Yeah I’ve noticed this too. But also the rest of the front page is often either seo spam (like those Pinterest links which catch whatever search term you’ve used) or shopping sites. I’ve found google search to be increasingly hostile to its customers.
I guess we’re not the customers. Use duckduckgo or something else.
It's fraud, effectively. I've seen a bunch of people that are not tech savvy do Google searches, and they have no idea they're clicking on ads. I pointed this out a few times and they seem to not care anyways.
Google knows this very well and they pretend like they're giving search results, but the majority of users are getting ad search results instead.
It is basically the yellow pages on the internet model that a few people tried and Google killed. I'm not sure what we can learn from the fact that Google is regressing into the model they killed in the first place.
Yup. Our competitor advertises against our company name, and Google helpfully optimises the text of their ad -- some ML algorithm finds text most likely to be confused with the search results. Optimising for "clicks" is just optimising garbage.
You're not duckduckgo's customer either (their primary revenue source is keyword based advertising), or the customer of anything else you don't pay for.
The only one I know of that at least plans to have a simple two-way relationship with search users as their customers is Kagi. Currently it's in free beta with a waitlist (took a week for me). When they go live they intend it to be a paid, subscription service with no advertising. So far I've found it good, and I'll gladly pay when the time comes.
>Currently it's in free beta with a waitlist (took a week for me)
When did you apply? I filled out their survey at the end of december and haven't even received a confirmation email. I tried again a few weeks back with a gmail address, and still nothing. So I guess at least it's already at Google-level customer service.
Around the new year. No idea how the waitlist is managed. I was pleased at how prompt it was after signing up for the Github Copilot beta several months ago and not having heard a peep out of them.
Very strange then, it almost feels like I've been shadow-banned from a service I haven't even used yet considering that I tried to request an invite with 3 different email domains (to rule out any domain whitelist) on 2 different platforms (to rule out any typeform website issues), waiting at least 3 weeks in between (to rule out any rate-limiting).
There doesn't even appear to be any contact email aside from the discord which is also invite-only. Kind of soured me on the whole experience.
I’ve had a similar experience but heard back from the Founder that many of the invites from before January 8th didn’t go through, and that he manually approves a new batch every few weeks now
>heard back from the Founder that many of the invites from before January 8th didn’t go through
That makes this situation even weirder. Why not just re-send them, considering that they should have the collected email address sitting right there? If it's a typeform issue, then some sort of message on their site would have been nice. I mean it's one thing if this was a free product, but the fact that they are planning to provide a paid search engine but can't manage the task of sending email invites and don't have any contact address* just ruins any enthusiasm I had of being a customer.
* I realize the founder has his email listed in the FAQ page, but emailing the founder for an issue like this seems quite gauche. And besides I did try reaching out on social media but didn't get any response.
I got an invite within several days of waitlisting back in January. Unfortunately the invite expired before I got around to signup, so no idea how the service actually performs...
We found out that many invite emails ended up in spam unfortunately. We will soon send a re-invite to everyone (knowing another email can frustrate those that already got it).
At least for me there's nothing in spam either. And I've tried with both a gmail address as well as a self-hosted one so I'm confident the issue is not on my end.
I am on Kagi Beta but IMO they do not have a valid monetisation strategy that I would pay for. Their current pricing model is planned to be $30 a month for an 'all you can eat' subscription, or $10 a month for a 'lite' membership that gives you 20 searches per day and then charges you $0.02 per search after that on a pay-as-you-go model (but if you check your search history, you may be suprised how many searches you actually do!). Users who join the $10 lite plan for instance and then do 70 searches a day (I hit much more than this during a full day of programming!) would get hit with an overage bill of $25 at the end of the month, as well as the next months 'lite' charges of $10.
On the 70 searches point too, if you search for "business news" and then click the news360 tab to get news results, I believe this is actually counted as 2 searches so would get charged at 4 cents if in the overages category.
When I searched up I thought maybe $5 a month, or possibly $10 at a push, but $30+ will be too much for mass market adoption in my opinion. I also think there is an inevitable situation that someone searches a lot and suddenly finds themselves getting a $100 bill after they signed up for $10 a month!
Unfortunately there isn't a way around the price too from an architecture perspective because it's a high cost engine to run - the costs are driven by the fact that Kagi uses the paid Google and Bing api's, then adds a bit of it's own index and instant answers, but the Google and Bing API's both charge quite a lot per request (c$0.015 per request).
Search quality is usually pretty good (until it isn't), and it's getting better as it's manually tweaked to meet common queries, but the maps search is pretty much unusable. The search doesn't seem to "understand" queries in the same way Google does, particularly ones that are semantically hard (despite the results coming from google, Kagi reshuffles them). The founder, Vlad, seems pretty great though and is very active in the discord community. I really wish them luck, and particularly that they manage to crack the cost/pricing challenge they have.
However I have gone back to Google with adblock as my daily driver as I just didn't get the same quality of results, and found myself going back to Google enough times to make it frustrating. I appreciate it is a beta though, and that it will only get better over time.
