Hacker News Reader

Comment by andoando | Hacker News Reader

The promoted links have gotten insane, the first 5-6 links often appear to be ads

Worse, they often aren't even relevant: we searched "passport renewal" and you had to go the the second page to even get the government site that renews passports, and not ad scams masquerading as the real thing. Optimized for engagement, presumably.

Edit: come to think of it, I don't know why I still use Google. I don't care if they track me. But when they have been actively try to prevent me from finding the information I'm looking for, and instead try to scam me?

> Edit: come to think of it, I don't know why I still use Google.

A guess: because you type queries in the URL bar, and they're the default search engine in your web browser?

(I'm convinced that these days, this is 90% of Google's advantage)

Image search is so hyper-optimised for shopping it's useless.

A good guess for any phone or tablet user, but I’m technical enough to change that default. It was because their results used to be objectively better. It’s also not the default on Windows Edge, and I still remember the experiences just after reinstalling a Windows VM that I’d be confused why search results were suddenly so unreliable until I remembered I was getting bing by default.

Small update: two thirds of my device browsers no longer default to google anymore. I’ll change the rest when relevant.

Like searching for an app in the store. The first result(s) are paid promotions that often have absolutely no relation to what I was searching for.

Even after that, for whatever reason, the next tranche of links is a mixture of AI slop and shopping links. If I'm looking for information about something and not a product to buy, I often have to, gasp, go to the 2nd page of results.

Why don't you use an adblocker or Brave browser?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com