you think of magazines, it would be a disappointment for Rolling Stone to contain no ads.

I'll bite…because they're pretty? Or because how else would one stay on top of the latest Axe body spray releases?

Woodworking magazines are 1/3 about shop organization, 1/3 about project ideas & techniques, and 1/3 about the latest and oldest woodworking tools and where to buy them.

Because who then pays for the content? Time and time again, the average person has shown that they will rather spend X times more on a trivial thing than content.

This is more acute on hard news. Where a single page article may cost 100k to produce, yet wont be able to be monetized per its "cost to produce".

So yes, it would be a disappointment to lose "great content". now, here lies in the kicker. You get to decide great content with your patronage ( or lack there of)

I don't know man I've never turned to an ad in a magazine and been thankful it was there. Ads could evaporate completely from existence tomorrow and I'd miss absolutely nothing.

Isn't that almost the whole point of the magazine?

I guess for something a bit more catch-all like "Rolling Stone" Ads would detract.

But for something like USA Hockey, honestly the Ads are more interesting than half the actual content. Although seeing the same 4 ads for home skating rinks has gotten old.

Although I guess this would be more akin to searching Google for "new hockey products" and then it would make a lot of sense to return pure ads.

That's fair! To be honest I haven't looked at a magazine in a long time unless I was in a waiting room so maybe I am just a bad example.

adbusters(https://www.adbusters.org/) is the only magazine I ever liked.

Some older magazines, like Computer Shopper, were 90%+ ads. I enjoyed seeing ads in game magazines too, because they were a great way to find out what's coming soon on top of the magazine's preview section. So while I agree that ads are frequently annoying, in particular when I'm trying to search for stuff, ads are not universally bad.

What I want is for ads to be sequestered in places for people who are actually looking to solve something. Just take all the ads in the camera magazine and put them at the end, neatly categorized. If I'm interested in buying a new lens, then I'll flip to the lens category. If I'm not interested in buying a new lens, I won't.

"But what about things you didn't know you wanted?" I can't want something I don't know about. I can want something I can imagine, in which case I might go searching to see if someone else has made it reality. But I don't need others trying to artificially inflate my demand for goods and services.

things you didn't know exist, if worthy, should have an article

But then those articles just become the ads

A magazine without ads would be fine if the content would be good enough. Personally I didn’t hate ads until they got completely obnoxious, irrelevant and distracting and lately invasive and creepy.

I don’t think Rolling Stone is a great example - the conceit of a music magazine is that its content is curated by tastemakers untainted by the marketing machinery of the industry they’re reviewing. The content is all promoting acts and albums and musicians who are the products of music labels, but it’s not ‘advertising’.

But ‘Computer Shopper’ magazine on the other hand was half magazine, half catalog. The ads are the point.

Before HN jumps all over this, I worked at Google and other ads and search companies... and this is technically true (in selected cases) ! There are certain categories of websites and search results pages, where ads actually improve user experience, measured by nearly any metric you want to pick, from user perception to CTR/conversion, etc.

There's lots of random categories, but the obvious ones are commercial/product searches where you're looking to buy something.

And this isn't new: over history, there've been magazines and other media where the ads dominated the content, e.g. trade publications such as _Computer Shopper_ during the 1980's PC revolution.

Thanks for listening to my TED talk, let the downvoting begin!

> There are certain categories of websites and search results pages, where ads actually improve user experience, measured by nearly any metric you want to pick, from user perception to CTR/conversion, etc.

I'm left for words, is this satire?

I don't think you deserve any downvotes, but there is also somewhat of a tragedy of the commons effect at play. I hear people Google "Facebook" to find the Facebook login page. No doubt, Facebook has ads for that search so that people click the right link. This ends up being expensive; people should have just clicked their bookmark, but don't really understand URLs, so there is just a tax on big companies to have that link available. I don't think this is particularly evil, but I also don't think it's amazing. At the end of the day, you're providing value for not making people type "www" and "com", but many think that should just be free. (Of course, before search was integrated into the address bar, I feel like typing "example" in there went to www.example.com. That feature mysteriously disappeared when browser vendors realized you could make money by displaying an unrelated webpage with ads instead.)

