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Comment by Denzel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

>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?

> 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.

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.

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