> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is billions of people use Google?
Key paragraph of the article. You don't have to be good at ads when you have a firehose of most of the world's population coming directly to you, telling you exactly what they want to buy/find/learn/read/do in their native language combined with their geolocation and search history. It would be hard not to serve up relevant ads in that case.
But that's precisely what makes Google "good at ads." They built the firehose. Own a destination where billions of people go everyday, find a way to measure their intent, serve my information to them. That = fantastic at ads.
Sometimes I type the name of a site into the URL bar, but I don't include the top-level domain. Most of the time, the top link is an ad for the site I wanted, and the second link is a non-ad link to the site I wanted.
I always try to click the non-ad link, as I like the sites that I remember the names of and I don't want them to have to pay the troll toll, but sometimes I accidentally click the top link and I feel bad (only very very little, though) about it. Yesterday, I accidentally made Hackaday pay the toll.
I refuse to say that that is being good at ads. It's kind of slimy, forcing sites to do SEO to put themselves at the top of the list when someone is searching their name. I've actually switched over from chrome to firefox (on the machines where I have the option) because of this (and the fact that the top ~7 search results for many queries are SEO'd garbage).
I've seen this term for years but I still don't understand what it means. I don't want to see ads. There are no 'quality' ads. All ads are designed to sell me things period. I don't need anyone telling me about what I might want. I understand ads exist to make money and if they didn't we wouldn't have the internet etc. But there's no 'quality' to them, they're a necessary evil i've come to accept and adapt to over my life. I dislike them, I have no need for them, there'll never be a time I say 'well gee, sure am glad I seen that ad, it showed me just what I didn't know I needed.' Ads exist to sell crap to people, they're not good or bad, they just are. Some are invasive, some are reasonable, but they're all shit.
You may have never seen a good ad then. There was a period of time I would actively look at ads on penny-arcade, because the owners of the site only ever allowed ads (mostly for games) that they themselves could at least tangentially endorse. This meant I basically got hand curated ads for products I was genuinely interested in, by people who’s taste I understood if not agreed with.
That said this ended up being the exception to proof the rule about ads being mostly noise, and I agree the world would be better with less of them. And almost certainly the current state of algorithmic ad serving is a disaster.
Okay, but did those ads contribute anything beyond reading Penny Arcade's reviews of games? For you as a user, how does the ad improve your experience?
Your hard-line position that all ads are bad, always, is laughable. If you search for "cheapest gasoline" it's not unreasonable that an ad for an electric car might be interesting. Or if you search for "Orlando hotels", an ad for generally less expensive hotels in Kissimmee (the next town over) is more valuable than a perfectly literal result. And if you search for "k8s cluster deployment tools" then you probably want as many ads as possible, so your evaluation doesn't fail to include a comprehensive set of options.
Perhaps you're saying I already know about electric cars and Kissimmee and kubernetes, to which I'd respond, yes, probably via ads. Maybe a commercial or sign or web ad, but also maybe through a TV news spot (pr campaign) or magazine review (expenses paid) or web article (with affiliate link).
> Your hard-line position that all ads are bad, always, is laughable.
This doesn't seem especially civil.
> If you search for "cheapest gasoline" it's not unreasonable that an ad for an electric car might be interesting.
Interesting to whom? The parent comment doesn't want to see ads. So no it's not likely to be interesting in this context.
> Or if you search for "Orlando hotels", an ad for generally less expensive hotels in Kissimmee (the next town over) is more valuable than a perfectly literal result.
For me, personally, no I would find that to be an annoyance.
> And if you search for "k8s cluster deployment tools" then you probably want as many ads as possible, so your evaluation doesn't fail to include a comprehensive set of options.
Again no, I would want 0 ads in that case. Have you read about k8s cluster deployment tools? It's hard to find any useful information because even the results that aren't literally ads are fluff blog posts with little content. I don't want the fluff posts, but I can comb through them. I certainly don't want the ads.
> Perhaps you're saying I already know about electric cars and Kissimmee and kubernetes, to which I'd respond, yes, probably via ads.
There are ways to learn about things without someone paying for the right to say them at you when you don't want them to.
OK Mr Literal, you're saying when you search for "Las Vegas hotels" you want the results to exclude the entirety of the Strip, "Dallas football stadium" to exclude where the Cowboys play, and "American airlines reservations" to provide the web site or phone number for Delta (which is, technically, an American airline.)
Discerning the intent of a search is completely orthogonal to whether to serve advertisements.
Search engines are generally not great at discerning the intent of a search. For example they frequently return irrelevant results that don't match key words even when you ask for a literal search. This has been discussed a lot.
But that's an unrelated issue to whether the search should return advertisements in addition to search results.
Could you explain how you got this from the comment you're replying to? Are you assuming a search engine can't find things there are ads for except when serving the ads?
Please check a map. It's an "annoyance" to SquishyPanda23 when he doesn't get a precisely literal result. If Kissimmee != Orlando, then Strip hotels != Las Vegas (they are all in unincorporated Clark County, NV) and AT&T Stadium != Dallas (it's in Arlington, and the old Texas Stadium is in Irving).
But, hey, he's absolutely entitled to live his life ignorant about viable options.
You can be in favor of the search engine making the best guess to what you wanted, but still consider ads worse than search results. The reason is that ads aren't optimized only for relevancy, but for relevancy multiplied by commission. When an advertiser pays more per click, their ads will show on less relevant searches. If that effect didn't exist, I think people would be more ok with ads.
I've never claimed that ads are better than search results. I'm only stating that some ads, in certain contexts or situations, do provide positive value. 'Grawprog' summed up his comment by stating "they're all shit," and I disagreed and gave examples of when they might offer positive value.
There are many factors that might determine which search results I will want to see. Under no circumstances will those factors include "how much money did they pay the search engine". By definition, that can only change my search results to something less aligned with what I want.
* Company creates thing people like you want to buy.
* Company knows if you know about the thing, you will want to buy it.
* Company knows you don't know whether a thing like their thing even exists, so you have no reason to search hard for it.
* Company upfronts the money to defray your search costs, knowing it will be paid back when you buy the thing. This is called advertising.
I am constantly learning about things I would have enjoyed if I had known about them. It is damn hard to make people aware even that you are giving away free lunch. Advertising breaks down that needless ignorance.
Advertising creates needless ignorance, by giving the impression that well-advertised products are quality products.
GoDaddy and NordVPN, for examples, are garbage products with highly effective advertising. Seeing ads for these products actively harms people, because it prevents them from finding better products like Gandi or PIA.
I used to buy hand tools at Lowe's, Home Depot, or occasionally Autozone if it was car-related. One day I saw a search result ad for Harbor Freight. Had heard the name, never knew they were a tools shop. I've joked to friends that discovery was life-changing. (for reasons, compare prices on just about anything, a good example would be a 1.5 ton floor jack)
I'm not a contractor beating up on these things every day. I need an impact wrench a couple times a year, my HF stuff is fine for my use case. I love the Bosch impact driver I got at Lowe's 10 years ago, but they've changed the battery pack so I can't take advantage of compatibility with other Bosch tools. HF also has random stuff for close to free... packs of zip ties for $2, decent work gloves for $4, actually free LED light perfect for under a car, etc.
Signs like those famous Golden Arches can be useful.
However, when browsing the web in 20+ years I have never seen a useful paid for online add. That’s an inherent product of the medium where the only point of an add is to be less useful than the content I am looking at.
Supose your GPS added advertising. so it’s priority is not the best for you but what’s best for 3rd parties. That’s what online adds are, they take something useful and inherently degrade the experience.
> Signs like those famous Golden Arches can be useful.
I know this is picking on your example rather than your general concept, but this is a great example of how advertising is harmful. McDonald's has done incalculable damage to the health of Americans, and even if you don't go there, seeing the arches sometimes will get your kids yelling in the back seat, "I want to go to McDonald's!" This isn't helpful to us: it's helpful to McDonald's.
> If you search for "cheapest gasoline" it's not unreasonable that an ad for an electric car might be interesting.
No, I still don't want to see an ad. It's not unreasonable that a search result for electric cars might be interesting, but I want results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the advertiser that serves themselves.
> Or if you search for "Orlando hotels", an ad for generally less expensive hotels in Kissimmee (the next town over) is more valuable than a perfectly literal result.
No, I still don't want to see an ad. A search result for a cheaper hotel in Kissimmee might be valuable, but I want results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the hotel that serves themselves.
> And if you search for "k8s cluster deployment tools" then you probably want as many ads as possible, so your evaluation doesn't fail to include a comprehensive set of options.
No, I still don't want to see an ad. I want to see search results of a comprehensive set of options, but I want those results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the hotel that serves themselves.
> Perhaps you're saying I already know about electric cars and Kissimmee and kubernetes, to which I'd respond, yes, probably via ads. Maybe a commercial or sign or web ad, but also maybe through a TV news spot (pr campaign) or magazine review (expenses paid) or web article (with affiliate link).
No, I'm saying that I want to discover products that are the best for my needs, not products with the best ad placement. I want tools that serve me, instead of serving the best-funded advertisers.
Literally none of the cases you describe are what I want. Ads inherently give inaccurate information.
Excuse me, but who are these benevolent 3rd parties who freely exist to "serve" you? Do you mean sites like Expedia or Booking.com, who are, of course, getting paid behind the scenes to highlight specific hotels? Or "review" sites who select their winner based on top paying affiliate links (see Sleepopolis)? Or car review sites who glowingly praise some new model, right after the writer was flown to California and given an all-expense paid weekend to tour wine country?
I'm assuming kerkeslager is talking about publications like Consumer Reports. Basically any publication that sells you access to curated aggregated content. It would be up to the readers to decide whether they trust the impartiality of the authors.
Perhaps kerkeslager could actually answer himself. Consumer Reports is behind a hard paywall, you certainly aren't getting their researched info via a search result. As far as ad-free publications "like" Consumer Reports, I'm not aware of any. Maybe it's because they don't advertise effectively...
it's really not hard to define what a "good" ad might be--a product (or service) you don't know about but that solves an immediate problem without an immediately obvious solution. it'd anticipate your need, without invading your privacy.
fwiw, i generally don't want to be subjected to ads either, particularly for the privacy-invading aspect, but also the time- and attention-wasting aspect too. most ads are absolutely horribly conceived and targeted, especially spray-and-pray email spam.
The problem with ads isn't "good" or "bad" ads, it's that the nature of building a business of serving ads inevitably leads to an unquenchable thirst for data plus customers whose primary goal in paying you is to sell things, not to provide value (though some may do so as a selling strategy). It's hard to imagine how, or even why, such an ad business could serve the best interests of the end consumer, despite the idea held at one point that perhaps consumers would be so turned off by ads that they'd defect to a different solution. There might be SOME people who don't use Google or Facebook for these reasons, but most people simply deal with poor user experience, security, and frustration because they want to see things listed with reviews on a map, or know what their friends are doing on the weekend.
> "...serving ads inevitably leads to an unquenchable thirst for data..."
well, to continue playing devil's advocate, we've had hundreds of years of advertising (newspapers, pamphlets, and posters/signs before that) without any kind of systematic data collection, so it's not necessarily an intrinsic characteristic of the advertising business to collect data.
in an alternate universe, if banks didn't have such a stodgy and stifling rent-seeking business on the movement of money (transaction fees on everything), microtransactions might be the preferred business model of many online businesses that are now dependent on ads.
You gave examples of what I assume you consider "bad" ads. What would be examples of "good" ads in your opinion? I mean, examples matching the definition you gave:
Anticipating needs of person X, (and serve person X an ad), without any foreknowledge of person X.
another poster gave a good example--offering related merchandise on a interest-based website/forum.
a made-up example might be a customer at best buy spending time in both the tv and pc departments and then having an ad pop up on a nearby screen for an intel NUC and/or apple tv (making the assumption you want a tv-connected computer). the ad didn't need to know any personal characteristics about you other than limited, directly observable behavior in the store.
i'm sure people who focus on this every day (i.e., not me) can provide better examples.
well, face recognition is more specific than you'd need in this case.
if you went that route, you could get away with simpler person recognition (height, width, clothing color, accessories, etc.). or you could just track phones and other devices via wifi/bluetooth (and presumably uwb in the near future).
but you could also just have salespeople on the floor doing the recognition & ad placement part of it, for a lower-tech solution.
i'd actually bet trained salespeople would have better hit rates over algorithmic solutions, where access to large amounts of dislocated data is the main advantage (at the cost of our privacy).
He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does.
As to the question posed by the article, isn't the answer obvious? I don't know if users even "trust" Google's responses now. But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers. As long as Google is still the best way to search up information on, e.g., obscure aspects of Stardew Valley's economy, users who want to do searches about such things will continue to prefer Google. If Google ceases to surface good results for queries compared to e.g. DDG, users will migrate to DDG.
> He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does.