Meanwhile the alternative is mobile apps and an icon on your homescreen, an effect that makes Apple and Google rich for taking a % of the revenue from those apps, and one of the largest job programs ever for software engineers.

At the end of the day, I can see why people are uncomfortable with the whole situation, but I also don't see an easy solution. It is fun to railroad rich people in front of Congress, but at the end of the day, what really changes? The rich person has slightly less money, the politicians get a photo op, and some lawyer has a little more cash. Only better technology will end today's quirks. (Remember when Microsoft got sued for anti-trust violations? Did the government end IE's reign on the Internet, or did Chrome?)

> Meanwhile the alternative is mobile apps and an icon on your homescreen, an effect that makes Apple and Google rich for taking a % of the revenue from those apps, and one of the largest job programs ever for software engineers.

Not to mention that you suffer the same problem in the App Store when you go searching for the Faceboook app. They have to bid for ads against competitors that want to show up when users try to find Facebook in the app store.

Though at least it's only the one time and then it's installed, unlike users who don't add .com to their URL bar and search for Facebook every time instead.

Something I think about a lot is what the world would look like without advertising, i.e., you'd have to make every decision on its merits, and never rely on bought opinions. Like imagine you walk into a grocery store, and every shelf is lined with plain cardboard boxes with the name of the product on it ("chocolate-covered breakfast cereal") and a nutrition label. You walk in and there is nothing other than the merits of the product itself to guide your purchasing decision. Nothing else would influence you.

Would that world be better than today's explosion of colors and brands and talking heads and size 100 font "NEW FORMULA!!!"? In today's world, if you're not sure what to buy, you just pick the thing with the most colorful box or whatever you heard about on TV, and you probably end up with something that's fine. (Occasionally, the thing you heard about on TV is actually good, and you wouldn't have thought to buy it otherwise. It's almost a win-win though I am somewhat hesitant to use that term to describe advertising on HN ;)

Advertising is that; you don't care what brand of light switch you buy, you just want a light switch, so there is a race to convince someone you trust to recommend their brand to you. They pay someone money, you buy a light switch, it switches your lights, you're happy, they're happy, and this random third party ad company is happy. Multiple people are bidding against each other for this recommendation, and so advertising ends up costing a lot. (You, of course, pay the cost, not the company doing the advertising. But if everyone is doing it, it's not like you can choose.)

That's the app store thing; Apple prides itself on how every iPhone app is the greatest thing ever created, and because sometimes that's true, you trust them. Well, what if they just approve everything and let people pay for recommendations? Now you have ads in the app store. Someone looking for a random app gets a random app. They're probably happy with their $0.99 purchase. They never think about it again and move on with their life, and Apple's execs get a cooler yacht, and some random software engineer also got 10 cents or whatever. This all seems a little wrong -- ideas and products should only be popular because of their merit in the global marketplace of ideas -- but is it actually? It's really just making a lot of money from making decisions that aren't worth making.

It does sound really dystopian... don't think about anything, just CONSUME what we say to consume... but is researching light switches so that the true best light switch maker gets your money actually better than spending an hour playing with your dog or whatever? I don't know. It's difficult. I should think about it less.

Funny you use light switches as an example because I have indeed spent some hours looking at light switch options. Decided not to blow a bunch of money on smarthome stuff (yet…), but for anyone who likes to tinker with that kind of thing the Inovelli switches look pretty fun.

Time well spent? Who knows. But I know more about smart light switches than I used to!

Something else I think about a lot. I have Lutron Caseta but would probably choose something Z-wave if I were starting from scratch today. Proprietary stuff is generally not as flexible as the more open-ecosystem stuff, but Caseta works perfectly with Home Assistant.

The worst part of smart lights is how I've forgotten the tactile sensation when flipping a light switch. Sometimes I see regular light switches outside of my house and play with them, which probably makes me look like a psychopath with a mental age of 6. But so clicky!

Caseta is definitely the non-tinkerer's premium option, I have family members who have used it for years with no complaints.

I don't like their weird button pads, but more recently they also come in a normal looking rocker version. Don't know how tactile it feels but I would bet nicer than the original Caseta controls.

https://www.casetawireless.com/us/en/product/diva-smart-dimm...

