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Comment by feelandcoffee | Hacker News Reader

I miss old contextual advertising. Like you read a sports website, you see ads for matches, sports gear, etc, all based on the content not the user preferences.

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That's just a lesson that capitalism is insatiable. Early on, Google didn't have personalized ads and they were still making money hand over fist just because search queries are an excellent signal into stuff you may want to buy. But in "line must always go up" fashion, there is even more money to be squeezed out if they surveille everything you do to personalize ads. Same thing happened with Facebook. They had a ton of data about what ads to show you solely based on your interactions on Facebook's (now also Instagram's) site and apps, but they could make even more money if they tracked you everywhere online in order to increase their ad click-through rates.

The adverts were better too. When I'm seaching for "vacuum cleaner reviews", there are adverts for vacuum cleaners.

After I make my decision and buy one (online, or in person), I no longer search for "vacuum cleaner reviews", but I search instead for "skiing in January" and I no longer get adverts for vacuum cleaners, I get it for ski resorts.

Yeah, those were better days: if you googled for some problem you were having with, say, a piece of equipment, you'd get ads from obscure little stores selling parts for that equipment, or special solutions for that problem. The ads were actually for things you might want, related to whatever you were searching for at that moment. And they were simple little text ads, next to the search results, so you knew they were ads, but they weren't in the way or stealing your attention.

That's not how it works. Rather, Google realizes someone else would take over their business if they didn't make their product better. If Google stuck to no data and XYZSearch used data, then XYZSearch would provide a better product and Google would go out of business. It doesn't take greed, the "could make even more money" part, to have an incentive to do better. All it takes is a desire not to go out of business.

That might make sense if everyone were picking which search engine to use based on the relevance of its ads, but they aren't. In fact, early Google was popular in part because it wasn't all covered in ads.

> if they didn't make their product better

Odd take IMO that Google's ever encroaching ads make their product better. Heck, Larry and Sergei even wrote a treatise (it used to be available directly off google.com, can't remember the name) about how they would be different from search engines at the time, how they wouldn't sell search position, and how the ads model was fundamentally at odds with end user experience. That's hilarious now as Google has gone to great lengths to make ads as indistinguishable as possible from normal search results, and for some terms my entire front page is ads. Compare that to "early" Google where ads were clearly identified in top and right sections with a yellow banner.

Clearly identified and few in number.

I wish all this data mining seemed to be worth a damn to me. Sponsored ads I see are either directly related to my search term, which is hardly a difficult problem, or based on my purchase history, which is baffling and frankly kinda stupid.

Hey! You just bought a filter for your air purifier! Want to buy a new one! For a different purifier you don't own!

No, talk to me in six months.

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