Just a few notes. Search costs money and it seems we needed to get to 2022 to realize that. We made a choice of user = customer so yes the cost is real, and it is suddenly on the user. What they get in return is (at least a promise of) a superior search experience with a product that has many features that Google and similar ad-supported search engines simply never can.
Our $10 plan is likely going to give the user 1,000 searches. 80% of users search less than that monthly, even average HN users (who are majority of our beta users). We will also have pay as you go option ($1 per 80 searches) and $30/mo for people who want to support Kagi.
I would argue that our monetization strategy is valid as it is the only one that at least has a chance of making the business sustainable. Whether enough people would pay (which is what I think you were getting at) is another matter.
Yes our Maps is completely broken now. But at least we are building our own Maps (together with our own Search and a Browser, not an easy feat). The vision is ambitious, I'd love a world where at least a portion of it is realized.
> Our $10 plan is likely going to give the user 1,000 searches.
Do you intend to make the search limit a daily thing, or will it only apply over the whole month?
For me at least, I have spikes in my search behavior, like when I'm working on some difficult project, while on other days there's not much going on. While having a search budget would maybe get some getting used to, I could see myself working with it if I had a way to plan ahead.
It would help if there was UI support for this, similar to what mobile phones have in the "Mobile Data" settings (data used/remaining, usage graphs and so on). I'm also on the beta right now, but haven't seen anything like that when looking just now.
> 80% of users search less than that monthly, even average HN users (who are majority of our beta users).
I suspect 80% of your users also are not daily-driving though, are also using other search engines at the same time, and have not set Kagi as a default on all their computers and their mobile devices (which I did!). In order to do that I had to change my mobile browser from Safari to Firefox, which is part of the reason I suspect most people have not done this.
1000 sounds like a lot more than 33 a day - particularly when if it is a search with a lens applied that drops to c16 per day, or a search that then clicks through to images.
I also think that the people that are willing to pay for search are likely to be the 'power users' which use search more. If your target market is 'people who are willing to pay for search, but don't use search that much' I suspect you will be limiting the market that find the subscription valuable.
> I would argue that our monetization strategy is valid as it is the only one that at least has a chance of making the business sustainable. Whether enough people would pay (which is what I think you were getting at) is another matter.
I think the problem is a monetization strategy is only valid if people are willing to pay for it. Anyone can create a monetization strategy that is designed to cover costs, but it's not going to lead to a sustainable business unless it generates more value for customers than the fee provides.
I don't know how the paid search API of Google and Bing work, but I will say one thing here. When I'm searching for technical data, I often search, and click through to more than one thing. I also tend to modify search terms, too, trying to winnow the results a bit.
My point being, there is a lot of potential for "show the same search results again, because the user re-searched 5 minutes later" and "show the same search results, but filter locally on an additional word" too.
If Google/Bing give "1000 results per search", then there is also value in storing that single search too. I guess:
- I'm not sure how the API works, so I can't add much value here
- But, even though it adds local cost for storage and DB, caching searches per user could reduce costs in some scenarios
Because, while I love the idea of paid search... I think I do 100s of searches per day, so if you pay for each page of search results, and winnowing down results with additional terms....
Completely agree with almost everything you have said, but to clarify on your caching point:
> But, even though it adds local cost for storage and DB, caching searches per user could reduce costs in some scenarios
There may be some opportunity to do this, and caching results would be a good idea, but most forms of caching are explicitly banned from the Google and Bing API T&Cs. Some caching is allowed in some circumstances, but this will limit the usefulness of caching to reduce costs.
> Because, while I love the idea of paid search... I think I do 100s of searches per day, so if you pay for each page of search results, and winnowing down results with additional terms....
Agree with this - and at your usage levels plus $1 per 80 searches plus the $10 fee for 30 / day, you will be talking about $40+ per month, or $480 per year - enough to buy a new Macbook every 2.5 years :)
But IMO having been on the discord group the founders have got themselves into a trap of thinking "Charging per query is the only way we can make the sums financially work because we use both the Bing and Google APIs, thus we will need to get users to accept to paying per query".
> Agree with this - and at your usage levels plus $1 per 80 searches plus the $10 fee for 30 / day, you will be talking about $40+ per month, or $480 per year - enough to buy a new Macbook every 2.5 years :)
The proposed pay per use is an independent tier, not on top of any other.
> The proposed pay per use is an independent tier, not on top of any other.
Pay per use is on all tiers if you go above the quota, the quota just changes based on tier. It’s been made pretty clear on discord that none of the tiers will be ‘all you can eat’.
A bottom PAYG tier is different to what I last heard although it doesn’t actually change the monthly cost of $40 for OP though.
> I think the problem is a monetization strategy is only valid if people are willing to pay for it.
There are people willing to pay for it, the question is will there be enough. A doomed monetization strategy would be one where people are willing to pay for it, but you lose money on every transaction.
> 1000 sounds like a lot more than 33 a day - particularly when if it is a search with a lens applied that drops to c16 per day, or a search that then clicks through to images.
Not sure where you got this from. Search via lens does not cost as 2 searches. It is costing 1 search and we are making changes in the future where it will count as less than 1 search.