Inovelli makes a Z-wave version (red series) as well as a Zigbee (blue series) which is supposed to support Thread/Matter eventually. Among other things, they can operate either as a switch to turn off a circuit, or in "smart bulb mode" where the circuit stays powered and on/off commands are sent to the bulb.

Yeah, I have the rocker switches ("Diva") and they are not particularly tactile. To me the worst feature is that they aren't instant off when you press the off side of the rocker; there is like a 500ms ramp down time. This has no negative effect on my life, of course, but it does bug me. I bought this system before I knew that anything hacker-friendly even existed, so I'm always slightly disappointed, but at the same time... they work really well and I wouldn't replace them at this time. Also, no neutral wire required, which is quite convenient for my older electrical system. (My apartment was apparently completely remodeled in 2017. The electrical system is original to the 1950s building, though. Weird stuff. I'm very jealous of the smarthome YouTubers in their brand-new house with 200A electrical service and those blue plastic wall boxes.)

interesting points.

one comment: growing up, we have Pathmark groceries, with the "generic" aisle of all (literally) white labeled products. It was depressing and uninspiring.

Yeah, I also find it depressing. I think it's conditioning from exposure to advertising, though. It's good to be rich and bad to be poor, and if you're poor, you can't afford name brand stuff. So open your wallet and impress your friends with NAME BRAND BAKING SODA. WHOA WOW! I'm not sure it's objectively depressing to not be able to choose from 300 brands of household essentials, but the explosion of color and creativity and eye-popping packaging that's the result of multiple companies competing is certainly a sensory experience.

A long time ago, brands used to mean something. They invested a lot in advertising (branding) to promote their products but they also invested a lot in their products so that brand would mean something. There was a tangible difference between the brands and people acquired brand loyalty because of it. That has almost entirely disappeared. Most products are all the same shit with different packaging and color schemes. But that is relatively new development.

That makes it sound like we just need a new UX for web browsing without a traditional search engine. It doesn't sound unrealistic to be able to recreate the "app homescreen icon" experience for the web. One of the biggest blockers is that the speed of google search (and success rate for things like "facebook login") means it's barely even a pain point for users, or not one they're aware of anyway.

At the end of the day I strongly believe the web is a better future for the world. Letting the future of the internet sit behind 2 mega gatekeepers seems to be an objectively worse path looking 10+ years down the line.

>I hear people Google "Facebook" to find the Facebook login page. No doubt, Facebook has ads for that search so that people click the right link.

This reminds me how back in the dark ages, Yahoo! Search got sufficient searches for Google that someone decided it was worthwhile to return a second search box in the results before the real results to trick those users into inputting their real search instead of clicking the link to Google...

Users failing to remember trivial domains is sadly not a new thing...

Firefox, not Chrome, dethroned IE. It was just short lived because very soon after, Google hired half the Firefox team away from Mozilla and created Chrome.

That’s not really why people switched to Chrome. Google started to push Chrome aggressively on Google.com.

Yes this is also true. I was pointing out that people switched to Firefox before they switched to Chrome. Chrome didn't even exist for quite some time after Firefox was already thriving and putting a serious dent in IE's dominance.

I'm not going to downvote you (I can't even), but you've made plenty of claims but haven't got anything backing up those claims. So I'd love to ask for some citations on these claims.

I can get behind "ads keep the internet free" narrative, but it seems rather odd to suggest something that someone who doesn't exactly know you wants you to see is better than relevant result.

It's funny to see in this thread simultaneously the sentiment that Google's search results have gotten awful over the years due to widespread gaming of the free channel of delivering results to you and also immense skepticism that any other channel could be better than the free channel.

In general, I've found any query that's blogspammed to death, the ads are actually surprisingly useful. eg: I turn off my adblocker for any query that is "Alternatives to X (dropbox/xero/notion/figma etc.)". Every organic search result is some generic comparison website that is scraping from the same public data but the ads are generally actual product companies. I figure the companies paying their way to the top of ads have their LTV to CAC figured out and are generally going to be the ones with the highest predicted retention for me.

In this case, I have a specific intent to buy and the bid/ask mechanism for ads is much more predictive of my intent than the SEO algorithms of the organic results.

> And this isn't new: over history, there've been magazines and other media where the ads dominated the content

Was it better user experience than if it was not dominated by ads?

Nobody was forced to buy Computer Shopper... people bought it for the ads.