Yeah, I think the only way that would happen is if someone came up with a novel superior approach to search and managed to legally protect it so Google couldn't just copy it. That's a very unlikely at this point.
> But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers.
I don't think I agree with this. Users don't necessarily behave rationally in self-interest: they can be (and are) manipulated, and unwilling to try new tools.
I can believe that if there were another solution that were marginally better it might not be enough to unseat the top player in the market. But switching costs in search are extremely low so it would be surprising if people did not switch for a substantially better experience. In particular, it would require us to believe that what happened when Google showed up on the scene would not happen again, and to me that just does not seem likely.
Perhaps switching costs are low, but they're certainly higher than people are willing to pay in many cases. Switching costs as high as "changing the default search provider" are demonstrably prohibitive.
Peretti is talking about the quality of the ad service, not the quality of the ads themselves. Peretti is suggesting that maybe Google's service isn't anything special, and their success is due to their insanely large audience.
The comment you replied to goes even further to suggest there's no real talent to serving ads at all, and that everything depends upon the audience size. That's not just semantics.
After all this time watchin me, everything I ever asked it, all the ads I never clicked on, all the videos it watched me watch, all my emails it read, heck even after I worked for the dang company for nearly ten years, Google does not understand a very basic, essential thing about me. I hate advertising, damn it! I am sick of looking at it, I am sick of it looking at me. I am sick of hearing about how advertising is necessary to support a $130 billion in revenue and a trillion dollar valuation and some of the world's richest people. It's a lie. I'm sick of hearing about how I don't really hate advertising, I just want to see better ads. It's horseshit. I want to stop being bothered. I wanna stop being followed around. I wanna stop being monetized. We could have a smaller, more useful web that better benefited humanity, we could make education free or nearly free, we could actually have a chance to realize the dream of the original pioneers of the internet, if we weren't so obsessed with making it into the world's largest commercial marketplace, the world's biggest casino and TV show, and Google wasn't intent on extracting its ludicrous "fair share". If access to the internet is a human right, then its gateways can't be commercial entities, let alone ones hell-bent on growth. It is fundamentally incompatible.
They understand that you are part of the cohort that doesn't want to be monetized. Which is the reason they don't change it for you, because the efforts required to remove this cohort from tracking and still serve useful search results are a lot higher than what they think people would pay for.
But let's surprise them. I personally would be willing to pay up to 10k per decade of my remaining life expectancy to opt out completely. Upfront payment, right now. A package deal including Amazon would be even better, maybe for 50% more?
I think at one point people need to put a price point to their privacy, otherwise nothing changes. The market has no incentive for this change right now. And yes, that would mean that privacy is a luxury for people who can afford it, which is not what I would like to see, especially since I remember the times when you had privacy by default when going online. But I can't imagine how it can become a fundamental right under the current market conditions.
That's nowhere near enough. Sorry. You do want to see ads, you just don't realise it.
Google did actually run this experiment. They aren't stupid and lots of people say they'd rather pay money directly rather than see ads. Because of Google's place in the ecosystem they can actually implement that.
So they did. It eventually became Google Contributor and never really launched properly. The early version of Contributor was a lot more pure than what eventually launched. It let you set a budget and compete against yourself in the ad auction, so publishers were getting the same amount of money for their content as before. I tried it out when I worked there. You could set a fake budget and Google would pay for you to see empty boxes or pictures from your own photo albums instead of ads. A few things became apparent.
One is Google doesn't serve all or even most of the ads on the internet. So I still saw a lot of ads. This made the experience feel pretty pointless.
Another is that this model is completely infeasible. The internet economy is huge. Just a week or so of browsing rapidly blew my test budget of a few hundred dollars. To see no ads on the internet served by Google I would have needed to pay a large multiple of what I paid monthly for TV, mobile and Internet connectivity.
You say you'd be willing to pay $10k per decade? Forget it. If you're a heavy internet user that'd buy you less than a month, not a decade.
Finally, this didn't opt you out of search ads. That's because Google has strong experimental evidence that ads on search are good for users. One of the longest running A/B tests the firm ever did was selecting 1% of users and disabling search ads for them. What they found was a long term trend where those users simply used Google less than normal. Without ads the results were less useful so they did the obvious and searched less. Why would Google let you pay to make their product less useful for you?
Good points, actually very interesting, especially the budget part.
But I wasn't talking about just the ads, I was talking about the tracking to optimize those ads. I don't care about the ads. Show me ads, I ignore them anyway. I just don't want to be tracked to build out my personality profile for the rest of my life, because I don't know who will get access to that data and what it might be used for. Show ads based on my search term, not based on my browser, email and location history. They will have the same effect as the optimized ones: none.
Just keep in mind, the cohort I was talking about, was the one that will not be monetized. It is the cohort that still sees ads, but will never convert. So I'm not sure why I would buy my own ad space for an amount of money that is based on the usual conversion rate, when my conversion or click rate for my sample of n=1 is zero all the time. My profile correlates to zero spending, it is not worth the average ad price.
Google Contributor kind of proves my point about the efforts required being too costly. It was easier to inject a person as a buyer for their own profile into the merchandising system, than to rework all the tracking tools and the analytics that runs on it to stop tracking that specific person. So yes, my $10k is still not enough.
> Why would Google let you pay to make their product less useful for you?
Because I value privacy as a principle more than a slightly less useful product, and I would pay for it. But apparently I can't afford it.
Many ads are brand ads. You don't have to click for the advertiser to get what they want, just see their ad at all. Even for click-based ads, well, most people claim they never click on ads. But, they're wrong. Again, Google has lots of data on this. You will never be allowed to opt out of ads if you aren't paying your way, because lots of people would do it and that would render the internet economically unviable (of course no such ad network would survive for more than 5 minutes).
It was easier to inject a person as a buyer for their own profile into the merchandising system, than to rework all the tracking tools and the analytics that runs on it to stop tracking that specific person.
No, they did it that way because otherwise it'd have reduced publisher earnings who would then have gone to other ad networks with no Contributor programme. How do you set the price of not seeing an ad otherwise? The price of seeing it is set by auction. It had nothing to do with tracking which can be disabled by anyone here:
Tracking isn't actually the big hammer people imagine it is. That's a fiction invented by journalists. It helps a bit but only really basic stuff like "show German people ads in German" or remarketing (show people ads for products they were looking at buying very recently). That's why it's OK to opt out. You become worth a bit less and you'll see more irritating ads as a result, but very few use this option.
Because I value privacy as a principle more than a slightly less useful product, and I would pay for it. But apparently I can't afford it.
Go disable ad tracking then. The options have been there for many years.
I think there is more to privacy than just disabling personalized ads, which is the reason I'm not bothered by them. I'm more concerned about personalized search results and filter bubbles. But I also think it is totally fine that the system works for you and you get value out of it.
You don't need Google. The Internet is fairly decentralized. You can build your small web even today and just block Google via robots.txt, never use it yourself, and link via webrings.
The Internet is very good at overlay networks. Search engines aren't even required. If you want Google's features then they ask that you pay their price. But if you don't want to play with the rest of us, you can host on your own, you can choose to browse via a free web directory you and others like you maintain, and all that.
It's all there for the taking. It's just that the rest of us derive utility from being part of the network that's growing.
Unfortunately their price is excessive and their income mostly comes from rent-seeking the contribution they make to the value of the internet is negligible and they leverage their position to take an outsized chunk out of income streams.
Google is a literal barrier to entry when it comes to running a web based business - if you can't secure traffic you die and traffic breeds more traffic so it's price is highly inelastic. It's (essentially) the same issue as market driven healthcare if you are dying then prolonging your life (generally) has infinite value and the market price for treatment becomes as much cash as you can get your hands on.
That's only if you want access to all the people who find Google useful. The guy I'm responding to wants a smaller web that doesn't grow. You can do that without drinking from the Google firehouse.
No one is taking the ability to make a smaller web away from anyone. But that's the nature of the small web, it's small. And maybe your business can't sustain itself on small. That's just incompatibility of what you want and physical reality.
You know what people say on this website about blocking ads, right? "Your business model is not my problem". It's true.
I get what you're saying and I sympathize. It just isn't compatible with the other guy's view. In a "smaller web" your business wouldn't even exist.
YaCy certainly comes to mind when considering decentralized web search. Google has a strong control of the pipe of people sending it queries. Though, there are certainly other methods.
I just want to point out it's not necessarily that we want those things, it's that those who are in control push for it, and they do it because the way our society is structured rewards them for it
Which ads? The ads on the google search engine, or the ads that random website is getting from google. Are the google ads at me.com any good?
I'm surprised more companies don't take this in house. 20 years ago little small town newspapers and radio stations had their own in house ad sales. Seems like a no-brainier for web news to sell targeted ads to their customers.
They still do that. Large content sites still sell ads and can do so in any way they want, exclusivity deals, results oriented, click based, you name it. The inventory they can't sell directly they sell to Google or whoever is paying best at that time. They can even throw an ad view into ad networks to be bid on and show the winning bid ad to the user. The whole bidding war happens in real time for each user for each ad sometimes across multiple ad networks.
I suppose a lot of people here know how real time bidding networks work but I was mind blown the first time I saw that.
Newspapers used to be relatively well targeted. You know people reading the Podunk Times are probably in the Podunk region. But now the competition has surged ahead, and you can target on Facebook "people who run as a hobby and are African American and live in a metro with great than >500K population" or whatever.
But from a consumer point of view, is it better to be targeted in a loose way by people guessing about your demographics or an exact way by people who know your demos? And as a publisher, how the hell are you supposed to make content if all the money is gobbled up by the platforms?
I think we should return to status quo ante by just banning the collection of targeting data. We know that the old ad ecosystem worked because we observed it working, and we know that the new one sucks because we observe publishers going bankrupt and privacy being violated.
I have a feeling that we'll arrive soon at StatGate... The point where we find that many companies have been providing erroneous and/or outright false web stats, recommendations, reviews and other metrics to users in order to steer and increase profit.
Social media sites offer the ability for everyone on platforms to pay for primary placement now. This is a big conflict of interest in how posts are shown to users, and why very protected/secret algorithms are now applied to creatively show posts to some users and not others on all of these sites and services.
Once a company like Google has cornered the search market,and they also have tentacles everywhere through their collected data form other sources (e.g. google maps, gmail, google trends, Android, etc) there are few ways of backing out. They are now deeply ingrained in our society, and they'll know about anyone who is inventing an alternate path before it even happens and possibly operate in an anti-competitive manner. This is the modern realization of Skynet in a way I guess. :/
At the end of the day, how can we trust companies that manipulate us to boost profits? We simply can't, and we shouldn't really allow monopolies to get this big and embedded into critical services.
Same as any other monopolistic company. Comcast isn't necessarily good at providing internet, in fact most of their customers would say they're shit at it. But most people don't have a choice.
Google has a near monopoly on search which is unrelated to their competence serving adds.
So, Google could theoretically be terrible at advertising and yet still make insane profits from it. Just as Comcast’s internal IT systems might be a mess. This is why monopolies tend to be less efficient over time, nothing is forcing efficient operations.
i shake my head every time i think of the sheer marketing power of the bing brand...
Hey man, i googled that chick in marketing last night and found her facebook account. Really??? well i binged her and found her pornhub account. Bing... Find what you really are looking for.
I am forced to use Comcast, and I really wish I had another option. I have numerous complaints about them. But I have to say -- the quality of their internet service is not one of them. It's been consistently solid and well-performing for me for years.
The pricing is much higher than equally good service that can be had from other companies in other parts of my city, so I consider it overpriced.
But the bigger problem is that you have to scrutinize every billing statement from them, and then when they start charging you for things they shouldn't be (every 2 or 3 months), you have to spend a couple of hours on the phone with them to get it straightened out. Until the next time.
I feel like we need some precedent here - billing errors in the volume Comcast hands them out are essentially contract violations that go entirely unpunished - you don't get a discount if you have to wrestle with them to correct your bill, you can't charge them for your time, you just come out the other end with what they had originally offered you.
I'm hoping the recent CenturyLink/Minnesota situation gets more scrutiny over telecom bills. You may find this to be relevant [0]. I work in telecom and CTL is one of our vendor partners, I feel like I'm on the phone with them at least twice a week raising flags about billing statements.
The upload speed does suck, but it truly does affect only the 1% of the 1%, and is an infrastructure problem. They could and should update the infrastructure, but truly the number of people who demand a serious upload speed and are residential customers is incredibly small.
I don't like Comcast, but at least in my experience, others I know and companies worked at, it's been surprisingly reliable. Used them at multiple locations over the past 15+ years and could count the number of outages or other issues on one hand. Is that unusual?
Do we know what the data says about it? Statistics on uptime, ping, speed, customer response turnaround...
This is just anecdote:I have two houses with Comcast: one in Palo Alto and one in the sierras. The one in the sierras is pretty fast though had lots of multi-hour outages that stopped a couple of years ago.