I've been using kagi for a while. I was using google+ublacklist, and (mostly) searx prior to that. I only care about search, every other feature (maps, listicles, etc) is worthless to me.
So far I've been quite pleasantly surprised. I didn't need to de-prioritize anything yet, and most of my queries are technical. I would pay for it, but like you say, I'm not sure how much.
5$ for unlimited searches is something I'd go for without even thinking. For 10$, I already question whether is it actually better than using searx where I get comparable results. I can get a VPS cheaper than than and run my own customizable searx instance for that cost.
I'm not doing anything fancy, but I don't want to think about the query count. You can stack-up hundreds of searches per day sometimes, just because you're looking up something interesting, then do next to nothing for days.
I'm not saying I wouldn't pay for more, but I don't see the gain.
I definitely see the problem with the API cost of the underlying calls though. That feels like a huge argument that having your own index is important to compete in the market.
> I definitely see the problem with the API cost of the underlying calls though. That feels like a huge argument that having your own index is important to compete in the market.
A Google size index that is potentially able to replace google results would probably cost $100m-$1B to build. We have a fraction of that built for noncommercial results (try Noncommercial lens in Kagi to see how it works).
Aside from the upfront cost, how much do you think a query would cost? I know it's a bit hand-wavy as it depends on the infrastructure itself, but maybe you already have an order of magnitude of the projected cost? I wonder just how much margin google/bing is actually making with the API.
I'd pay $10/month for a nerd-only, developer-friendly, pro-small-biz, precision search that works like 2008 version of Google. Something that I use dozens of times a day, is totally worth paying for.
I've seen some people mention Kagi[1], but it's a closed beta. Hope they're successful, because I would also gladly pay $10/month to get a search engine that actively resists spam.
Kind of an aside but it seems like there are SEO pages which dynamically adjust their displayed text in the search results to your search query...how does that work? Isn't search result text indexed in advance? Or is this some sort of paid feature from google, where your search terms are injected into a template?
Whatever it is it's really annoying because usually these results link to another search on a shopping site and more often than not those results come up empty anyway.
They are usually search result pages with the keyword in the url parameter, and they link to those search results elsewhere on their site for Google to find
But they show up in the cached google search preview as well. I search for something that doesn't exist, and you get 5 "shopping" sites that have faked URLs and faked product entries for the non-existant product.
Like you see in the cached textlines: "Buy reptilecandy here, low prices!!" or something, and the URL to the site seems legit, trustedstore.com/reptilecandy/ but if you click on it you just get to the shop top page with no reptile candy in sight.
This actually turned out to be an example of what was discussed... if you google "reptilecandy" (as one word) you get some of these weird search results that do look like they have a category on the shop that has Reptile Candy, with the appropriate Title and search excerpt.
Clicking on one of the sites linked in the search results gives:
And on their shop page it seems they have a section called "Reptile Candy & Favors". But if you click on the category above, Candy & Favors, there is no sub-section list so the sub-section is probably entirely dynamically generated.
So there's something weird going on, I wonder how those dynamic categories end up in googles search excerpts. Can they pay google to inject non-existant pages and sections into the results? (the search result in question was not marked as an Ad though)
I'm beginning to realise that Google are happy for Pinterest to monopolise all image search since it requires a lot of resource and is difficult to monetize.
Not sure why they are allowing them to take over the rest of search though?
I don't get how Pinterest hasn't been removed from existence by Google. There is literally no one who is ever searching for things that wants a Pinterest link, but the incredible persistence of Google in showing me Pinterest is amazing.
Though this kind of goes to the related question: why Google don't allow you to setup your profile to nuke domains from consideration when you search, I do not know - it would completely divorce them from any responsibility for search result manipulation and make everyone happier.
There's a great chrome extension called "unpinterested" that automatically adds -site:pinterest.* to all google queries. It's improved my use of google by an east 20%.
It's so bad you'd almost think google has a stake in pinterest at this point.
IIRC, it was canned because it was linked to search performance and was abused on an industrial scale for negative seo.
Such a blacklist could be limited to one's personal account though but, I guess, since there is no monetisation benefit for google they don't care to offer it?
Pinterest links can be removed from Google searches using the "Unpinterested" browser extension for Firefox and Chrome, but it breaks Google Maps searches and it was never patched to correct the issue.
My biggest feature request: A check box that says, "[ ] I'm not buying anything"
I don't know how technically hard this would be to implement. Or what business model will resist adding it. I just know that most of my web searches are NOT me trying to buy stuff. They're usually looking up information.
Like, how does the load sensing algorithm work on my LG washer? No chance I'll ever find out by searching the web. Only 200 links to different places I can buy a new one. Or maybe some videos explaining that the feature exists, and "oh and would you like to buy one?"
Maybe I want to know if my GadgetMaster 3000 will work with my WidgetWanker Mark II. Nope, but here's 100 places you can buy those, or maybe the THINGDOODLE brand of knockoffs.
Ok, I'm ranting. Point is: give me a way to restrict my search to only those pages that aren't selling anything. Maybe the heuristic is that the page hasn't changed in 6 months, or uses outdated tags like <marquee>, or some fancy semantic analysis of the page copy. I don't know. I just wish search results weren't so utterly dominated by e-commerce sites or affiliate spam.