In some cases the ads were one of the product. Some catalog businesses charged you for their catalogs. Some other magazines were also entirely for ads. In both cases there's be no user experience without the ads.

But an important caveat was of course that buyers chose this. You got those magazines when you were looking for an ad for a specific product.

If Google let you search specifically for their ads, I'm sure some searches would be specifically for ads, but most wouldn't be.

Ads improve conversion?

You don't say.

don't be snarky - I mean compared with lower quality free/organic content.

> And this isn't new: over history, there've been magazines and other media where the ads dominated the content, e.g. trade publications such as _Computer Shopper_ during the 1980's PC revolution.

Wired magazine was heavy on ads but they must have exerted some creative control over them because he entire experience was this unified techno-futurist thing.

If you fill the search results with enough SEO garbage eventually ads will look better by comparison. If ads are making your user experience better you have a serious problem.

Okay, sure, build a better search engine that functions and is better without ads.

Easier said than done.

The internet is 99.99% scams and trash. It's easier said than done to find the signal in the noise.

Some times - willing to pay (and being vetted not to be a scam) is a good indication of signal.

Unfortunately, Google could do a little better on vetting their ad partners. Too often these days, ads are scams.

> build a better search engine that functions and is better without ads

https://kagi.com

> The internet is 99.99% scams and trash. It's hard to find the signal in the noise.

https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

Spot on. However I do wonder if the cost of indexing the internet would be prohibitively expensive for a company looking to bootstrap without ad money.

> We gather new content, published within the last week, from a handpicked list of blogs

imo this only only works because it is a niche product? If Google went away, and Kagi became the #1 search engine overnight, I think this approach would immediately become a source of criticism for being too restrictive, gatekeeping newcomers or biased towards a narrow perspective (as Google itself already is).

To be clear, overall Kagi is not limiting itself to the small web.

That's a passion project of the founder who coded it himself to the consternation of his team.

Strange to define something as better with ~0% market share and not meaningfully growing, but sure.

Strange to define market share as a gating criteria for better.

So not sure I trust definition of "meaningfully" either. Perhaps a better word would be "sustainably".

> Okay, sure, build a better search engine that functions and is better without ads.

As others have said, Kagi. It's a great search engine, even if it's less powerful than Google, because unlike Google it works with you and for you, not against you and for advertisers.

The fact that alt-search companies can flourish and grow even with Google's 800lb gorilla in the room should be a massive red flag to Google execs.

> The internet is 99.99% scams and trash.

Mostly because of Google.

> (in selected cases)

The tweet presents the quote without context so I interpret it to be a sweeping statement and therefore disagree based on that. If someone could provide a transcript of the cross-examination (I couldn't find it easily), then that could help with making a more informed opinion.

The point of Google (or, of search engines, at least) is to surface content relevant to a query. If the content exists, it should be surfaced, and it should not require an advertiser to suggest you surface it to the user. If the content is not surfaced except by ads, that's a failure case for Google (or, for search engines, at least). Saying "Ads improve the user experience of a search engine" could only be true in the case where the search engine is already failing, and one might suggest spending the money and resources one is spending on an ads engine on improving the search engine, if the search engine is actually trying to optimize for delivery of relevant information.

There's certainly one metric that'll always be improved by showing ads, though, and I suspect it's that one, and not any of the others, that's driving the decision to put ads on the page.

> There's lots of random categories, but the obvious ones are commercial/product searches where you're looking to buy something.

I believe that you believe this while also believing that your metrics must be so horribly biased towards indicating that "ads are good" that you miss the forest for the trees.

I have entirely stopped using google to search for products because of ads. It is impossible to research products when the vast majority of what you see are ads for competing products. It has made the signal to noise ratio so bad that I can't actually trust Google to collect information and make it useful to me.

Google is the absolute worst way to discover information about products you want to buy, because it is so front loaded with bullshit ads for things that others want me to buy.

I google for one app and google store shows a paid app with similar name and colors as the first result, leading me to install other apps by mistake and deleting just after while google still gets the money from the installation. I'd call this a scam to both the customers buying ads and the customers of the play store.

It's this failure to engage with reality that will be their downfall. Hubris is at the root of it really, reinforced by the way they hire.