The one in Palo Alto goes out a couple of times a week and is quite slow.
Luckily they haven't implemented the mooted usage caps: last year I was traveling for a few months but somehow managed to transfer tens of GB over the network in the sierras, according to Comcast's site.
They have a lot of good network engineers but the work at the edge is inferior.
There’s a certain irony that you ask for data instead of anecdotes to chastise /u/blackearl’s claim, then provide a personal anecdote to support your claim.
This seems like a reasonable start to build a case against Comcast:
When I used comcast (which was several years ago) the actual service was fine - it was the terrible customer relations that really got my goat, and it's harder to quantify customer satisfaction but the fact they aren't the absolute worst company isn't a mark of honor, showing up on customer surveys as one of the worst companies is enough of a black mark - the ranking is less important than being on the top ten at all.
I used them in college in Chicago ~ 4 years ago and we have 12+ outages in a single year, several of which took multiple days to resolve, and we never got close to the speed we were paying for.
Comcast has a physical monopoly or duopoly in most markets. Customers don't have much choice even though Comcast does a shitty job for a premium price.
Google's competitors are literally a click away. Google couldn't get away with Comcasting the web.
"Good" is hard to define, when we're talking about monopolistish scenarios, at least in this era.
Google's ads make good money because:
(1) The overture model for running a search ad market works well (Google acquired and adopted a mature system). (2) targeted ad markets get better with scale. The larger the market share, the smaller a& more targeted a segment is. (3) Ads are also search results. Over time, Google has nudged users to select ads... on high value searches.
On that last point: The value of a click varies in orders of magnitude 18c for this one $12 for that one. In the early days, this meant you could buy clicks for pennies. These days, Google limits the supply of low value ads and increases the supply of low value ad clickers.
On average, users might even see or click on fewer ads than 10 years ago. On high value search terms, advertising prominence & click-throughs are through the roof.
If Google is "playing dirty," this is where the incentive is highest... and achieves the goals which Google has strategically used to grow revenue for years now.
Playing dirty is even a weird term here. A newspaper may have a journalistic ethos whereby ad-selling squares don't get to editorialise journalism... whether they stick to it or not. By what ethos is Google not supposed to let ad selling concerns influence organic search?
> By what ethos is Google not supposed to let ad selling concerns influence organic search?
So ad-selling squares don't get to editorialise journalism.
Search is (automated) journalist. Why would you think otherwise? If a search treats users as mere eyeballs to trick and hijack instead if inform well engine, then users learn not to trust the search engine, same as any other kind of journalist
> What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway?
This is about incrementality. Google/advertisers are well aware of this fact and have been doing lots of ablation studies to understand advertisement's effectiveness. Don't underestimate the industry; you may spend millions of dollars but not billions of dollars without good justifications.
I don't know the exact numbers (and I wouldn't be able to tell it even if I know it) and it heavily depends on the type of particular ads (e.g. brand ads will show much less incrementality), but the general consensus is that more than half of those ads can take the credit for conversions. Given that conversion tracking and attribution is not perfect, it's fair to take the money.
I frequently see people click through a Google Ad just because they didn't type in the whole domain name. Example: type "NYtimes" into address bar, click on top-most link (an ad). In these cases, the ads are entirely extractive compared to organic results.
The question really is then if those billions went to Bing or DDG and searched for their stuff there, would approximately the same percentage click through to the ads.
Recently there's been cases where searching for a company name will actually return an ad for a competitor. Companies are being forced into a bidding war to win back the top position for exact searches on their own name.
"Forced how"? Because otherwise a web user might buy something "better than Basecamp" and that's unfair?
If Basecamp can't sell to a prospect who knows their name unless basecamp is top search result, why does Basecamp deserve the sale?
Basecamp seems to generate more free advertising from playing the victim in the media than they lose from whatever they complain about.
A significant portion of the modern digital advertisement is heavily data-driven, and those numbers are available to advertisers as well. Based on the numbers, many advertisers actually believe that Google is one of the best options available on the market. It's possible that this is not necessarily due to their modeling technology but infrastructure though.
Indeed, who are all those people giving Google $100B a year, with 20% growth YoY, to run their ads? They must all be fools to believe that Google is giving them anything of value.
Possibly? Or they think that their payments are required to be ranked fairly on Google's service and view it more as blackmail than anything else. Searching for "amazon" brings up an Ad paid for by Amazon, searching for "books for sale" brings up paid Ads for four different book sellers - if any of them stopped paying google they'd be, at best, the fourth result - and the first Ad result is for the first organic result, the next organic result is the fourth ad, the one after it a sub-page in the last result and the fourth organic result is craigslist which didn't pay for an Ad. In fact, Amazon isn't even on the first page of results except for their Ad.
Related tweet by Jason Fried about Basecamp result placement:
"When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own brand name, you’re forced to pay up if you want to be found. It’s a shakedown. It’s ransom. But at least we can have fun with it. Search for Basecamp and you may see this attached ad."
One way to read this is “Google is serving up ads for what would have been the top search result anyway.” This makes you then wonder, why pay for ads?
Because if you don’t, a competitor will and that is where the article takes the turn into talking about the new layout, occlusion, etc. It’s an interesting discussion about trust and how far Google can push before that trust is broken. However, I’m almost certain I’ve had this conversation a decade ago.
Unless you compare to an ad free version of search, you can't prove that the value of placing an ad is more than the negative value of an ad being sold to a competitor.
I've actually moved to other search engines because the quality of the results have gone down dramatically. It seems like google will fixate on one or two keywords in my search (usually the most generic ones) and ignore the rest. In addition, the old google tricks like using quotes for literal values no longer seems to work. It is like google is guessing what I want, rather than trying to find what I have entered as a query.
I don't know if this is because SEO has poisoned their index, or if I'm not googling "correctly" anymore.
Google ignoring what I had actually typed and instead showing results to a more popular query that was similar, but distinctly different, is what finally got me to switch over to DuckDuckGo. Now that I've gotten used to DDG I find Google unpleasant to use. The amount of ads and clutter on the page is distracting, and the organic results seemed ever more skewed towards ecommerce results.
Indeed! It's got to the point where I have to quote like 80% of the keywords in my query, just so that it doesn't throw them away. Because if I do not, I've had cases where it would throw away 2 out of 3 keywords for some results - and, as you say, it's usually the less generic ones that get thrown out.
Even worse, sometimes instead of striking them out, it substitutes them with "synonyms" that are anything but. For example, if you search for FreeBSD, you sometimes get results where "linux" is highlighted as a keyword. I'm pretty sure that this is some ML crap doing this, because the more obscure the term, the more likely it is to get it not just wrong, but hilariously wrong, even to the point of meaning the opposite.
DDG only just recently added the feature that they show you which terms they ignored… most of the time. This is actually my main problem with DDG (which is my default search engine), that they like to ignore even quotation mark-forced words. My impression is that Google sees "" as an important signal for what you want while DDG sees it as something you probably did by mistake and decides to show you a ton of unrelated results (with the word not even showing up at all), even on the first page. It’s the one thing that annoys me about the otherwise superior search of DDG.
maybe that's what it was. Used to quotes meant "look for this exact sequence of letters", and at some point that started to maybe work sometimes, and maybe not othertimes.
It sounds like what you're saying is that it acts more like a typical full-text index now? I suppose it's better than nothing, but still not what I would like to see happen.
Some of that skew might be their algorithm noticing that the great unwashed masses are looking for ecommerce. I should give DDG another try, it was not that great last time I tried (few years ago?)
Some of that skew might be their algorithm noticing that the great unwashed masses are looking for ecommerce.
I don't believe that it's the masses looking for e-commerce sites. I think it's that Google wants people to click on e-commerce sites because it makes money off of those ads. And even if someone doesn't click on a sponsored link to an e-commerce site, that click still reinforces in their mind that Google is the place to start shopping.
There was a comment on HN yesterday where someone wrote something like, "Did you know there are countries where people who want to buy things just go to amazon.com directly and don't search for their item in Google?" I was floored. It never occurred to me that if I want to buy something at amazon.com that I would involve Google in any way. But there must be legions of people who do this, or that person wouldn't have made that statement.
At the same time, I think that Google falls down at this kind of lead generation because it allows so much automation that it can't be trusted.
I just put "rocket to mars" in Google and the top results are ads for Wal-Mart and Michael's.
To be fair, the duck isn't much better. I just put "f-14 fighter jet" into Duck and got an ad for "Fighter Jets For Sale near you" with a link to an auto repair shop.
I've seen people type "example" into the address bar, hit enter, then click the Google link to example.com, without realizing that they could just add ".com" to the end of their initial query and go directly to their destination.
If you have a typo in the name, Google will fix it for you, whereas your browser will happily take you to a domain that is probably owned by a scammer.
One could argue that since Google is JUST as happy to take money from scammers for an ad for the keyword WellsFrago as the Registry would be to sell the domain WellsFrago dot com ... I'm not sure either approach is technically safer than the other if you're prone to typos. I think (gasp) bookmarking the important sites you need is the only safe approach.
My wife does this all the time. If she wants to go to Prime video she types "Amazon Prime Video" into her address bar then clicks the first Google result, often the ad for Prime Video.
I started doing that years back. I'm a bad speller and sometimes the url is example.net where example.com exists as some scam that I wouldn't want but looks like the real example.net. Google will correct my spelling and find the correct string to put after the name.
In theory websites could kill off googles dominance by blacklisting their crawler and only caring about traffic from DDG and other lesser known engines
If enough websites did it, google would become just a giant resolver for corporate content that everyone already knows about. It would effectively fork the internet into google and non google. We just need a few search engines that can compete of quality.
* Some of that skew might be their algorithm noticing that the great unwashed masses are looking for ecommerce*
Not necessarily. The great unwashed masses may not be searching for ecommerce, but people not searching for ecommerce may not be monetizable.
Let's say we run a basketball web site that has a search engine. People sometimes type the word "travel" into the search bar.
We can show them results related to the rules violation of "travelling," and/or results related to physical travel such as "trusted partners" who provide charter trips to playoff games.
It could be that we know that 90% of the searches for the word "travel" are for the rules violation. But the remaining 10% are the ones that click on ads. And we get a kickback when someone clicks on an ad on our site.
If all we care about is the web site's revenue, we might choose to prioritize showing travel to basketball games, even though we know it's only relevant for 10% of the users who query the word "travel."
It may only be 10% of our users, but it's 100% of our revenue from keyword searches for "travel." So we show the monetizable results, and maybe--if we are feeling generous--we'll show a little line, "Showing results for travel to games. Click here to search for travel (violation)."
--
TL;DR: We don't need to assume that Google is trying to provide good search results for everyone. They might be trying to provide the results that maximize their immediate revenue.
They are definitely trying to guess what you are searching for.
One thing that drives me crazy is that they assume all of your searches are geographically or linguistically "local", they don't have an international search mode where the most relevant result in the world shows up.
One thing that drives me crazy is that they assume all of your searches are geographically or linguistically "local"
It wouldn't be so terrible, except that Google is extraordinarily bad at geolocation.
Right now, Google thinks my work computer is in southern New Mexico. Google thinks my personal computer, right next to it, is in northern Nevada. Google thinks my mobile phone, in between the two, is in Los Angeles. All of those locations are hundreds of miles wrong.
But it gets even worse when you want to know about something in a place other than where you're standing right now. It's like nobody inside Google has ever done any trip planning in their entire lives.
Apple Maps has the opposite problem, though. If I want to search for a German restaurant near my location in the United States, it will show me places in Germany.
How is Google supposed to know which location you want if you don't tell it and you don't want it to guess? It can't customize results just for you and serve bad results to the other 99% of users.
Google trying to guess everything I was doing before me is what finally broke me from them. The day (not terrible long ago) I started typing an email in gmail and they were auto-typing entire sentences for me I lost it. I don't need an algorithm to help dictate my sentence structure. I can do that on me own.
I tend to get zero results in verbatim and then find what I'm looking for after following a rabbit hole from some other search. It's like Google's given up on indexing more than 5% of the web any more.
While I find your answer very helpful. Now I first search with Qliqz and DDG coding related stuff! It is almost impossible nowadays to find an accurate technical result out of so many adds with Google.
Perhaps they should create "Google Pro" that searches for what people ask for rather than trying to interpret what they mean. Don't get me wrong, the interpretations can be useful for generic queries. On the other hand, it is annoying when I know the exact terms that I need.
> I've actually moved to other search engines because the quality of the results have gone down dramatically.
Agreed. It also reminds me that the old engines weren't so much bad or that Google was better as the quality of the old engines degraded with time (may that be from the index being poisoned, paid inclusion of results, or something else).
Switched to DuckDuckGo a few months ago and haven't looked back, the results pages are much cleaner, like the old Google results.