Google is incentivised by you relying on them instead of a competitor, shortly followed by page loads. Giving you what you want immediately, particularly when they know that you know what your searching for is a niche interest, isn’t in their best interests.
> My biggest feature request: A check box that says, "[ ] I'm not buying anything"
The primary purpose of ads isn't to get you to buy something. It's to plant a brand in your brain so that next time you do want to buy something, you'll think of the brand.
I’m not talking about ads. I’m talking about the “natural” search results.
Of course those are also really ads in a sense, but somehow there’s got to be a way to provide a real search engine that doesn’t show only e-commerce sites. I’ll pay for it!
If we are to believe advertisers are so great at their jobs, why can't they produce any meaningful metrics that don't commit egregious sins of statistical analysis?
Here's a thing that I am absolutely convinced happens. Ad network tracks purchases. Ad network track ad impressions. Ad network correlates the two and finds that 90% of people who saw the ad also bought the product. But they conveniently "forgot" to check if the ad impression was before or after the purchase.
I'm confident this is happening because the only times I see ads for anything I'd be interested in buying is after I've already bought the damn thing.
If 1 out of 100 impressions leads to a purchase it's alredy a good performance. The effort to improve this rate is not always worth it. That's the reason we are spammed with ads.
I'm not convinced even 1 out of 100 is happening. If advertising is having an impact, it would be measurable. If it's not measurable, there's no impact.
> If 1 out of 100 impressions leads to a purchase it's alredy a good performance.
But do they at all take into account the fact that probably about 50 out of 100 ad impressions lead to an "I'll NEVER purchase anything from the purveyor of this ad-spam shit!" reaction?
This is the summary of the second hit on Duck Duck Go (the first hit is a troubleshooting article about the feature):
> A built-in load sensor automatically detects the laundry load and a microprocessor optimizes washing conditions such as ideal WATER LEVEL and washing time. Turbo drum washing (option) When "Punch + 3" washing wings turn, the washing tub turns in the opposite direction.
I accidentally searched for this:
load sensing algorithm work on my LG washer?
Adding "how does the" to the beginning of the search gives this as the second hit:
> Water level sensing in LG washers is done differently from how you may be used to seeing it done in other brands. Whirlpool, GE, Electrolux and others use an air tube connecting an air dome on the tub to a pressure sensor with a physical diaphragm or transducer that "feels" the water level increase as an increase in pressure inside the air tube.
Which seems more promising, but I didn't click through.
Appreciate the effort, but my example was for clothes load sensing (what it does before determine the water required.)
I've watched it at work and as best as I can tell, it takes inertial mass readings by wiggling the drum using a specified current, and measuring how far the drum oscillates. Or maybe it predetermines the amplitude and measures the power required?
I'm just guessing. What I want to find out: is either of my guesses close? Is there something else I'm not seeing? Why does it do this 4 times in a row? (In between "wiggles" it will rotate the drum a few times to—my guess—redistribute the load and get an average from the four readings.
Maybe its rose-tinted glasses looking at the web of yesterday, but I have this sneaking suspicion some nerd out there has an entire website devoted to arcane appliance details like this. I would very much like to find and bookmark that site!
The problem I am seeing is that yes, someone will write the exact nerdy explanation on how it works - on a private Facebook group, which you will never find in any search engine. I'm a member of several automotive FB groups and the wealth of knowledge there is enormous - but ultimately it all gets swallowed up in Facebook's belly and is not available for easy search like it used to be. It's a real tragedy.
Yeah the replacement of forums with facebook is one of the worst things to happen to the web. Like craigslist, many of them still exist, but are just not very active.
But the “I’m not buying anything” box would never be implemented by Google because their whole existence is based on tracking us to find out they or their real customers can extract every last dollar from us. It’s all surveillance ad based…
Duckduckgo hasn't been any better for me lately. It seems like search as a whole is failing to respond to the latest round of SEO tricks. It takes a lot more work to find what I'm actually looking for, regardless of which engine I use.
> But also the rest of the front page is often either seo spam (like those Pinterest links which catch whatever search term you’ve used) or shopping sites.
Hey now, SEO spam is often packed to the brim with high revenue ads.
I think they've already done that–only since they are a software company they decided that it would be better to write an OS for portrait mode monitors, and make it free, off-loading those pesky manufacturing steps. Ideally the OS would be attached to a device that the consumer would bring with them everywhere and have fancy geo-locating tools that tell Google where they go, you know for better ad attr-err search relevance!
Try neeva . com it's really similar to google but with none of the garbage experience from ads and SEO Spam. I switched from duckduckgo to neeva recently and have enjoyed it wayyy more.
So what if it is cropped, is the amount of ads shown in the screenshot with no actual search results acceptable to you?
Does the fact OP has a smaller or larger resolution than you change your mind?
I can't replicate at all, in fact I get zero results labeled as ads for the same search (on desktop, logged in, using FF). I have my search history paused, perhaps that could be affecting it?
Edit: I now see 3 ad results after disabling uBlock origin, but still far from the entire thing being ads. I didn't think it removed ads from the search results themselves (since I see 'sponsored ads' occasionally in my search and things). My bad.
