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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Google doesn't show ads on navigational queries because of the potential trademark-infringement legal issues that could result from recommending a competitor when somebody searches for a trademark.

Search for [carglass], no ads. Search for [facebook], no ads. Search for [spotify], no ads. Search for [american airlines], no ads. All of these would be very desirable queries to advertise a competitor on.

(IIRC they've gone back and forth on this depending on what the lawyers thought they could get away with; ISTR when Bing launched Microsoft would run ads on [google] that pointed to Bing. It's been a long time since I've seen an ad on a navigational query though.)

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As a counter example, a couple days ago I was to install DaVinci Resolve on a new windows installation, so I searched "davinci resolve." Since I was used to having adblocker, I just clicked the top result, which is titled "DaVinci Resolve" but actually takes you to some awful shady thing like wondershare or softonic/uptodown, I forgot.

I feel like, navigational queries or no, Google should be held liable for allowing scam sites like that to advertise. I think there was a trending HN post recently on that front.

Should the police be liable for not preventing your house from being broken into?

Did the police gives out keys to my house and give some of them to criminals? Then yes.

No? I'm not sure what the comparison here is.

> As a counter example, a couple days ago I was to install DaVinci Resolve on a new windows installation, so I searched "davinci resolve." Since I was used to having adblocker, I just clicked the top result, which is titled "DaVinci Resolve" but actually takes you to some awful shady thing like wondershare or softonic/uptodown, I forgot.

I just tried this query on chrome / android.

This is the first link on the page at the very top:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

(The product page)

The next site listed was Wikipedia.

I don't have any adblockers. I am in the US.

When people tell me this stuff about their Google searches it drives me insane, I want to know why our experiences are so different. It is regional? Is it OS, is it browser, is it something else? I want to know!

You know your search results are personalized right? If I google something and my girlfriend googles the same thing, on the same network, we get different results.

>You know your search results are personalized right?

Of course.

But these results don't seem to change on a degoogled chromium on desktop, with no google account login personalization, no account logged in, in incognito, using: Ublock origin lite, User Agent / OS Randomizer, Privacy Badger, and using a VPN to other locales.

That's why I want to know, I've been curious about this for years, and nothing I've looked at seems conclusive.

My biggest guess is country or native language, but it's been hard to pin down. I think that may be the biggest factor (with local laws contributing maybe to how search results get displayed).

I'm curious! I want to know the driver behind the bad experiences people are having with it. (I've been using it literally since it was released.)

When you say "navigational queries" do you mean Google Maps?

If so, you may not be aware that the locations represented by square dots on the map are ads.

This a search domain term that means a search query where the user is trying to find a specific destination/product. I don't know how Google search works, but often a search will first go through an intent classifier and then use a different model based on the query type.

A "navigational query" is a query with a certain website in mind. So like if you search for [facebook], 99.99% of the time you are looking to go to Facebook, if you search for [hacker news] 99.99% of the time you are looking to go to news.ycombinator.com. Basically it replaces the address bar for people who don't know what URLs are. You aren't looking for information about the business, you want to go to the site/business itself.

Thanks to you and @bradley for the explanation.

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