One blatant issue with Google (& DDG still often does not get right) is the search for a specific busines - using the exact business name and sometimes even town - I expect their listing to be at the top. Instead there's piles of Yelp & listing pages, and I often cannot even find the actual Item for which I'm searching - sometimes have to go to the indexers, hunt for their posting of the intended [website], and go that way.
Opportunity for someone to get it actually right...
Please search engine, listen to this: it's ok if you don't have any results for what I'm searching. I want to know fast when there are no results, so I can try other queries. I don't want to open a dozen of pages before realizing you didn't had any results so only gave me garbage.
I noticed this behavior starting around the time the ranking algorithm became more ML driven. I think this may have been late 2015[0].
I switched to Duck Duck Go a few months back, at first for privacy reasons, but now find myself preferring that search engine's results for most things.
The new UI with favicons was the last straw for me. Everything looks like an ad, which I'm sure is intentional. I've been adjusting to DDG for the past 4+ weeks.
I don't trust Google's search results right now. Not because they've blurred the line between ads and results (although that certainly makes the situation much worse), but because I don't tend to get very good results from Google search.
Not sure about everyone else but google is a proxy for other sites now where I can get relevant answers. So I have 2 clicks to the eventual site instead of 1. Similar to using site:www.reddit.com or something similar. I realize that's still using Google as a search engine but it is different than how I previously used it.
Thinking briefly on it, the main thing I leverage Google for is phonebook like information or getting a quick definition/spellcheck.
It's better than github search or Wikipedia search. Haven't even tried stack over flow search. I don't put "site:stackoverflow.com" too much, but I always put "stack" for a stackoverflow search or "wiki" for a wiki search. For general searches, I've shifted from putting in keywords I was pretty sure would be in the answer to just putting in the question in natural language.
I'm not sure what else to put. When I need to know more about something, I go to the library's database site, select the appropriate database, and search for what I need to know about.
This is in-depth knowledge, as it requires reading and synthesizing journal articles, and understanding themes. This obviously doesn't work for quick questions like what is the square root of 6, but for more higher ordered concepts in my specific field, it's highly valuable.
This has been building for years though. The tipping point in my mind was some time in early 2019 -- DuckDuckGo simply started returning more relevant results with fewer scrolls.
I don't, anymore. Just as I now don't trust and download a gazillion apps on my phone anymore.
I've personally switched to https://duckduckgo.com/lite (wished it was available in dark-mode, may be I should write a greasemonkey script) and make it a point to change search engine defaults on all phones in the household and remove or disable google-search and chrome apps.
For most basic searches, ddg/lite works just as good and is lighting fast. I do find myself !g redirecting searches to Google which admittedly does a remarkably better job at answering certain class of queries. I used to search on startpage.com, before it sold to an ad-company, which proxies Google search results minus the tracking and ads.
Speaking of proxy search engines, there're various searx mirrors too, but I haven't yet used them.
I think a better question that isn't asked is the following: Has Google created a market for ads where non would exist if they simply provided only organic results?
By this I mean that it's possible the main reason Google Ads are useful for companies is because Google has reinforced a sort of negative Nash equilibrium by allowing competitors to squat on organic results by purchasing ads against those better results. I.e. So the best organic results lose user share & clicks because Google lets competitors set ads against them. Given this situation, those targeted by their competitors have no choice but to try & outbid their rivals. Meaning Google Ads are only useful to companies because they exist at all, and assuming minimal gaming of the organic results system with SEO, both companies and users would be better off if there were no ads and the best most relevant results won out on their own merit.
If you put the question to people "Would you have an easier time finding good products and services if there were no advertisements?" I think the majority of people would answer "no".
It's sad state of affairs we're in if we can't even imagine finding out about something without that knowledge being forced down our throats.
I haven't seen an internet ad in years due to using uBlock Origin with very strict block lists. I feel like I find products and services I need effortlessly. Am I missing something?
Yes. We are discussing googles advertising, and the strategic decisions it forces on companies operating within googles context. And in my post more generally, how that same game plays out in wider society, and with the general public
We are not discussing your personal advertising experience. Nor even the general technocratic audience of HN's advertising experience.
I'm aware the overall discussion was not about my personal preferences, so it should hopefully be clear this is not what I was asking.
The context (set by the OP of this branch) is also that perhaps there is a case of perverse incentives going on, one where we have reached an unhealthy, but relatively stable equilibrium of the majority having the impression of needing Google ads where there would be no such need if they didn't exist.
You responded by saying the majority would indeed confirm that they would not want to be left without ads (an unsubstantiated but plausible claim). But there are clearly people who choose to opt out of ads completely, myself included, and I don't see myself as missing out on anything. So I'm asking whether I am missing out on something.
I have to disagree fundamentally with the author on this point:
> but then Google was always ugly until relatively recently
Google was originally and for many years extremely elegant in it’s simplicity. There is nothing ugly about getting people exactly what they need instantly.
As for the main thrust of the article, I’ve already found Google’s results mostly untrustworthy. For some time search results have been so dominated by adverts that frequently the results I was looking for are buried under the fold. Search is a simple task and for 99% of searches there are at least 2 competitors who serve 90% fewer adverts per page. For the other 1% of searches I’m 3 keystrokes away from getting Google’s search laden results as a second opinion.
>Google was originally and for many years extremely elegant in it’s simplicity.
The reason I started using Google (and made it my home page) over 20 years ago wasn't because of the quality of their searches, but because their home page was a plain white page that loaded instantly (in contrast to Alta Vista and other search engines that were loaded down with all sorts of animations and advertisements that took forever to load). Even after I got broadband I stuck with Google for many years because their searches were clearly the best. In the last few years (especially the last year), their search quality has fallen off a cliff and there is just no compelling reason to stick with them.
Yeah, it’s as if they don’t understand modernism: it’s about deep understanding of your materials, and letting the forms be driven by the demands of those materials. A truly modern web site feels unmistakably “webby”. Anything with a petina of beauty is more Romantic than Modern.
Google has always and still does have the least-obtrusive ads. I don't like when ads masquerade as content, but if I have to receive ads, I'd prefer Google-managed ads over anyone else's. Even Stack Overflow fills their pages with hideous animated ads, and they're about the second-least-objectionable ad-bearing site.
> Google has always and still does have the least-obtrusive ads.
This is no longer true. DuckDuckGo definitely has less obtrusive advertising now versus Google. There are fewer adverts per search and adverts are better labeled. Ads have gotten so pervasive, on a typical Google search, organic results are frequently below the fold.
You're right. Wow. Just tried it. (yandex.com/images) This thread is really opening up the truth which is that Google is no longer the be all and end all of search.
This is a great feeling. Thanks for the Yandex tip.
I miss the days when I could search with AND, OR, +word and -word. Now if I search google with more than one word it no longer searches the internet. Instead it searches for ads that are somewhat similar to my query and features those. Any useful links on the first page are accidental.
I'm surprised nobody has been talking about the fact that muddying the distinction between ads and organic results is illegal. Google, Amazon, and others have been moving this way for a while, despite the FTC sending a warning a few years ago: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2013/06/...
Wow. I actually didn't know that there was any law or regulation that even in theory could make Google do this at least in the USA.
But then again, this is the same FTC that has proven unable for decades to rein in the MLM industry, whose blatant scamminess makes Google look like a Boy Scout. So I am over here not holding my breath at all that they will ever draw a line. Google will just keep making that "Ad" label smaller and smaller and fainter and fainter, and the FTC will do nothing other than maybe extracting a tiny fine in a settlement every 10 years or something.
As far as I can tell, there are four major search providers: Google, Bing, Baidu, & Yandex. Qwant seems to do some amount of their own indexing, falling back to Bing for other things ( https://betterweb.qwant.com/web-indexation-where-does-qwants... ). Most of the 'alternative' search engines (DDG &c.) seem to rely on Bing and a few (like StartPage) on Google, and I continue to find regular Bing-based search results worse than Google-based search results. Searx is interesting (and what I largely use), and can aggregate from various providers, but it's hard to find reliable working Searx instances.
Search engines like Google and Bing are like a new pair of shoes, imho. You've got to give them a week or rwo of use before they really fit your use case. I used to use Searx, and DDG, and kept having to fall back on Google regularly.
I went to Bing, and had a similar issue. But after its personalization kicked in, I haven't had to go back to Google more than once or twice a month, and in general, I'm happier with my results when I compare the two.
YMMV, though. I trust Google less than I trust Microsoft for search, because the company and its employees seem to lack a "save the world" pathology which I keep getting hints of whenever someone pulls back the curtain on the company's culture. I can intuitively understand a corporate Megalith like MS's interest a lot more easily, so I'm more comfortable deciding whether or not I'm getting a good response from Bing.
But as a daily driver, unless you're really concerned about Google, I don't think there's any material advantage to making the switch.
I think it's not impossible to dethrone Google from its dominant Search position if it continues a trend of serving up less relevant paid results, provided a competitor is able to step up.
It's what happened with Google initially. I remember the late 90's search engine landscape. Result were hit or miss, but one of a few search engines would usually give what you needed, so you had to try a few: Yahoo, Alta Vista, MSN, Hotbox... there were even sites the aggregated a few engines to provide results from multiple: I don't remember the name, but there was one such that had 4 quadrants, each one a different engine and you'd get results from all 4. It was my default for a while.
Then Google came along, and I'm not sure it always provided better results than all of the other engines, but it consistently provided results that were good enough that you didn't need hop around much anymore. And as we all know, virtually in the blink of an eye they dominated the market.
This is why I think they can be dethroned if they go too far down a path of weakening their results. Just a bit too far, and a competitor with a little momentum and word of mouth network effects could really gain a toe hold. It's a long shot, but over time.... there was once a time IBM seemed unbeatable. It took years of chipping away from multiple competitors, but they had a big fall.
> I don't remember the name, but there was one such that had 4 quadrants, each one a different engine and you'd get results from all 4. It was my default for a while.
Dogpile? Looks like they are still around, but a quick test shows it to be even more full of ads than Google nowadays.
Does anyone here even really use Google's search engine anymore?
I do search for stuff a lot, but to be honest I know perfectly when it will be a stackoverflow page I want, or a wikipedia page, or it will have that link to maps.
I can't remember the last time I searched for something and I didn't already know what domain I actually wanted to end up on.
> Does anyone here even really use Google's search engine anymore?
Yeah. Plenty of people do.
I know I do when searching for PDFs because DuckDuckGo randomly ignores "filetype:pdf" when it feels like it, and also sometimes ignores word in the the query that are within quotes.
It's also not great with localised results, at least in many parts of the world.
I don't use Google's search engine, but I do use search engines heavily. Unlike you, I rarely know what site will have what I'm looking for in advance -- it's rarely SO, Wikipedia, or maps.
They've been terrible for years. I yearn for the days when you'd look up "x video game review" and you'd get actual human beings with personal sites showing up, and opinions from random people. Now that SEO has been beaten into a pulp, the first 8,000 pages are either major corporations or spam.
So the modern internet in general, I suppose. Corporations in spam. Never mind, it'd be unreasonable of me to expect anything else.
Wish I could up this a thousand times. I've had a personal site for some twenty years; nothing fancy, but I put a lot of effort into my content, and I used to get hundreds of unique visitors a day.
Over the last ten years, my non-bot traffic has dropped to a tenth of that, and at the same time, my ability to find similar websites has disappeared. Now I see nothing but resume-padding blogs with generic WordPress templates, and pages of empty corporate bullshit.
I've been prefixing all my searches with reddit and then filtering by within last month or last year, and something seems to have changed lately. The reddit results say some number of days within the time constraint, but then the result is actually years old which makes it all pointless. This is literally the only way I search google right now because their results are so spammy otherwise.
This is exactly the same for me. I only search reddit through google (and ddg otherwise), but it no longer is providing me with recent results even when I filter.
I've seen various stories about this for a week, and I kept wondering when they were going to roll the change out so that I could see. It turns out that I just don't see any of the ads/sponsored links at all normally, presumably because uBlock is hiding them. I guess I'm surprised that enough HN users would even notice this.
I’m a sysadmin/engineer. Google results have gotten so bad in the past year I’m debating about taking some training courses from our vendors just so I’m not so reliant on a search engine. I feel like this is dark times for my profession.
I would love to be a fly on the wall for the decisions that led to Google making the distinction between ads and search results more ambiguous with the latest redesign because whoever signed off on this needs to be fired, for Google's sake.
Google SERPs are the one form of advertising I don't mind and are most effective because:
1. Unlike pretty much every other form of online advertising, you have the benefit of user intent in that they actually want to find something and an advertised result may be what they're looking for. Most other forms of online advertising are deliberately intrusive because attention = $$$; and
2. Google ads are paid for on a CPC basis rather than CPM basis so Google is incentivized to show you something relevant to you and your search rather than just churning impressions (like those pages that split an article into a gallery of 11 pages; ad impressions is why they do this).