I test it occassionally and regularly see 3 or 4 ads, but not as much as the OP. That is pretty crazy as a result. Normally though I have 2 or 3 layers of ad protection.
Those two I just took. I mercifully cannot replicate this one anymore, but here's one for "indeed" I took in December, where LinkedIn had an ad that took up my entire laptop screen: https://i.imgur.com/x7g5Uo3.png
I can't replicate OP's specific one, but remember that ad buy is very dynamic. I do get the top two positions as competitors, one of which is seen in OP's link as well: https://i.imgur.com/hYjaWm4.png. I certainly do not think this post is fake.
> I, frankly, suspect you're a troll at this point.
It's sad how any resistance and the resistor must be a troll.
Even in your own video without adblock the ads display sparingly. If you count the instance you'll see that after reduction (meaning you take the average distance from the first link) the "correct" link is probably #3 or #2.
You have been caught lying, arguing, and moving the goal posts. Being accused of being a shill is a natural progression.
You have done nothing to clear up misinformation, argue in good faith, or concede a disproven claim. All these are required for arguments in good faith.
The title of this post is "For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads" - I hope it's shocking that that's true, irrespective of if we can replicate the exact ad placements in this post?
I saw this myself months ago with my father. He calls me up, and tells me that Google is only showing him ads, and he can't find any actual content. I figured it was some kind of malware he installed, but nope, I get over there and it's exactly like this screenshot. The entire first screen of results was ads. Then when I scrolled down, there weren't Google ads, but just a bunch of SEO spam. Wasn't gonna waste my time figuring it out, so I put him on DDG, and his problems were solved.
lol, OK what was the query? let's see the DDG and Google results side by side.
I swear people always say nonsense like this and when I ask for specific queries they stop replying. Check my history if you doubt it.
I don't doubt you saw ads, but Google very strictly limits the percentage of the screen that can be ads or percentage of results. If you can find a single query in which every result on the first page is a sponsored ad I'll send you $5 via Venmo right now, no questions asked.
people just like saying 'omg all my screen is ads' and then they crop their screen showing like 20% of the screen on a 1080p monitor. >_>
what's after the fold? Why do you crop it so it only shows ads? so ridiculous. Google will almost never show more than 5 sponsored ads or some combination of 2-3 ads and sponsored modal. same is true with Bing, DDG, Startpage, etc.
this scenario of all of the results being ads is nonexistent. again if anyone can show me a reproducible query in which all results are ads, $5 - easy.
I'm on a 15" macbook pro and also only see ads below the fold. Is it difficult to imagine that most users around the planet aren't working with 27" monitors or whatever size it is you have?
I suspect you misunderstood what folks are up in arms about. No one is claiming that Google is serving an entire page worth of ads. They're angered that the entire above the fold section, typically on a laptop, is entirely ads.
It is nice how passionate you are, though.
Also, appropriately, your screenshot of DDG does not showcase all ads.
I didn't crop it.. that's the point.. on the native resolution of my computer, doing a search for that specific term shows 100% ads after clicking "search".. Obviously you can scroll past them, maybe that's why you're confused?
Nobody's saying the search results are only ads, they're saying that the only results that are shown to consumers without some action on their part are ads...
> Nobody's saying the search results are only ads, they're saying that the only results that are shown to consumers without some action on their part are ads...
The title of this post and point of the twitter thread is:
"For some searches literally the whole screen!! on google is now ads."
I love how you're on a YC Combinator forum criticizing other people about worshipping corporations.
I care about accuracy and quantifiable metrics. I can show screenshots for Bing, DDG, and Google showing all ads. OK what's the point? What percentage of results on the first page for each are ads. More accurate and easier to compare.
By the way, if you want to attack Google you should attack them for things that actually matter, like their egregious Play Store fees and anti competitiveness by misleading buyers in their ad bidding market, tax evasive, anti-trust, and adherence to censorship in various countries.
do you realize how disgusting it is to be okay with twisting the truth as long as it fits your agenda? somehow people are actually receptive to arguments like yours, it boggles the mind. criticize when there is something to criticize, in Google's case this is not hard. viewing the world in black and white is the height of immaturity
"Twisting the truth" in this case is using a term that literally everybody except for one deliberate contrarian understands to mean the same thing.
A good faith argument shouldn't come down to semantics. Once you realize that the other side isn't using a term in the way you think it should be used, you can either stop the debate to argue the semantics, or accept their definition as the terms for the debate.
I think when people are saying "the whole screen is ads", they mean the _visible_ screen. The person took a screenshot of the first visible screen and it's all ads. You can even see in the tweet that the tippy top of the next result is a non-ad, but all visible results were ads. Even one of the parent comments says "...Then when I scrolled down, there weren't Google ads, but just a bunch of SEO spam", implying that there were non-ads if you scrolled.
So I think there's just a communication breakdown here.
You didn't even read my comment you replied to. Did you not see where I said that I scrolled down past the ads to look at all the totally legit SEO spam?
Maybe people don't reply because they don't care about proving it to you, or they don't care about replying to some snarky-ass comment. I saw what I saw, and don't care if you don't believe it.