I always wondered if the rise of ds&a/leetcode style interviews often hurt these companies more than helped? You are definitely screening for a certain type of engineer when hiring this way, especially when you want to hire 10,000 of them.

You're basically filtering people who care more about optimizing their career than wanting to make a good product (nothing wrong with putting your career first, but you can't have the entire company made up of these people), but then again all the incentives at these companies reward short term thinking so it's probably beyond the interview level.

Either way there needs to be way more competition in the entire tech space in all sectors. Competition would solve a lot of these issues if Google was forced to break up Chrome, Search, Ads, Android, and YouTube; same for the other big tech co's too. This amount of consolidation is bad for everyone.

> Before HN jumps all over this, I worked at Google and other ads and search companies... and this is technically true

Only a very small percentage of bad people acknowledge it. Most evil people create mental models where they are actually working for the greater good. Your defense of the google exec quote is one of the ugliest attempts of turning bad into good that I have seen and knowing that this is the normal at Google I'm hoping for a good outcome of the antitrust trial (for society).

I'm sure ads bring something to be experience, but ultimately when I have to scroll past 5 somewhat relevant ads before even seeing my results and once I finally see that my results are not very good because of SEO abusing blog spam... I'm going to use another service.

I was not on the "google sucks" train until very recently. It sucks now.

Another second-order benefit is the fact that innovation in ad tech has bled over into other kinds of content recommendation. If you can figure out which ads I would likely click on, you can also probably figure out what news stories I’m interested in.

That being said, while ads may improve certain kinds of content, it is strictly negative for other kinds. For example, pretty much every kind of ad online which is intrusive. It’s intrusive because it’s not wanted. I don’t want a full screen Dior ad in the middle of an article about the auto worker strike.

So sometimes the interests of advertisers and users are aligned, but many times they are not. And ad tech companies know which kinds of content are improved with ads and which damage the user experience. They could measure this if they wanted. But because they are trying to maximize ad revenue rather than user experience, so the ads win.

Downvoted for not only having a bad point but also trying to lampshade it as just an unpopular opinion by pre-empting downvotes.

Ads can be good depending on some metrics (e.g. conversions) or usability if a person is looking for a certain product - I check flyers for deals near me for when I want to eat out sometimes. But to claim "by nearlly any metric you want to pick", is hyperbole.

Yes, but Google puts ads on every search result, even the ones for which the context makes it pretty clear ads would be detrimental to the user.

> Thanks for listening to my TED talk, let the downvoting begin!

that you didn't eat some of the babies doesn't make it okay?

my favorite shops have such tiny margins they couldn't afford buying ad slots. If they organically took the top of the search it wouldn't be very interesting to advertise the same only more expensieve along side of it?

I disagree. Not once has "sponsored result" ever helped me in my shopping process. If anything, algorithm steering and "sponsored results" hurt because I'm searching for product X while you're pushing (sometimes quite hard) for me to buy something else.

Fuck that noise. If I were on the board of directors I'd push for a vote of no confidence in the CEO over saying something this idiotic.

You haven't proven that it's true in any case, not even "selected cases". You conflated CTR with user experience quality (rookie mistake) and then tried to say that the existence of ads throughout history somehow proves your point (lol?)

The fact that you knew your point was ridiculous, and had to say "let the downvotes begin!" is just icing on the cake.

I like magazine ads, such as ads for computers/software/accessories in computer magazines, ads for games in game magazines, or ads for guitars/amps/effects/etc. in guitar magazines.

But I hate web ads - for some reason they are universally terrible.

And the only thing worse than youtube ads is drugs ads on cable TV.

> measured by nearly any metric you want to pick

Which in conclusion should question the quality and meaningfulness of such metrics.

Of course conversion rates are only meaningful if you indeed have any ads. That doesn't lead to any indication of positive "user experience", which admittedly is another soft term.

Sure, if I go shopping, I mind ads far less. Although I find them to be mostly devoid of information.

FWIW, I used to enjoy ads on Google's search page (or at least weren't bothered by them), but importantly, when they were clearly identified by (a) a yellow background, with at most one or two entries at the top, and (b) an unobtrusive sidebar (random example I found online, https://www.avidlyagency.com/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/searc...).