But a key part of this is user trust that Google clearly differentiated an ad from an organic search result. I wonder what short term metrics and thinking went into this. I'm sure there was a short term topline revenue gain but it's one of those things that you're not actually increasingly value, you're just cashing in your brand's value for cash now.
But hey I'm sure a bunch of people got promoted, so it's fine.
I trust them for dev stuff, error codes, obscure technical whatever, but not for news or political content, and I’m wary about certain scientific/medical topics.
I don't think it's practical. None of the search engines give me results of quality high enough for my daily software development problem, but Google. Tried them all. If you want to get stuff done, you google it. If you want to play socially responsible society member role, you try alternative browsers, until you run out of time, then you google it.
I don't know what you're searching, but I found the opposite to be true. Exceptions being local to geo area shopping, searching for images with text on them with the text - think xkcd -, and extremely obscure software error messages - apart from these, DDG beats google for me. Has been for quite a while.
I switched to bing on my work machine at the start of this week, and have found I've been getting better results than google gives me. Especially if I'm trying to do any type of complex query, like filtering by domain or multiple search phrases, google dumbed down their query handing some years ago so it's basically useless now.
I've started treating google more like the Yellow Pages; a good source when you WANT ads, i.e. you're looking for a tradesman in your area, or a restaurant to go to. For organic search, it's rubbish.
Edit: the dumbed down search has begun on youtube as well, YT routinely ignores what I searched for and just shows me videos related to what I was watching previously. I search for guitar amps and get videos for DIY kitchens, because I was looking at that stuff last night. Beyond moronic.
We’ve gotten to a place where Ads have become the backbone of the Web. Google says it’s mission is to make the worlds content organized and useable. That isn’t quite true. It’s to monetize the organization of that content.
They claim ads “keep the internet free”. “Free” from paying sure, but free from questionable untruthful ads, con artists Ads, and Horrible content that is monetized by ads that shouldn’t be?
Google will say those are “hard computer science” problems they are tackling. The reality is they tackle the problem as long as it doesn’t impact revenue and put just enough resources on it to make it look like they care. Or retroactively share data and say they are ahead of the problem (like YouTube CEO on 60 minutes).
How a trillion dollar company of the Self proclaimed worlds Smartest people don’t know a pedophile ring is using YouTube kids comments Section is reckless. Why google even needs to monetize Kids content is pure greed. Do kids really want to see an Ad or benefit from it? Maybe to burn into their habits that “Ads are just part of life”
Life With Google in charge of the worlds Information.
In what meaning we could ever "trust" Google's search results? We have already witnesses myriad of examples of Google removing and modifying search results to mollify various governments and private groups. We witnessed how Google banned substring "gun" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16479204) from Google Shopping results. We have seen people in Google discussing "ML fairness" (modifying algorithms to fit their perceptions of what results should be instead of showing what they actually are) and more broadly, their responsibility to shape political discussion and national election results. We now know they have the tools, the means and the motivation to influence search results, and that they have done it many times in the past. Commercial considerations add to this mess, but I think if the "trust" is the idea that Google just shows the search results as they are, without any outside considerations not related to the quality of search intervening, then this "trust" is long gone. Now the question is only who gets the power to play with it. Is it worse if Google sells a bit of this power instead of keeping it all to themselves? I don't know, maybe, but by then I don't think talking about any "trust" has any point.
Advertising aside, Google's search problems also extend to their political and/or economic agenda (outside of paid advertisements). I do a lot of writing, and often look up articles I have read in the past, sometimes the distant past, in order to reference them in the footnotes of my articles and posts. Many articles on politically controversial subjects (especially those that reflect poorly on "establishment" positions) either don't come up at all or are extremely hard to find, despite putting in numerous, specific keywords. Doubtless this is (at least in part) a function of Google's curated "reliability algorithm" that deranks (and in some cases hides completely) sites and sources that Google deems less credible than mainstream, establishment sources (a black-box decision making process that often ranks credible sites below larger, "corporate" outlets with a much worse track record of accuracy). While one could argue that this sort of algorithmic sorting has some use in its news section, when it comes to search this is a terrible policy. A search engine that hides or obfuscates the specific information or article I'm looking for because it doesn't match their agenda is worthless as a search tool.
Realized I was reading this alongside another link on the HN front page right now, [We Wasted $50k On Google Ads So You Don't Have To](https://www.indiehackers.com/article/we-wasted-50k-on-google...)... the comparison was a little funny and a little.. scary?
1. Google search ads look like search results. While they used to not allow website owners to make their content look like their text ads.
2. Uber shows the rate (and eventually charges) for the maximum possible route from any two locations, when the actual route is generally smaller than that.
3. Amazon charges Import Fee Deposit based on a calculation and when less than that is actually charged, they don't refund it, unless someone actually asks them to.
It seems that world has fallen prey to the mindset, "Screw customer experience, let's extort the maximum amount of money we can."
Technology companies are no longer in the business of making things easier, instead they are in the business of making the most amount of money they can, while not loosing their business entirely. If these companies actually valued the consumer/customer in the past, they've certainly moved beyond that point.
> What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway?
I don't think that's the case. I mean, in some case yes there are companies buying ads when they would have been among the top search results anyway. But assuming that many ad creators are probably savvy enough to know where they rate in organic search results, they're likely not targeting adwords where they'd be high in those organic results.
I.e., competent users of google advertising are, by definition, users that avoid paying for results they would have gotten otherwise.
Consider the following from personal experience: If you rank highly on Google search as I once did you may become the target of malicious actors trying to leach from your ranking.
In my case this leaching appeared to Google as if /we/ were trying to game the system with link farms (we were not). Google penalized us in 2011 and we've yet to recover.
The point: when you use Google search you're often served sub-standard results, as over time generations of ranking penalties has lead to lower quality sites ranking higher.
> Last week we updated the look of Search on desktop to mirror what’s been on mobile for months. We’ve heard your feedback about the update. We always want to make Search better, so we’re going to experiment with new placements for favicons….
Why even show ads? Perhaps, it would be easier to just have Alphabet spawning a company doing SEO that triggers the right strings of the Google page ranking algorithm, thus successfully putting stuff on top of search. Google still receives money, but no specific "this is an Ad" needed. At least, in that universe that would be no question on whether we can trust in "no-Ad" section of the results.
Given how little I trust Ads (and I think others are in the same boat) I'm a bit surprised Google hasn't started interspersing Ads more at this point - having your Ad as the second result below an organic search result would probably give you more clicks... that first search result slot is slowly becoming a dead zone.
I think the logical next step is for Google to start showing old-school banner ads at the top of the page and pop-ups, and pop-under's. Once that happens (and I am thinking it will be relatively soon), their transformation and subsequent and inevitable slow decline will be fully complete.
Google has removed favicons from search in an attempt to de-adsify their results. I don't think it's gonna work, I think with the latest change they've brought to light stuff most of the people using Google didn't even think about.
Peripheral question to the article: are there any vendor-independent tools that attempt to objectively measure result relevance among various search engines? Or even user-rated studies where the user tried multiple engines and rated their results?
Switch to OneSearch. It's just an anonymizing wrapper around Bing like DuckDuckGo, but since it's run by a public utility (Verizon) rather than a private fly by night outfit like DDG, I trust it slightly more.
This seems fine and I'm not anti-onesearch or anti-Verizon in particular, but why do you feel that DDG is "fly by night"? Because they're small?
I think more Americans have been scammed by Verizon, Comcast, or AT&T than have ever even heard of DuckDuckGo! I have plenty of tiny class-action settlement checks to prove it.
Their attempts to make their search more intelligent ends up keeping the user from using theirs. Which is practically always a bad thing: Regular users tend to suck at searching (e.g. formulating queries) because they haven't learned it, not because they wouldn't be smart enough or because it's something you need a special talent for.
I still do trust Google --- because I knowingly feed the search engine with terms I really hope no one can monetize. That's the only way I do not feel betrayed.
their quality has definitely gone down and they are really pushing their own results for domains like travel. They seem to have mixed goals there or maybe not.
I'd certainly pay a fixed price per month for unlimited searches. I think Google knows that won't work so they don't offer it. Or they couldn't ask the same price that they get selling your personal data?
They do offer Youtube Premium without ads but the search engine space is really different. Microtransactions are not here yet.
If they offered a premium "no ads" search option it would draw too much attention from the media/public to just how bad the situation currently is.
So, even if they could increase revenue per power user (RPPU?) it would do irreparable harm to their ad-supported model (for non-power users) in the long term.
The question of trusting Google's search results go far beyond it obfuscating ads in the results pages. Google's executives exert absolute granular control over what results end up at the top. Research shows that users are most likely to click only the top few results, meaning the this control has a massive influence on public awareness.
What's more, Google has been shown to be ideologically driven when ranking its results. Including, for instance, down-ranking news sites with left-leaning or socialist views such as the World Socialist Website, Common Dreams, Democracy Now and others as part of a concerted scheme with other information controllers like Facebook to marginalize ideological viewpoints counter to their preferences.
One can only speculate how much "meta-googling" (googling google to find out what it's up to) is rigged and cherrypicked.
Because unfortunately I still find Google indispensable (it's fast and gives me better results than the alternatives), I'm now using the "Better Google" userscript which reverts to the old look. Saves me a lot of pain and suffering.
I'm done with Google as of today. The evil genius of making links look like ads, is not just the straw that broke the camel's back; it's the entire bale.
There is mass hysteria about Google in general. They aren't the privacy nightmare the pitchfork wielding folks would have you believe. That said, they inspire others that are indeed nightmares. The entire third party tracking industry is a nightmare. And it was already, before Google. (Google bought doubleclick, don't forget.) But people see Google doing it and want to get in on it, nevermind the internal controls and oversight. So the net net is that it's a bad thing -- nobody can be trusted to hold so much PII.
I'm switching to Bing. DDG never did it for me. As an aggregator of other engine's work, I do not enjoy their business model either.
No they aren't and never did. They don't, for example, install a supercookie (like AT&T has done) so that they can track you the person vs "you" some uniquely identified user. Where are the pitchforks for AT&T?
To the extent they do collect as much data as they can, they limit it to identify you as a unique user, not you as a specific person. In the cases they necessarily identify you the person (e.g. Google Pay where they know who you are), they firewall that data and do not make the connection to you, some anonymous but unique user. They do an excellent job of not pulling a FB and selling the raw data. Their internal controls are extreme. They "quickly" aggregate and anonymize the data so that they can sell their customers (ad buyers) demographics, not individual people.
They could collect much more information than they do.
That you can say this make me think that we are using different definitions.
Have they also stopped buying real-world credit card usage and correlating it with your other actions?
> To the extent they do collect as much data as they can, they limit it to identify you as a unique user, not you as a specific person.
That doesn't really make it much better, in my opinion.
> They do an excellent job of not pulling a FB and selling the raw data. Their internal controls are extreme.
I never thought they did sell raw data. Having strong internal controls is wonderful, but a bit beside the point in my criticism. I object to the collection. How the data is handled post-collection is a separate issue.
> Have they also stopped buying real-world credit card usage and correlating it with your other actions?
Thank you. This is a really great example of pitchfork-ism. People want to see things that aren't there. Their desire to see those things blinds them to what is actually happening.
Google doesn't and never did what you are implying. Yes, they correlate those 2 sets of information. But neither side of the transaction (CC, Google) knows or can know the identifying linkage in the other direction. It allows the vendor (advertiser) to get conversion rate of online ads to real world purchases, without revealing who purchased them to any of the 3 parties. It isn't that Google or the CC issuer has to anonymise the data after they correlate the linkage, so as to hide the linkage from the advertiser; no party has the other piece of data in the first place, thanks to homomorphic encryption. It's actually a wonderful application of technology, being decried for completely wrong reasons. We need more of this specific technology, not less. (to the extent we need this at all)
> I object to the collection.
As do I, and I stated as much. My anti-complaint is that there is a huge backlash against Google when Google aren't the bad guys. There is a whole industry of actual bad actors -- doing "bad" things with the data they collect. vs Google that treats the data as sacrosanct, and they use it to actually provide a service to you. The other folks are simply stealing your data and reselling it for their own ends, without providing anything useful to you.
Look, I'm not saying Google is great, or even good. As I said here and elsewhere, they are evil. But evil people (entities) can do good things. We (collectively) have all agreed to Google's business model. And Google is acting as a responsible steward for the information they collect. There are much, much worse actors out there that are far more deserving of the spite that is sent in Google's direction. (only re: privacy specifically ... again, they are generally evil and deserve to die the death that will come to them and none too soon)
> Google is acting as a responsible steward for the information they collect.
OK, but that's beside the point. The point is that they collect information about me without my consent.
> There are much, much worse actors out there that are far more deserving of the spite that is sent in Google's direction.
Let's say this is true. That in no way means that we shouldn't complain about Google as well. I direct my ire at all companies that I consider abusive. That some of those may be more abusive than others isn't a free pass to the less abusive ones.