Yes. I have seen it a lot. More and more as the days go on. Google search results are no better than any of the other search engines and even worse for people not in tech they do not even know they are ads.
Just dark patterns. Sad it used to be a good search engine.
As for your question, there is no point in trying to replicate results for the same query, search results and the displayed ads can wildly differ for the same query based on a large number of factors.
That's never been the definition. The fold is the bottom of the viewport on initial load, meaning nothing below the fold is viewable without scrolling. This is an analog to the fold in a newspaper, hiding anything below it.
It seems like most of the claims you've made in the this thread are false.
The issue here is that I’m talking about literally the line break between ads and regular results. There are multiple folds - search widgets, instant results, etc.
I wonder if there would be a good way to monetize a search engine such that returning great results gets them paid.
Like a check in if you found what you were looking for, give a penny. Or potentially not what you were looking for, but something that you are happy you found. Thus giving back good info to the search engine and only pay a nominal amount when you get what you want.
The Facebook stock debacle from yesterday makes me think that maybe there is a limit to how user-hostile a tech giant can be before it really starts to hurt their bottom line. For a while it seemed like companies like FB had captured enough of the market that they seemed impervious to backlash from their many controversies, too big to fail in a way. It’s too early to tell if this is the beginning of FB’s demise, but it looks like letting resentment towards your product build among your user base can come bite you in a very real way after all.
FB used outrage as a way to increase engagement and it worked for a while, but now FB is increasingly a non-desirable place to hang out. Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content. When Apple added restrictions that cut off oxygen to FB, FB started a PR campaign to paint it as one grave injustice. It seems like that was met with a collective shrug. Who cheers for the bad guy?
All that is to say, it seems like Google has been in this value extraction mode for a while and I don’t see what the long term plan is. They don’t seem to be innovating much, but are instead intent on squeezing as much money as they can from their existing assets. And while that may work in the short term, FB has shown tech giants are not invincible. I’ve seen a lot of talk online lately about how bad the quality of search results have gotten. If a credible competitor emerges, I think a lot of users would gladly switch. If/when that happens, Google better hope they don’t find themselves in FB’s position where they can’t acquire their way out of their rut.
> FB used outrage as a way to increase engagement with their product and it worked for a while, but now FB is increasingly a non-desirable place to hang out.
> Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content.
Tiktok does this very well. I usually end up feeling good after using TikTok. On the other hand Twitter makes me stressed, FB is not much used by my friends age group or only used for memes, and Instagram is now showing me two ads every three stories that is really a pain to use.
Should we be concerned if the goal of a social network is to just make people feel well? (This is a serious question to ponder as a society perhaps (or just for me).) The goal of these products of course is to keep people around.
Not to feel good as a goal but certainly as an effect of positive human interaction and experience. It's a desired outcome that interaction with the product makes you happy.
Where do normal people go from Google? I've seen plenty of billboards for DDG, and even radio ads, but how likely is it that a user will switch (& persist) when their browser is controlled by the offending company that isn't afraid of implementing dark patterns to get the users back? Anecdotally, I have a senior citizen neighbor who asked me to look at her computer because of ads (I figured malware/adware) and she was somehow already using Firefox as her browser, so her problem was just resolved by installing uBlock Origin.
Users defecting from FB have a number of options, driven by their in person network, search doesn't. How do new search engines communicate that Google is turning up the (ad/spam) heat and they need to escape the pot? Search results are subjective (that's why Google uses human raters), so what does it take for users, en masse, to start questioning their search results quality and/or excessive number of ads?
Bing, Yandex, and DDG are more than serviceable. Furthermore, you have to imagine every search counts. Sure, Siri results might come directly through Google but that doesn't mean they won't lose some other fraction of your searches if you set your default search on Safari to be Bing.
…a limit to how user-hostile a tech giant can be before it really starts to hurt their bottom line…
Reading that line I just realized that google lost me as a YouTube viewer in the past two weeks. I used to follow a bunch of ~100k subscriber channels that produced content every couple of weeks on building things and how to build things. I'd generally watch one or two 10-30 minute videos a day.
They've cranked the ads through the roof to the point that I'd see the same 6 second Liberty Mutual bit three times before the video even got through its introduction along with a couple other ads.
I now realize its been days since I even went to the site. So I guess for this n=1 we've found the limit.
I quit because I was getting 2-3 30 second ads per video, 5 minute videos that is.
Ended up getting an ad blocker on my iphone and deleting the app. I now have to use youtube.com and settle for 720p, but it's far and away better than the shit ads it served.
You may have been in the heavy ads group from some sort of A/B experiment on how the number of ads they show affects engagement. YouTube runs these sorts of experiments all the time to improve "metrics". I've heard that there's even a long-running "control group" that doesn't get ads on YouTube.
The account I logged into Youtube... female facebook shill sock puppet. The feminine hygiene ads are down right discusting. N <= 2, If I see 3 ads, I just close the window.
There is the Scottish electrical engineer, that although his accent is really thick, its refreshing, but with the adds for cell phones/no and FHP/no.
