Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

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How many stories have you seen with "I search for X, and all the top results are advertisements"? The latest that I recall that I saw on HN was "Now all results above the fold are ads".

Its not uncommon to search for product X, only to find product Z being ranked above the official store of X. Google search is advertisement first, quality second.

Bing may be equally crappy too. Microsoft "welcome to edge" page is a bunch of advertisement for Microsoft products and then in the corner there is a search window. I have not tested bing itself to see if their flood of advertisements are as bad as google, but I sure do not trust Microsoft. Windows start menu being overloaded with advertisements are a cautionary tale of what happen when Microsoft is copying google.

Normies do not like having advertisement being thrown in their face, but they will tolerate it if they have no choice or if the advertisement is hidden enough that they do not know that what they see is a bought listing.

> Its not uncommon to search for product X, only to find product Z being ranked above the official store of X.

I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action racketeering charge brought. And this is exactly how a protection racket works. You wouldn't want some other brand in the top position when they search for your brand term. You should just pay us to make sure that doesn't happen.

> Its not uncommon to search for product X, only to find product Z being ranked above the official store of X. Google search is advertisement first, quality second.

While I was at eBay, there was a company announcement praising one executive who had noticed that eBay spent a lot of money on placing Google ads for searches like "ebay", when obviously someone searching for "ebay" can find it in the search results. He canceled the ads, and it worked! There was no significant decline in traffic.

But that's a problem for Google, and the situation you describe is the obvious solution. If people won't advertise on searches where they should appear in the actual results, the way to get them to advertise is to stop having actual results.

Id wager SEO/AI slop is a much bigger problem for Google than ad load for their userbase. Only 20% of queries have ads so 4 out of 5 times ads won't even be seen. But on those 4 out of 5 do have the chance of turning users away from Google with awful SEO optimized sites and AI slop.

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