It's true, google is dominant and we should complain about them. But for what they do, not for what they don't do. That's where the pitchforks come out.
Key paragraph of the article. You don't have to be good at ads when you have a firehose of most of the world's population coming directly to you, telling you exactly what they want to buy/find/learn/read/do in their native language combined with their geolocation and search history. It would be hard not to serve up relevant ads in that case.
I always try to click the non-ad link, as I like the sites that I remember the names of and I don't want them to have to pay the troll toll, but sometimes I accidentally click the top link and I feel bad (only very very little, though) about it. Yesterday, I accidentally made Hackaday pay the toll.
I refuse to say that that is being good at ads. It's kind of slimy, forcing sites to do SEO to put themselves at the top of the list when someone is searching their name. I've actually switched over from chrome to firefox (on the machines where I have the option) because of this (and the fact that the top ~7 search results for many queries are SEO'd garbage).
Peretti is talking about quality versus quantity: maybe Google doesn't serve up quality ads, maybe they just serve up quantity ads.
I've seen this term for years but I still don't understand what it means. I don't want to see ads. There are no 'quality' ads. All ads are designed to sell me things period. I don't need anyone telling me about what I might want. I understand ads exist to make money and if they didn't we wouldn't have the internet etc. But there's no 'quality' to them, they're a necessary evil i've come to accept and adapt to over my life. I dislike them, I have no need for them, there'll never be a time I say 'well gee, sure am glad I seen that ad, it showed me just what I didn't know I needed.' Ads exist to sell crap to people, they're not good or bad, they just are. Some are invasive, some are reasonable, but they're all shit.
That said this ended up being the exception to proof the rule about ads being mostly noise, and I agree the world would be better with less of them. And almost certainly the current state of algorithmic ad serving is a disaster.
For that matter, the same goes for motorcycle magazines, and just about every other kind of magazine that caters to a niche market.
Those kinds of ads can be great, even.
Perhaps you're saying I already know about electric cars and Kissimmee and kubernetes, to which I'd respond, yes, probably via ads. Maybe a commercial or sign or web ad, but also maybe through a TV news spot (pr campaign) or magazine review (expenses paid) or web article (with affiliate link).
This doesn't seem especially civil.
> If you search for "cheapest gasoline" it's not unreasonable that an ad for an electric car might be interesting.
Interesting to whom? The parent comment doesn't want to see ads. So no it's not likely to be interesting in this context.
> Or if you search for "Orlando hotels", an ad for generally less expensive hotels in Kissimmee (the next town over) is more valuable than a perfectly literal result.
For me, personally, no I would find that to be an annoyance.
> And if you search for "k8s cluster deployment tools" then you probably want as many ads as possible, so your evaluation doesn't fail to include a comprehensive set of options.
Again no, I would want 0 ads in that case. Have you read about k8s cluster deployment tools? It's hard to find any useful information because even the results that aren't literally ads are fluff blog posts with little content. I don't want the fluff posts, but I can comb through them. I certainly don't want the ads.
> Perhaps you're saying I already know about electric cars and Kissimmee and kubernetes, to which I'd respond, yes, probably via ads.
There are ways to learn about things without someone paying for the right to say them at you when you don't want them to.
Discerning the intent of a search is completely orthogonal to whether to serve advertisements.
Search engines are generally not great at discerning the intent of a search. For example they frequently return irrelevant results that don't match key words even when you ask for a literal search. This has been discussed a lot.
But that's an unrelated issue to whether the search should return advertisements in addition to search results.
But, hey, he's absolutely entitled to live his life ignorant about viable options.
* Company creates thing people like you want to buy.
* Company knows if you know about the thing, you will want to buy it.
* Company knows you don't know whether a thing like their thing even exists, so you have no reason to search hard for it.
* Company upfronts the money to defray your search costs, knowing it will be paid back when you buy the thing. This is called advertising.
I am constantly learning about things I would have enjoyed if I had known about them. It is damn hard to make people aware even that you are giving away free lunch. Advertising breaks down that needless ignorance.
GoDaddy and NordVPN, for examples, are garbage products with highly effective advertising. Seeing ads for these products actively harms people, because it prevents them from finding better products like Gandi or PIA.
Might be fine for your use case, I donno.
However, when browsing the web in 20+ years I have never seen a useful paid for online add. That’s an inherent product of the medium where the only point of an add is to be less useful than the content I am looking at.
Supose your GPS added advertising. so it’s priority is not the best for you but what’s best for 3rd parties. That’s what online adds are, they take something useful and inherently degrade the experience.
I know this is picking on your example rather than your general concept, but this is a great example of how advertising is harmful. McDonald's has done incalculable damage to the health of Americans, and even if you don't go there, seeing the arches sometimes will get your kids yelling in the back seat, "I want to go to McDonald's!" This isn't helpful to us: it's helpful to McDonald's.
No, I still don't want to see an ad. It's not unreasonable that a search result for electric cars might be interesting, but I want results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the advertiser that serves themselves.
> Or if you search for "Orlando hotels", an ad for generally less expensive hotels in Kissimmee (the next town over) is more valuable than a perfectly literal result.
No, I still don't want to see an ad. A search result for a cheaper hotel in Kissimmee might be valuable, but I want results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the hotel that serves themselves.
> And if you search for "k8s cluster deployment tools" then you probably want as many ads as possible, so your evaluation doesn't fail to include a comprehensive set of options.
No, I still don't want to see an ad. I want to see search results of a comprehensive set of options, but I want those results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the hotel that serves themselves.
> Perhaps you're saying I already know about electric cars and Kissimmee and kubernetes, to which I'd respond, yes, probably via ads. Maybe a commercial or sign or web ad, but also maybe through a TV news spot (pr campaign) or magazine review (expenses paid) or web article (with affiliate link).
No, I'm saying that I want to discover products that are the best for my needs, not products with the best ad placement. I want tools that serve me, instead of serving the best-funded advertisers.
Literally none of the cases you describe are what I want. Ads inherently give inaccurate information.
fwiw, i generally don't want to be subjected to ads either, particularly for the privacy-invading aspect, but also the time- and attention-wasting aspect too. most ads are absolutely horribly conceived and targeted, especially spray-and-pray email spam.
well, to continue playing devil's advocate, we've had hundreds of years of advertising (newspapers, pamphlets, and posters/signs before that) without any kind of systematic data collection, so it's not necessarily an intrinsic characteristic of the advertising business to collect data.
in an alternate universe, if banks didn't have such a stodgy and stifling rent-seeking business on the movement of money (transaction fees on everything), microtransactions might be the preferred business model of many online businesses that are now dependent on ads.
Anticipating needs of person X, (and serve person X an ad), without any foreknowledge of person X.
a made-up example might be a customer at best buy spending time in both the tv and pc departments and then having an ad pop up on a nearby screen for an intel NUC and/or apple tv (making the assumption you want a tv-connected computer). the ad didn't need to know any personal characteristics about you other than limited, directly observable behavior in the store.
i'm sure people who focus on this every day (i.e., not me) can provide better examples.
You'd have to recognize the face and track it prior to displaying the ad.
if you went that route, you could get away with simpler person recognition (height, width, clothing color, accessories, etc.). or you could just track phones and other devices via wifi/bluetooth (and presumably uwb in the near future).
but you could also just have salespeople on the floor doing the recognition & ad placement part of it, for a lower-tech solution.
i'd actually bet trained salespeople would have better hit rates over algorithmic solutions, where access to large amounts of dislocated data is the main advantage (at the cost of our privacy).
I agree with your point though: from a user's perspective there's no such thing as a quality ad: ads are inherently bad.
As to the question posed by the article, isn't the answer obvious? I don't know if users even "trust" Google's responses now. But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers. As long as Google is still the best way to search up information on, e.g., obscure aspects of Stardew Valley's economy, users who want to do searches about such things will continue to prefer Google. If Google ceases to surface good results for queries compared to e.g. DDG, users will migrate to DDG.
Yeah, I think the only way that would happen is if someone came up with a novel superior approach to search and managed to legally protect it so Google couldn't just copy it. That's a very unlikely at this point.
> But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers.
I don't think I agree with this. Users don't necessarily behave rationally in self-interest: they can be (and are) manipulated, and unwilling to try new tools.
The comment you replied to goes even further to suggest there's no real talent to serving ads at all, and that everything depends upon the audience size. That's not just semantics.
But let's surprise them. I personally would be willing to pay up to 10k per decade of my remaining life expectancy to opt out completely. Upfront payment, right now. A package deal including Amazon would be even better, maybe for 50% more?
I think at one point people need to put a price point to their privacy, otherwise nothing changes. The market has no incentive for this change right now. And yes, that would mean that privacy is a luxury for people who can afford it, which is not what I would like to see, especially since I remember the times when you had privacy by default when going online. But I can't imagine how it can become a fundamental right under the current market conditions.
Google did actually run this experiment. They aren't stupid and lots of people say they'd rather pay money directly rather than see ads. Because of Google's place in the ecosystem they can actually implement that.
So they did. It eventually became Google Contributor and never really launched properly. The early version of Contributor was a lot more pure than what eventually launched. It let you set a budget and compete against yourself in the ad auction, so publishers were getting the same amount of money for their content as before. I tried it out when I worked there. You could set a fake budget and Google would pay for you to see empty boxes or pictures from your own photo albums instead of ads. A few things became apparent.
One is Google doesn't serve all or even most of the ads on the internet. So I still saw a lot of ads. This made the experience feel pretty pointless.
Another is that this model is completely infeasible. The internet economy is huge. Just a week or so of browsing rapidly blew my test budget of a few hundred dollars. To see no ads on the internet served by Google I would have needed to pay a large multiple of what I paid monthly for TV, mobile and Internet connectivity.
You say you'd be willing to pay $10k per decade? Forget it. If you're a heavy internet user that'd buy you less than a month, not a decade.
Finally, this didn't opt you out of search ads. That's because Google has strong experimental evidence that ads on search are good for users. One of the longest running A/B tests the firm ever did was selecting 1% of users and disabling search ads for them. What they found was a long term trend where those users simply used Google less than normal. Without ads the results were less useful so they did the obvious and searched less. Why would Google let you pay to make their product less useful for you?
But I wasn't talking about just the ads, I was talking about the tracking to optimize those ads. I don't care about the ads. Show me ads, I ignore them anyway. I just don't want to be tracked to build out my personality profile for the rest of my life, because I don't know who will get access to that data and what it might be used for. Show ads based on my search term, not based on my browser, email and location history. They will have the same effect as the optimized ones: none.
Just keep in mind, the cohort I was talking about, was the one that will not be monetized. It is the cohort that still sees ads, but will never convert. So I'm not sure why I would buy my own ad space for an amount of money that is based on the usual conversion rate, when my conversion or click rate for my sample of n=1 is zero all the time. My profile correlates to zero spending, it is not worth the average ad price.
Google Contributor kind of proves my point about the efforts required being too costly. It was easier to inject a person as a buyer for their own profile into the merchandising system, than to rework all the tracking tools and the analytics that runs on it to stop tracking that specific person. So yes, my $10k is still not enough.
> Why would Google let you pay to make their product less useful for you?
Because I value privacy as a principle more than a slightly less useful product, and I would pay for it. But apparently I can't afford it.
It was easier to inject a person as a buyer for their own profile into the merchandising system, than to rework all the tracking tools and the analytics that runs on it to stop tracking that specific person.
No, they did it that way because otherwise it'd have reduced publisher earnings who would then have gone to other ad networks with no Contributor programme. How do you set the price of not seeing an ad otherwise? The price of seeing it is set by auction. It had nothing to do with tracking which can be disabled by anyone here:
https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662922?hl=en-GB
and here
https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
Tracking isn't actually the big hammer people imagine it is. That's a fiction invented by journalists. It helps a bit but only really basic stuff like "show German people ads in German" or remarketing (show people ads for products they were looking at buying very recently). That's why it's OK to opt out. You become worth a bit less and you'll see more irritating ads as a result, but very few use this option.
Because I value privacy as a principle more than a slightly less useful product, and I would pay for it. But apparently I can't afford it.
Go disable ad tracking then. The options have been there for many years.
The Internet is very good at overlay networks. Search engines aren't even required. If you want Google's features then they ask that you pay their price. But if you don't want to play with the rest of us, you can host on your own, you can choose to browse via a free web directory you and others like you maintain, and all that.
It's all there for the taking. It's just that the rest of us derive utility from being part of the network that's growing.
Google is a literal barrier to entry when it comes to running a web based business - if you can't secure traffic you die and traffic breeds more traffic so it's price is highly inelastic. It's (essentially) the same issue as market driven healthcare if you are dying then prolonging your life (generally) has infinite value and the market price for treatment becomes as much cash as you can get your hands on.
No one is taking the ability to make a smaller web away from anyone. But that's the nature of the small web, it's small. And maybe your business can't sustain itself on small. That's just incompatibility of what you want and physical reality.