Have you tried Youtube premium? We always say companies should move out of the ad revenue model and start charging for the services instead of pushing more ads. For me, paying Youtube premium has been a great decision.
I know the creators get at least some of it. I have no idea if it's more or less than they would get with ads. I also pay for premium, and I'm fine with Google getting some of it. After all, it's not free to host and stream millions of petabytes of data. I really enjoy YouTube without the ads. It might actually be one of the last videos streaming services I'd get rid of.
Seconding this comment. I grumbled at first about paying for it but frankly after more than a year I’ve come to realize it’s money well spent considering how much use my family gets out of it.
>>When in the history of mankind have the censors ever been the good guys?
I mean.....removing pedo or gore content from Youtube is still censorship. Just the kind that we probably all agree with. The way you view censorship(and censors) mostly depends on whether they remove content you want removed or not, and that line can massively vary even in western societies(for instance I love the fact that in Germany any nazi-related content is actually criminal, but many Americans gasp at the very concept - however the line is there even in America, but it's just placed in at a different point).
It doesn’t feel that great to help a company that’s dominating video hosting to help them muscle into the music streaming business through a bundle offer. But otherwise, yes: we might all be better off if Google made more from subscriptions and less from ads.
> When in the history of mankind have the censors ever been the good guys?
It's not called censorship when it is the right and reasonable thing to do. In many cases, it is simply decision making done collectively by society. For example, we don't tend to allow blatantly religious proselytizing in public schools by teachers. Is that censorship? Maybe? Is it controversial? Not really.
Education is actually a good example -- as decisions are constantly made in terms of what is and is not made available to students. It's easy to find decisions that are blatantly wrong -- for example, banning "A Big Mooncake for Little Star," which is a book about a little kid eating a cake. (But there are other choices that are obviously correct, such as banning books in school libraries that are blatantly misleading.
Whether something is considered censorship is often a matter of perspective.
Here’s the problem - if you don’t already watch a lot of YouTube the non pay version is such a bad experience that you avoid watching on it so you’d be unlikely to want to pay for it.
I agree with you 100%. I've had it for quite a while. When I see Youtube without being logged in, I really can't imagine using the at all with the current level of ads - it's gotten way worse in the past few years.
I also like having access to YouTube music but like so many things with streaming, you're not certain to get continued access to stuff you like. I've started buying MP3's of songs that I like again so that I don't have to worry that Google will stop carrying the music any more or raise prices on YouTube Premium to a level I don't like.
I have less and less trust for the big companies that provide these services so I'm focusing more on self-hosting and some form of ownership. It's not just MP3's. I'm also making sure that I'm using FOSS for my note taking (Joplin), backups (duplicati) and other such things. Some of this stuff is too valuable to me to risk losing access to.
I'd buy YouTube premium if YouTube was still an independent company. Even if paid YouTube doesn't serve you ads, they are still collecting analytics you and building out your Google profile. No thanks.
Honestly I’ve been interrupted by relentless pleas so many times for YouTube premium that I just don’t consider it a “positive” thing. I could cancel my Patreon payments to the content creators and redirect that money to Google, who would then give a small fraction of it to the creators. That doesn’t seem like I’m dealing with an ethical hosting service.
I’ll probably look through the Patreon pages in a few weeks, see who I still care about, and see if they have alternative video feeds that aren’t so ad littered. Those can remain, the rest I’ll cancel.
FB went with jacking people's emotion with rage, fear, and other scare tactics. Monsters Inc however showed us there's more power in laughter than screams. It's a shame nobody on FB's board ever watched a movie.
You're misreading the situation. It's not user hostility that's inherently the issue, it's that the demographics are aggressive and Facebook is failing to capture the younger, more captive audiences.
I think the risk here is that adblocking can only grow (and maybe Manifest v3 is the only answer Google has had to that so far). As people become more frustrated with Google they either complain to their friends/family or search online for help and inevitably learn about adblocking.
Once they do that they become lost to Google forever.
Perhaps the only holdout is mobile. But otherwise ad-tech is poisoning the well for themselves.
Speaking of Manifest v3, I really hope all these adblock extensions secretly work together and on the day Manifest v3 is released, they all display a gigantic red-backgrounded warning on startup telling the user Google Chrome has turned evil and suggesting them switching to Firefox or some other browser.
I can't speak to the market, but for me personally the restrictions on ad targeting and more specifically conversion tracking is what made me think FB loses a lot of value - not the reverse in user growth. Though that's not great for a long term window.
It seems the most profitable users don't care and typically engage with the ads. Or they used to before apple came in and lowered the quality.
>Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content.
TikTok has by far the best recommender system I have ever tried. After an hour of use the system had correctly narrowed down my interests of exoplanets, space exploration, technology, and startups.
However that also means TikTok is the most hypertuned echochamber. I hope people don't get their political views from TikTok.
Your intuition is correct. According to [1] it can take 2 hours of browsing and interacting with transphobic content to get straight into neo-nazi content. Many people don't ever see such videos, and don't think it's on the platform - it does become a very hypertuned hyperfocused echo chamber.
The web page you linked seems like it was written by someone who lives in a basement and has never logged off of Twitter.
