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Ask HN: Decline in Web's Quality?

5 points by jevgeni ↗ HN
Recently I've noticed that my Google results for (notably) technical topics have gotten __significantly__ worse.

Websites riddled with ads to the point of unreadability. It feels that we've regressed into the BonziBuddy/Pop-up era of the Internet, but now it's EVERYWHERE.

I've made a video to illustrate what I mean: https://youtu.be/a9nka506PEM

Is it just me or have you also had similar experience?

4 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 24.3 ms ] thread
chrisco255
I use Brave (chromium with ad blockers) and DuckDuckGo/Brave Search. Rarely use google for searching any more. Rarely see ads anymore.
alpaca128
Use an ad blocker. It's clear websites don't care, so why should the user.

Also it may be worth trying DuckDuckGo. You need to get used to the subtle differences in how it generates results (compared to Google), but in return it won't try to guess what you meant based on search history, so imho the results are a bit more consistent and sites like Pinterest don't appear as often.

yann2
I use the NoScript addon on Firefox and auto filter out all IPs that end up on Steven Black's Host list - https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

That takes care of a significant chunk of the ever increasing pollution.

The adtech world is totally reponsible for the state of affairs. They need to pay a big price or its not going to slow down anytime soon.

jevgeni
Oh wow, the host list is amazing. Thank you so much for this!

To me this is evidence of ads being less and less effective, to be honest. The trust-credits created by early 2000s Google has been spent, it seems.