You know what people say on this website about blocking ads, right? "Your business model is not my problem". It's true.
I get what you're saying and I sympathize. It just isn't compatible with the other guy's view. In a "smaller web" your business wouldn't even exist.
https://yacy.net/index.html
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
I'm surprised more companies don't take this in house. 20 years ago little small town newspapers and radio stations had their own in house ad sales. Seems like a no-brainier for web news to sell targeted ads to their customers.
I suppose a lot of people here know how real time bidding networks work but I was mind blown the first time I saw that.
Or they are optimizing to fleece dumb advertisers or I am extreme outlier.
Instagram however, a service that I hardly use, manages to present ads that look interesting again and again.
But from a consumer point of view, is it better to be targeted in a loose way by people guessing about your demographics or an exact way by people who know your demos? And as a publisher, how the hell are you supposed to make content if all the money is gobbled up by the platforms?
I think we should return to status quo ante by just banning the collection of targeting data. We know that the old ad ecosystem worked because we observed it working, and we know that the new one sucks because we observe publishers going bankrupt and privacy being violated.
Of course this is not data, but the parent post has an interesting stance.
Social media sites offer the ability for everyone on platforms to pay for primary placement now. This is a big conflict of interest in how posts are shown to users, and why very protected/secret algorithms are now applied to creatively show posts to some users and not others on all of these sites and services.
Once a company like Google has cornered the search market,and they also have tentacles everywhere through their collected data form other sources (e.g. google maps, gmail, google trends, Android, etc) there are few ways of backing out. They are now deeply ingrained in our society, and they'll know about anyone who is inventing an alternate path before it even happens and possibly operate in an anti-competitive manner. This is the modern realization of Skynet in a way I guess. :/
At the end of the day, how can we trust companies that manipulate us to boost profits? We simply can't, and we shouldn't really allow monopolies to get this big and embedded into critical services.
WSJ: Facebook Overestimated Key Video Metric for Two Years (2016)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-overestimated-key-vide...
There are LOTS of search engines to choose from that are freely available. DuckDuckGo is pretty great these days.
Microsoft is even is making a search engine now, I've heard! /s
So, Google could theoretically be terrible at advertising and yet still make insane profits from it. Just as Comcast’s internal IT systems might be a mess. This is why monopolies tend to be less efficient over time, nothing is forcing efficient operations.
Hey man, i googled that chick in marketing last night and found her facebook account. Really??? well i binged her and found her pornhub account. Bing... Find what you really are looking for.
But the bigger problem is that you have to scrutinize every billing statement from them, and then when they start charging you for things they shouldn't be (every 2 or 3 months), you have to spend a couple of hours on the phone with them to get it straightened out. Until the next time.
[0] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/01/08/centurylink-to-pay-...
Do we know what the data says about it? Statistics on uptime, ping, speed, customer response turnaround...
The one in Palo Alto goes out a couple of times a week and is quite slow.
Luckily they haven't implemented the mooted usage caps: last year I was traveling for a few months but somehow managed to transfer tens of GB over the network in the sierras, according to Comcast's site.
They have a lot of good network engineers but the work at the edge is inferior.
This seems like a reasonable start to build a case against Comcast:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Comcast
I included my anecdote simply to question the narrative.
What I'm looking for is proof.
Google's competitors are literally a click away. Google couldn't get away with Comcasting the web.
Google's ads make good money because:
(1) The overture model for running a search ad market works well (Google acquired and adopted a mature system). (2) targeted ad markets get better with scale. The larger the market share, the smaller a& more targeted a segment is. (3) Ads are also search results. Over time, Google has nudged users to select ads... on high value searches.
On that last point: The value of a click varies in orders of magnitude 18c for this one $12 for that one. In the early days, this meant you could buy clicks for pennies. These days, Google limits the supply of low value ads and increases the supply of low value ad clickers.
On average, users might even see or click on fewer ads than 10 years ago. On high value search terms, advertising prominence & click-throughs are through the roof.
If Google is "playing dirty," this is where the incentive is highest... and achieves the goals which Google has strategically used to grow revenue for years now.
Playing dirty is even a weird term here. A newspaper may have a journalistic ethos whereby ad-selling squares don't get to editorialise journalism... whether they stick to it or not. By what ethos is Google not supposed to let ad selling concerns influence organic search?
So ad-selling squares don't get to editorialise journalism.
Search is (automated) journalist. Why would you think otherwise? If a search treats users as mere eyeballs to trick and hijack instead if inform well engine, then users learn not to trust the search engine, same as any other kind of journalist
This is about incrementality. Google/advertisers are well aware of this fact and have been doing lots of ablation studies to understand advertisement's effectiveness. Don't underestimate the industry; you may spend millions of dollars but not billions of dollars without good justifications.
I don't know the exact numbers (and I wouldn't be able to tell it even if I know it) and it heavily depends on the type of particular ads (e.g. brand ads will show much less incrementality), but the general consensus is that more than half of those ads can take the credit for conversions. Given that conversion tracking and attribution is not perfect, it's fair to take the money.
This generates revenue for Google with virtually no added value.
See: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 and the SS in the reply: https://twitter.com/webiyo/status/1205534848192045056?s=20
Basecamp seems to generate more free advertising from playing the victim in the media than they lose from whatever they complain about.
Did anyone besides Google sales and marketing people actually believe that?
"When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own brand name, you’re forced to pay up if you want to be found. It’s a shakedown. It’s ransom. But at least we can have fun with it. Search for Basecamp and you may see this attached ad."
https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016?la...
Because if you don’t, a competitor will and that is where the article takes the turn into talking about the new layout, occlusion, etc. It’s an interesting discussion about trust and how far Google can push before that trust is broken. However, I’m almost certain I’ve had this conversation a decade ago.
At least for my company, we run blackout experiments and measure/estimate the incrementality of the ads.
The price of AdWords has certainly gone up, but the value hasn't declined.
I don't know if this is because SEO has poisoned their index, or if I'm not googling "correctly" anymore.
Even worse, sometimes instead of striking them out, it substitutes them with "synonyms" that are anything but. For example, if you search for FreeBSD, you sometimes get results where "linux" is highlighted as a keyword. I'm pretty sure that this is some ML crap doing this, because the more obscure the term, the more likely it is to get it not just wrong, but hilariously wrong, even to the point of meaning the opposite.
Maybe they changed that stance at some point?
It sounds like what you're saying is that it acts more like a typical full-text index now? I suppose it's better than nothing, but still not what I would like to see happen.
I don't believe that it's the masses looking for e-commerce sites. I think it's that Google wants people to click on e-commerce sites because it makes money off of those ads. And even if someone doesn't click on a sponsored link to an e-commerce site, that click still reinforces in their mind that Google is the place to start shopping.
There was a comment on HN yesterday where someone wrote something like, "Did you know there are countries where people who want to buy things just go to amazon.com directly and don't search for their item in Google?" I was floored. It never occurred to me that if I want to buy something at amazon.com that I would involve Google in any way. But there must be legions of people who do this, or that person wouldn't have made that statement.
At the same time, I think that Google falls down at this kind of lead generation because it allows so much automation that it can't be trusted.
I just put "rocket to mars" in Google and the top results are ads for Wal-Mart and Michael's.
To be fair, the duck isn't much better. I just put "f-14 fighter jet" into Duck and got an ad for "Fighter Jets For Sale near you" with a link to an auto repair shop.
Oh, I tried an alternate approach and it didn't work... Search bing for Google and you just get a second bing. https://imgur.com/a/YntBiYc
I don’t even notice that it’s not Google anymore.
https://www.qwant.com/
https://duckduckgo.com/
Not necessarily. The great unwashed masses may not be searching for ecommerce, but people not searching for ecommerce may not be monetizable.
Let's say we run a basketball web site that has a search engine. People sometimes type the word "travel" into the search bar.
We can show them results related to the rules violation of "travelling," and/or results related to physical travel such as "trusted partners" who provide charter trips to playoff games.
It could be that we know that 90% of the searches for the word "travel" are for the rules violation. But the remaining 10% are the ones that click on ads. And we get a kickback when someone clicks on an ad on our site.
If all we care about is the web site's revenue, we might choose to prioritize showing travel to basketball games, even though we know it's only relevant for 10% of the users who query the word "travel."
It may only be 10% of our users, but it's 100% of our revenue from keyword searches for "travel." So we show the monetizable results, and maybe--if we are feeling generous--we'll show a little line, "Showing results for travel to games. Click here to search for travel (violation)."
--
TL;DR: We don't need to assume that Google is trying to provide good search results for everyone. They might be trying to provide the results that maximize their immediate revenue.
It wouldn't be so terrible, except that Google is extraordinarily bad at geolocation.
Right now, Google thinks my work computer is in southern New Mexico. Google thinks my personal computer, right next to it, is in northern Nevada. Google thinks my mobile phone, in between the two, is in Los Angeles. All of those locations are hundreds of miles wrong.
But it gets even worse when you want to know about something in a place other than where you're standing right now. It's like nobody inside Google has ever done any trip planning in their entire lives.
Apple Maps has the opposite problem, though. If I want to search for a German restaurant near my location in the United States, it will show me places in Germany.
When I search for "peking duck recipe" show me a recipe for peking duck, and don't show me "local" restaurants which are 300 miles away.
Pretty good for me. Gives me Battle Royale.
"whos the african warlord who has that laughing gif"
Top result is video of "Idi Amin laughing on a boat". Just the thing I was thinking of.
Pretty good.
"whats the name of the principle that two particles csnt have the same characteristics"
Pauli's Exclusion Principle as the top result. Great.
Google has always worked really well for me.
It's a must if you're a developer searching for some obscure error message, yet still most people don't know about it.
That hasn't worked for me for a long time.
This isn't always honored. Google has been inconsistent with this for at least two years. It's noted on HN every time someone brings this up.
I just noticed that with "Verbatim mode" enabled, Google doesn't even try to estimate the number of results available. I find that curious.
This is IMO very power-user-hostile.
> I've actually moved to other search engines because the quality of the results have gone down dramatically.
Agreed. It also reminds me that the old engines weren't so much bad or that Google was better as the quality of the old engines degraded with time (may that be from the index being poisoned, paid inclusion of results, or something else).
Switched to DuckDuckGo a few months ago and haven't looked back, the results pages are much cleaner, like the old Google results.
One blatant issue with Google (& DDG still often does not get right) is the search for a specific busines - using the exact business name and sometimes even town - I expect their listing to be at the top. Instead there's piles of Yelp & listing pages, and I often cannot even find the actual Item for which I'm searching - sometimes have to go to the indexers, hunt for their posting of the intended [website], and go that way.
Opportunity for someone to get it actually right...
Please search engine, listen to this: it's ok if you don't have any results for what I'm searching. I want to know fast when there are no results, so I can try other queries. I don't want to open a dozen of pages before realizing you didn't had any results so only gave me garbage.
I switched to Duck Duck Go a few months back, at first for privacy reasons, but now find myself preferring that search engine's results for most things.
[0] https://searchengineland.com/8-major-google-algorithm-update...
I've seen people say this, but it still seems to work for me, and is even documented here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?visit_id...
Thinking briefly on it, the main thing I leverage Google for is phonebook like information or getting a quick definition/spellcheck.
That is exactly right! I use it as a reference material, calculator, or map. There is no other use for google search due to optimization nonsense.
For anything in-depth, I use technical resources and databases available through my local public library.
Can you speak more about this? Very curious about this as I would like to try myself.
This is in-depth knowledge, as it requires reading and synthesizing journal articles, and understanding themes. This obviously doesn't work for quick questions like what is the square root of 6, but for more higher ordered concepts in my specific field, it's highly valuable.
Does that answer your question?
I've personally switched to https://duckduckgo.com/lite (wished it was available in dark-mode, may be I should write a greasemonkey script) and make it a point to change search engine defaults on all phones in the household and remove or disable google-search and chrome apps.
For most basic searches, ddg/lite works just as good and is lighting fast. I do find myself !g redirecting searches to Google which admittedly does a remarkably better job at answering certain class of queries. I used to search on startpage.com, before it sold to an ad-company, which proxies Google search results minus the tracking and ads.
Speaking of proxy search engines, there're various searx mirrors too, but I haven't yet used them.
By this I mean that it's possible the main reason Google Ads are useful for companies is because Google has reinforced a sort of negative Nash equilibrium by allowing competitors to squat on organic results by purchasing ads against those better results. I.e. So the best organic results lose user share & clicks because Google lets competitors set ads against them. Given this situation, those targeted by their competitors have no choice but to try & outbid their rivals. Meaning Google Ads are only useful to companies because they exist at all, and assuming minimal gaming of the organic results system with SEO, both companies and users would be better off if there were no ads and the best most relevant results won out on their own merit.
It's sad state of affairs we're in if we can't even imagine finding out about something without that knowledge being forced down our throats.
