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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone reproduce this? When I search "Midjourney", I get an ad for Midjourney (from Midjourney), followed by Midjourney, the site. After that, I get the Midjourney Discord, the Midjourney subreddit, the Midjourney Wikipedia page, and then (inexplicably), another Midjourney ad.

That seems about as good as it could be.

Edit: I guess I should say that I do agree that the quality of Google Search is pretty poor these days, so I directionally agree even though I can't reproduce this issue. Still, it's interesting to see how much our searches differ. I can't imagine what algorithm in Google decided to give me great results and you trash.

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Google SERPs are personalized. Likely OP is a Midjourney user which is recorded in his targeting profile.

When OP searches for Midjourney as a Midjourney user, Google’s algorithm infers he might want to consider an alternative because why would an existing user search for the product they’re already using.

We see evidence supporting this given no Midjourney ad showed up for a direct keyword match query; and only alternatives triggered.

This is kinda like Amazon retargeting you with alternative toasters after you just bought a new toaster. Most people think this is stupid. Well, the most likely cohort to buy a new toaster is a person that just bought one because they’re not satisfied with their purchase.

Interesting hypothesis, but I am also a Midjourney user.

I oversimplified. :) Main gist is that SERPs are personalized and based on your targeting profile which makes the results non-deterministic, as we're experiencing. Google is the only entity who will ever truly know.

Let me try to answer in an ELI5 fashion:

You know how you can ask ChatGPT the same thing 3x in a row and get 3 completely different results? Google's basically the same and has been for a long time.

If you and me both ask for something hyper-specific, we'll see the same results. But the more generic the search term is, the more hyper-personalised it gets.

In some ways it makes sense, for example we shouldn't see the same thing when we search for "restaurants" as we're unlikely to be looking for restaurants on the other side of the world, in many other ways it's annoying and counter-productive.

So in fact Amazon is incentivized to sell you a shitty toaster on your first purchase, hoping you’ll then come back and buy a better one.

they still have to pay to stock, ship, then return and restock the shitty one - then stock and ship the better one. Hard to imagine there’s profit in that.

IDK about most people but I rarely bother to return a cheap broken item. It's just not worth my time. I'd just grumble and replace it (but probably not from the same seller).

> This is kinda like Amazon retargeting you with alternative toasters after you just bought a new toaster. Most people think this is stupid. Well, the most likely cohort to buy a new toaster is a person that just bought one because they’re not satisfied with their purchase.

I don't think that makes sense. The goal of Amazon can't be to have you unhappy with shopping on Amazon, if for no other reason that returns cost money.

>When OP searches for Midjourney as a Midjourney user, Google’s algorithm infers he might want to consider an alternative because why would an existing user search for the product they’re already using.

That's insane. Someone searching for something they've searched for in the past is looking for stability of the search results; they're trying to get back to where they've been before. If they wanted different results, they'd change the search query.

Is this the "logic" behind Google and Youtube search results being different each time a query is run?

Yes, I can. I get deevid as a first result occupying the whole screen (on mobile) as it lists the sub-links, too (one of them being a sub-link to the "AI kissing generator")

Then comes PixVerse, a sponsored result for a google play app.

Then difuss.me.

Then comes midjourney.

Yes, I see something similar for the query "Midjourney": 4 sponsored results from Deevid, Artlist.io, Lovart, Pollo AI (see the screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/ESM3xtJ)

Finally Midjourney. Unlike in the article I have never visited Midjourney.

It was number 1 when using the "Web" link, it was also the number 1 when I clicked "all"

Not sure why they get very different result.

Another repro:

https://imgur.com/a/ZNtA0rI

Historically. If you are logged in you get better results. I got no ads when logged in. Not logged in I got 8 ad links in total before the real site.

I searched on DDG, first result was www.midjourney.com the second result was the Wikipedia article about midjourney.

That's pretty similar to what I see on Google

1. Actually website

2. Subreddit

3. Wikipedia

Same. On an android browser, not signed into any Google accounts. Got the legitimate result at the very top.

That's when you are not logged into Google, they will show some organic results before the ads.

Seriously, all I get is Midjourney links and links to midjourney official accounts on a number of other platforms

Going incognito, the first link is a sponsored ad for... midjourney

Just tried on my own on google, I get the Midjourney official site on 1 result, followed by Wikipedia about Midjourney. I am not a midjourney user.

In a "private session" tab I'm getting on the first page:

- the official site - their subreddit - their Discord server - Wikipedia - Facebook - LinkedIn

here's my repro: https://imgur.com/a/p0wBgWy

Wondering if OP has malware that’s injecting results into the search.

We all have the malware injecting results into our searches. The ad networks graciously run part of the malware server side.

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