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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

Hardly a corner case. It's such an obvious question that the failure to cover it means the author isn't serious.

Knowing what you need is not magic, but knowing which products might satisfy it is not automatic. Advertising targeting, which people quite reasonably find intrusive, exists because advertisers desperately want to find people who may potentially want to buy their product.

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> but knowing which products might satisfy it is not automatic.

Would not search + first party description solve that? It’s easy to create a page “you have problem A? Try our product B”.

Of course it does, but this proposal entails banning search engines, right? I can imagine definitions of "advertising" that don't encompass search, but this author doesn't intend them; he explicitly states that he is not just classifying "paid" advertising of products as advertising but all "third-party" advertising, "full stop", and acknowledges this would make Google "cease to exist" in its "current form". He clearly intends his proposal to include banning search engines, entirely.

It doesn’t ban search engines, it prevents a company from making money with their search engine through advertising.

> It’s easy to create a page “you have problem A? Try our product B”.

How is that not advertising?

Because you’d have to search for and choose to see that page, not being fed a banner/pop up

>Knowing what you need is not magic

Knowing what you need is easy. Knowing what you might want is far harder.

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