What I despise now is that for most remotely-commercial searches every entry above the fold is an ad, and it's barely marked with a tiny "ad" box (otherwise the visual treatment is the same as organic results). I especially hate it when I search for a particular branded item, and the first 5 results I get back are competitors' ads, in addition to an ad from the brand because they have to pay "the Google tax".

I don't use Google for this type of search at all. The results obviously aren't relevant.

Since I already use DuckDuckGo by default, I just skip the !g.

Honestly, who here sees ads? My son owns a marketing firm and anytime I see his display it's shocking to me how different it looks than mine.

I worked a short while at Mindgeek (The pornhub holding company) and it was the first time I had every faced the internet without adblockers in a very long time. (Most of the work I was doing involved ads themselves.)

Definitely was not "great" but also not the worst thing. Pretty quickly I regained whatever sky-scraper ad-blindness I had in the early 2000s.

They changed names recently, but yeah.

> Honestly, who here sees ads?

Your problem is selection bias. Here is HN, a group of mostly tech-oriented people who all have adblockers. The majority of people actually _don't_ have ad blockers, especially the older crowd.

Agreed, but I was referring to those who visit HN.

I see ads when watching YouTube on my TV, since I have been too lazy to set up a pi hole so far.

To be honest, I don't even mind it that much. At least I have some contact with what's going on out there in the ad space. But I watch 90+% of YT videos on other devices, not the TV.

I recently accidentally opened a video in an incognito tab. I was angry after the 2 unskippable ads, but endured them. When, after a second of skipping through the video another 2 unskippable ads appeared I immediately switched back to my normal browser with uBlock Origin. What a joke. That stuff is unusable.

I don't really use Youtube on my iPhone anymore because I know that any immediate gratification I could get from clicking on a video won't happen because of the ads. It's been very healthy for me in that way.

I don't have a Pihole because they seem to be cracking down on it. When I want to watch Youtube videos on the TV, I mirror my Laptop's screen.

I'm not even generally opposed to buying Youtube Premium either, the pricing is just off. And the tactics are just so scummy.

Just FYI - Pihole won't block video ads on Youtube on your TV because it is limited to DNS blocking. Youtube is structured such that blocking the necessary domains would block all of Youtube.

It’s disappointing to see google lacking basic self awareness like this. Ten years ago they seemed highly competent and nearly unstoppable.

I wonder if bringing Larry and Sergey back into day-to-day leadership roles would help. They've been out of the day-to-day so long I wonder how long the ramp-up time would be, though.

I don't know the specifics, but I can only imagine Google is too big to have a single "thought leader" at this point. The many layers of middle management that are already implemented are probably the source of a lot of this. It is shocking to hear the higher ups saying this stuff, but I don't think swapping them out would change much.

My guess is, that people simply do not get into management positions at G, if they are not fully onboard or brainwashed enough or greedy enough for the next paycheck, to state obvious nonsense, if that is what is good for G.

The rumor is that neither of them has even the slightest interest in ever being involved in running Google again.

Ten-ish years ago, Google was still trying to make Google Plus work. I don't think it's been a particularly competent company for a long time.

Google plus circles is still a genius idea.

Google's problem now is they give up too easy and no one relies on them outside of core products

This reminds me of having to disable pihole for my wife because she is shopping and wants to click on the ads

I think my favorite part of this thread is the people replying saying "I did a report on this, click to listen to my podcast or watch my video". One wonders why they chose those particular media for sharing their story, rather than just replying inline or writing an article. Could it be that they want people to watch higher cost ads? "Google is terrible for having ads! Please come watch my ads." deserves at least a little bit of an eye roll.

I imagine, to a certain extent a willingness to bid highest for an ad display is itself a pretty good sign of relevance.

I can imagine alternatives though, like a real time auction to donate the most to charity and the platform maybe gets a set fee or a %. This would still generate a useful signal but remove some of the current negative incentives.

Imagine the internet without google. It would be bad at first, then a Cambrian explosion

Anyone else feel that Google as a search engine has gotten really bad these past few years? Finding information outside of looking up restaurants, songs or products the results are often times completely irrelevant and limited now.

There was a post yesterday about the literal operator (double-quotes around a word) no longer working. I had noticed weirdness like that but hadn't thought much about it. I've noticed a lower quality experience in general searching for things on Google, though, yes.