We are not discussing your personal advertising experience. Nor even the general technocratic audience of HN's advertising experience.
The context (set by the OP of this branch) is also that perhaps there is a case of perverse incentives going on, one where we have reached an unhealthy, but relatively stable equilibrium of the majority having the impression of needing Google ads where there would be no such need if they didn't exist.
You responded by saying the majority would indeed confirm that they would not want to be left without ads (an unsubstantiated but plausible claim). But there are clearly people who choose to opt out of ads completely, myself included, and I don't see myself as missing out on anything. So I'm asking whether I am missing out on something.
> but then Google was always ugly until relatively recently
Google was originally and for many years extremely elegant in it’s simplicity. There is nothing ugly about getting people exactly what they need instantly.
As for the main thrust of the article, I’ve already found Google’s results mostly untrustworthy. For some time search results have been so dominated by adverts that frequently the results I was looking for are buried under the fold. Search is a simple task and for 99% of searches there are at least 2 competitors who serve 90% fewer adverts per page. For the other 1% of searches I’m 3 keystrokes away from getting Google’s search laden results as a second opinion.
The reason I started using Google (and made it my home page) over 20 years ago wasn't because of the quality of their searches, but because their home page was a plain white page that loaded instantly (in contrast to Alta Vista and other search engines that were loaded down with all sorts of animations and advertisements that took forever to load). Even after I got broadband I stuck with Google for many years because their searches were clearly the best. In the last few years (especially the last year), their search quality has fallen off a cliff and there is just no compelling reason to stick with them.
What, no ads?
This is no longer true. DuckDuckGo definitely has less obtrusive advertising now versus Google. There are fewer adverts per search and adverts are better labeled. Ads have gotten so pervasive, on a typical Google search, organic results are frequently below the fold.
Ecosia: https://www.ecosia.org
Duckduckgo: https://duck.com
Yandex: https://yandex.com
Cliqz: https://beta.cliqz.com
Qwant: https://www.qwant.com
Startpage: https://www.startpage.com
Searx: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx
Bing: https://bing.com
Resources to build your own:
https://github.com/topics/search-engine
https://openwebindex.eu
https://commoncrawl.org
This is a great feeling. Thanks for the Yandex tip.
But then again, this is the same FTC that has proven unable for decades to rein in the MLM industry, whose blatant scamminess makes Google look like a Boy Scout. So I am over here not holding my breath at all that they will ever draw a line. Google will just keep making that "Ad" label smaller and smaller and fainter and fainter, and the FTC will do nothing other than maybe extracting a tiny fine in a settlement every 10 years or something.
I went to Bing, and had a similar issue. But after its personalization kicked in, I haven't had to go back to Google more than once or twice a month, and in general, I'm happier with my results when I compare the two.
YMMV, though. I trust Google less than I trust Microsoft for search, because the company and its employees seem to lack a "save the world" pathology which I keep getting hints of whenever someone pulls back the curtain on the company's culture. I can intuitively understand a corporate Megalith like MS's interest a lot more easily, so I'm more comfortable deciding whether or not I'm getting a good response from Bing.
But as a daily driver, unless you're really concerned about Google, I don't think there's any material advantage to making the switch.
It's what happened with Google initially. I remember the late 90's search engine landscape. Result were hit or miss, but one of a few search engines would usually give what you needed, so you had to try a few: Yahoo, Alta Vista, MSN, Hotbox... there were even sites the aggregated a few engines to provide results from multiple: I don't remember the name, but there was one such that had 4 quadrants, each one a different engine and you'd get results from all 4. It was my default for a while.
Then Google came along, and I'm not sure it always provided better results than all of the other engines, but it consistently provided results that were good enough that you didn't need hop around much anymore. And as we all know, virtually in the blink of an eye they dominated the market.
This is why I think they can be dethroned if they go too far down a path of weakening their results. Just a bit too far, and a competitor with a little momentum and word of mouth network effects could really gain a toe hold. It's a long shot, but over time.... there was once a time IBM seemed unbeatable. It took years of chipping away from multiple competitors, but they had a big fall.
Dogpile? Looks like they are still around, but a quick test shows it to be even more full of ads than Google nowadays.
I do search for stuff a lot, but to be honest I know perfectly when it will be a stackoverflow page I want, or a wikipedia page, or it will have that link to maps.
I can't remember the last time I searched for something and I didn't already know what domain I actually wanted to end up on.
Yes, most people will search for 'insurance quotes' and click an ad.
Yeah. Plenty of people do.
I know I do when searching for PDFs because DuckDuckGo randomly ignores "filetype:pdf" when it feels like it, and also sometimes ignores word in the the query that are within quotes.
It's also not great with localised results, at least in many parts of the world.
My first preference is DDG, but it's not perfect.
Is this question supposed to be rhetorical?
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=google+search+market+share
So the modern internet in general, I suppose. Corporations in spam. Never mind, it'd be unreasonable of me to expect anything else.
Over the last ten years, my non-bot traffic has dropped to a tenth of that, and at the same time, my ability to find similar websites has disappeared. Now I see nothing but resume-padding blogs with generic WordPress templates, and pages of empty corporate bullshit.
Google SERPs are the one form of advertising I don't mind and are most effective because:
1. Unlike pretty much every other form of online advertising, you have the benefit of user intent in that they actually want to find something and an advertised result may be what they're looking for. Most other forms of online advertising are deliberately intrusive because attention = $$$; and
2. Google ads are paid for on a CPC basis rather than CPM basis so Google is incentivized to show you something relevant to you and your search rather than just churning impressions (like those pages that split an article into a gallery of 11 pages; ad impressions is why they do this).
But a key part of this is user trust that Google clearly differentiated an ad from an organic search result. I wonder what short term metrics and thinking went into this. I'm sure there was a short term topline revenue gain but it's one of those things that you're not actually increasingly value, you're just cashing in your brand's value for cash now.
But hey I'm sure a bunch of people got promoted, so it's fine.
I've started treating google more like the Yellow Pages; a good source when you WANT ads, i.e. you're looking for a tradesman in your area, or a restaurant to go to. For organic search, it's rubbish.
Edit: the dumbed down search has begun on youtube as well, YT routinely ignores what I searched for and just shows me videos related to what I was watching previously. I search for guitar amps and get videos for DIY kitchens, because I was looking at that stuff last night. Beyond moronic.
They claim ads “keep the internet free”. “Free” from paying sure, but free from questionable untruthful ads, con artists Ads, and Horrible content that is monetized by ads that shouldn’t be?
Google will say those are “hard computer science” problems they are tackling. The reality is they tackle the problem as long as it doesn’t impact revenue and put just enough resources on it to make it look like they care. Or retroactively share data and say they are ahead of the problem (like YouTube CEO on 60 minutes).
How a trillion dollar company of the Self proclaimed worlds Smartest people don’t know a pedophile ring is using YouTube kids comments Section is reckless. Why google even needs to monetize Kids content is pure greed. Do kids really want to see an Ad or benefit from it? Maybe to burn into their habits that “Ads are just part of life”
Life With Google in charge of the worlds Information.
Who in the hell is in charge of search at Google right now? What a god awful job. The engineer in charge should be fired for such an abomination.
Only time I hit up Google is if DDG has trouble understanding what I’m after
It seems that world has fallen prey to the mindset, "Screw customer experience, let's extort the maximum amount of money we can."
Technology companies are no longer in the business of making things easier, instead they are in the business of making the most amount of money they can, while not loosing their business entirely. If these companies actually valued the consumer/customer in the past, they've certainly moved beyond that point.
... Declared the news site, in a paragraph sandwiched between two ads carefully disguised to look like legitimate content...
You can debate about whether you believe the message, but there's no reasonable argument that you should believe the messenger.
WTF, journalism. Seriously.
Google's results are now nearly all ads above the fold. The ads are also deceptively marked.
Really scummy tactic. The sort of thing you'd expect from crappy credit card companies.
If this is the direction Google is going to take under Pichai, then I'm out.
Until about negative-ten years from now.
I don't think that's the case. I mean, in some case yes there are companies buying ads when they would have been among the top search results anyway. But assuming that many ad creators are probably savvy enough to know where they rate in organic search results, they're likely not targeting adwords where they'd be high in those organic results.
I.e., competent users of google advertising are, by definition, users that avoid paying for results they would have gotten otherwise.
In my case this leaching appeared to Google as if /we/ were trying to game the system with link farms (we were not). Google penalized us in 2011 and we've yet to recover.
The point: when you use Google search you're often served sub-standard results, as over time generations of ranking penalties has lead to lower quality sites ranking higher.
We don't need two. Which is better? Edit: we've got https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144210 now.
https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1220768238490939394
Maybe Yandex?
I think more Americans have been scammed by Verizon, Comcast, or AT&T than have ever even heard of DuckDuckGo! I have plenty of tiny class-action settlement checks to prove it.
They do offer Youtube Premium without ads but the search engine space is really different. Microtransactions are not here yet.
So, even if they could increase revenue per power user (RPPU?) it would do irreparable harm to their ad-supported model (for non-power users) in the long term.
Besides adblocking is a bit of a cludge.
What's more, Google has been shown to be ideologically driven when ranking its results. Including, for instance, down-ranking news sites with left-leaning or socialist views such as the World Socialist Website, Common Dreams, Democracy Now and others as part of a concerted scheme with other information controllers like Facebook to marginalize ideological viewpoints counter to their preferences.
One can only speculate how much "meta-googling" (googling google to find out what it's up to) is rigged and cherrypicked.
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/395257-better-google
There is mass hysteria about Google in general. They aren't the privacy nightmare the pitchfork wielding folks would have you believe. That said, they inspire others that are indeed nightmares. The entire third party tracking industry is a nightmare. And it was already, before Google. (Google bought doubleclick, don't forget.) But people see Google doing it and want to get in on it, nevermind the internal controls and oversight. So the net net is that it's a bad thing -- nobody can be trusted to hold so much PII.
I'm switching to Bing. DDG never did it for me. As an aggregator of other engine's work, I do not enjoy their business model either.
Wait, so they aren't collecting as much information about me and my use of my machines as they can anymore? When did that change?
To the extent they do collect as much data as they can, they limit it to identify you as a unique user, not you as a specific person. In the cases they necessarily identify you the person (e.g. Google Pay where they know who you are), they firewall that data and do not make the connection to you, some anonymous but unique user. They do an excellent job of not pulling a FB and selling the raw data. Their internal controls are extreme. They "quickly" aggregate and anonymize the data so that they can sell their customers (ad buyers) demographics, not individual people.
They could collect much more information than they do.
That you can say this make me think that we are using different definitions.
Have they also stopped buying real-world credit card usage and correlating it with your other actions?
> To the extent they do collect as much data as they can, they limit it to identify you as a unique user, not you as a specific person.
That doesn't really make it much better, in my opinion.
> They do an excellent job of not pulling a FB and selling the raw data. Their internal controls are extreme.
I never thought they did sell raw data. Having strong internal controls is wonderful, but a bit beside the point in my criticism. I object to the collection. How the data is handled post-collection is a separate issue.
Thank you. This is a really great example of pitchfork-ism. People want to see things that aren't there. Their desire to see those things blinds them to what is actually happening.
Google doesn't and never did what you are implying. Yes, they correlate those 2 sets of information. But neither side of the transaction (CC, Google) knows or can know the identifying linkage in the other direction. It allows the vendor (advertiser) to get conversion rate of online ads to real world purchases, without revealing who purchased them to any of the 3 parties. It isn't that Google or the CC issuer has to anonymise the data after they correlate the linkage, so as to hide the linkage from the advertiser; no party has the other piece of data in the first place, thanks to homomorphic encryption. It's actually a wonderful application of technology, being decried for completely wrong reasons. We need more of this specific technology, not less. (to the extent we need this at all)
> I object to the collection.
As do I, and I stated as much. My anti-complaint is that there is a huge backlash against Google when Google aren't the bad guys. There is a whole industry of actual bad actors -- doing "bad" things with the data they collect. vs Google that treats the data as sacrosanct, and they use it to actually provide a service to you. The other folks are simply stealing your data and reselling it for their own ends, without providing anything useful to you.
Look, I'm not saying Google is great, or even good. As I said here and elsewhere, they are evil. But evil people (entities) can do good things. We (collectively) have all agreed to Google's business model. And Google is acting as a responsible steward for the information they collect. There are much, much worse actors out there that are far more deserving of the spite that is sent in Google's direction. (only re: privacy specifically ... again, they are generally evil and deserve to die the death that will come to them and none too soon)
OK, but that's beside the point. The point is that they collect information about me without my consent.
> There are much, much worse actors out there that are far more deserving of the spite that is sent in Google's direction.
Let's say this is true. That in no way means that we shouldn't complain about Google as well. I direct my ire at all companies that I consider abusive. That some of those may be more abusive than others isn't a free pass to the less abusive ones.