That seems like a weird thing for Google to intentionally break. I’m guessing there’s a more technical reason.

For example Google probably directly indexes by keyword. So “foo bar” probably searches the union of all “foo” and all “bar” pages for “foo bar”. But if the page changes since indexing, they will serve matches that aren’t actually matches. Or websites might game the indexer so that “foo bar” isn’t actually visible but it shows up on the Google search page.

In my 24 years of use, my google-fu has improved significantly. However, I can no longer keep up with how drastically google search results have deteriorated.

It's an adversarial environment.

Today, I was googling for some methodology discussions on how to execute a type of market analysis I'd never previously undertaken. Instead of finding what I was looking for, I got a bunch of SEO-optimized corporate garbage trying to get me to hire Nielsen or IRI to do it for me. Corporate "blogs" suck a$$.

I don't see it as a Google thing, it's just that the internet as a whole sucks more, as do the people on it. It doesn't really matter how they change their search engine because people will find ways to game it, and are heavily incentivized to do so.

I’ve been talking about it for a while - try searching for any industry metrics, research into topics, trends reports etc, it’s impossible. Unless I know the exact title of an article, even though I remember concrete things about an article I read and try to use them in a search it returns nothing useful.

One thing I think affects this, aside from Google just being trash now, is the age of content available. I can't tell you how many times I google for a solution while writing some code and find irrelevant crap from 2013 or something.

Don't get me wrong, it's good those things are available to be searched still but I don't routinely need 10 year old data. It would be nice if they'd archive things older than a certain date and give you an alternate way to search those things.

Maybe I'm searching for something where the tech is 10 years old so I need that answer and Google's results say "No current results. (number) archived results available. Click here" and let you click to load the archived results the same way they do with omitted results.

I don't know this is just something I've been thinking about for a long time. Maybe it's stupid but I get so tired of scrolling through stackoverflow posts from the 2010s when I'm looking for an answer on a new version of a language I'm using.

For these things you can often just append something like "after:2020" to see current results. (I am not sure if you were aware.)

I wasn't, I appreciate that!

Yep it's pretty awful now. Being tech support and then a programmer, I've been googling very frequently for a long while and only in the last few years have I started to feel frustrated in trying to find what seems like basic info. Seems the variety in results has vanished, e.g. once I could search for csharp xyz and get a stack overflow result with a few solid 'sub results', followed by an msdn article, then a GitHub issue page, then a blog or three. Now, it seems like I get an entire page of msdn results, maybe a stack overflow result, a couple of those dogshit content aggregation sites regurgitating stack overflow content, and that's about it. What should worry Google (ha) is that I'm starting to break the muscle memory of going straight to google and instead asking chatgpt first. I set my custom instructions to include a link to docs for anything it mentions and even if ChatGPT is wrong, I'm usually at the info I want faster than with Google.

Does anyone have the context in which this was said? The question that was asked?

My thoughts too. This just seems like such a ridiculous thing that it must be out of context. Perhaps it's about in comparison to paywalls?

What do they think people are searching for where the ads are valuable? I've never clicked an ad and it be what I wanted, except when it's like a search for "target" and I wanted "target.com" and Target paid for the top ad spot (which would have been the first link if there were no ads)

They should implement leet-code interview also for exec positions next time.

Cigarette executive: "your lungs are actually worse off without cigs"

Cigarette Exec "Starter Pack":

1. Lung Inflammation: Nicotine in cigarettes may have anti-inflammatory effects, potentially aiding conditions like COPD or asthma.

2. Stress Relief: Smoking can provide temporary relief from stress-induced shortness of breath.

3. Pollutant Resilience: Constant exposure to cigarette pollutants might hypothetically increase lung resilience to other environmental toxins.

4. Parkinson's Disease: Some studies suggest a correlation between smoking and reduced risk of Parkinson's, possibly due to nicotine's neuroprotective properties.

5. Weight Management: Cigarettes can suppress appetite and increase metabolism, potentially aiding in weight control.

6. Mental Health: Nicotine may temporarily alleviate symptoms of mental health conditions like schizophrenia or depression, acting as a form of self-medication.

Actually as an occassional tobacco enjoyer (pipe, cigars) some of this is actually true lol

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