“ We defined “prominent far-right figures/prominent far right talking points” posts as those that contain prominent far-right figures such as Ben Shapiro, Alex Jones…”
“ We defined “racist/white supremacist” posts as those which… support white supremacy by using white supremacist talking points such as “white pride” or “white lives matter.””
So do white lives not matter? Seems like whoever wrote this hates themselves and is racist.
Bravo, best self-own I've seen in a while. And thanks for letting us know you're the kind of poster who unironically echoes white supremacist talking points.
It isn't an either or situation. Personally I used to watch Youtube quite a bit more but barely watch it at all these days thanks to their oppressive censorship policies.
In my experience people making these "freedom stands" are a statistical minority that in no way influences actual mass markets, much like those Greenpeace people chaining themselves to oil & gas equipment to stop it from being used.
I mean, it's nice and noble but the vast majority of people don't follow you and corporations don't care as long as you don't become a social and political landmark. If you go quietly for sure it doesn't matter to their bottom line.
People generally give stuff up for prosaic reasons, instead such as: too many ads, favorite content producers moved to another platform, content they like becomes paid, their social circles don't consider the platform cool anymore, etc.
>In my experience people making these "freedom stands" are a statistical minority that in no way influences actual mass markets
>.., favorite content producers moved to another platform,..
This was my grip against youtube, it wasn't merely a principled stand. Numerous independent content creators that I had followed and subscribed to on Youtube have been either censored, demonetized or blocked completely in the last couple of years. It doesn't matter to your bottom line until you censor, discourage, or otherwise drive away enough people where it does start to matter, as Facebook found out a few days ago. Perhaps Youtube/Google is such a monopolistic revenue juggernaut that it can continue to censor, demonetize and ban content creators liberally and without any coherent standards and still churn out a profit. We'll see.
They just need to keep content creators happy, which is a much smaller customer base. So if numbers really start falling that's going to be a much easier thing to fix.
And keep in mind that content creators have their own interests ($$$, fame, etc) not all of which align with their viewers' interests.
I often prepend my searches with strings such as "wikipedia " - typically there's a big improvement on the SRP end...but the borG will fix that if it catches on.
Coming soon - "Ad Infinitum(tm)" Google search results pages, which start to slowly scroll 5 seconds after being displayed...
I feel like using search engines has become a "jargon arms race" where you have to be smart enough to figure out the right combination of synonyms for what you want, that advertisers, seo spammers, and regulators haven't figured out how to stimey yet. Jargon is almost like a different language at this point, where if you know how to speak in esoteric jargon you have unfettered access to information, and if you don't, then information rapidly approaches unobtainable.
Even that doesn't help in cases as Google will interpret your jargon filled query to something that's a lower common denominator and return irrelevant results regardless.
To be fair, it depends on the screen. The submission makes it sound like the whole first page is ads, but there’s 4 ads at the top instead of the usual 2-3. It happens to extend to the fold in this Twitter user’s browser.
I scroll past all ads out of habit[0], so honestly this doesn’t impact my Google usage. Wish I didn’t have to train that muscle, but here we are. :(
Ah, my bad - though you can use many of the same block lists, iOS only has a concept of content blockers, so you have to use DNS Cloak with a content blocker. Or you can use Brave on iOS which has adblock.
You could send your DNS queries over a VPN to your home network... but that’s pretty roundabout and will have a big performance hit. Instead you can just run a pihole-like DNS resolver on iOS directly. I like DNSCloak, which just runs dnscrypt-proxy under the hood.
As a pihole alternative, I highly recommend using dnscrypt-proxy. It can provide the same system/network level DNS ad blocking but it also ensures all your outgoing queries are encrypted and spread across different resolvers so no one can use your DNS activity to profile you. I also find the blocking/forwarding rules are more powerful than pihole’s.
That said, pihole or any DNS level blocking is pretty weak compared to what uBlock Origin and provide. Like a parent commenter said, it doesn’t prevent you from seeing the google ads, it just keeps the links from working. Most big sites know not to make their ads so easily blocked.
Now that I think about it, I don't use search engines very much anymore, at least not in the traditional way. My searches are almost all site:$foo.
Actually, a good majority of my searches are site:reddit.com {product I am looking for}, or site:news.ycombinator.com {some tech thing I want to find again}.
I think there is a comparison here to how inbound telephone calls, or to some extent email, have been made useless by marketers. Google searches for "Phoenix {thing}" tend to be almost all yelp/yelp clone spam.
edit: this made me actually look in my history. It seems that by far the thing I am using google for the most is image search. Second from that is spelling/grammar sanity checks.
I just try to do as close to first party searches as I can instead. Like, use the Reddit search to search Reddit, or use Yelp to search for businesses, and when I don’t know what site to search from, I just use DuckDuckGo.
I find it easier than typing out “site:” especially since my browser allows me to just start the URL and then tab into a search on that site.
I've been using shorthands for websites for a while now, "aw pipewire" looks for "pipewire" on Arch Wiki, "c cassandra" looks through my confluence, "re hotas" is for reddit and so on. It's very easy an intuitive. I'm using Vivaldi, but I'm pretty sure it's a feature in many other browsers that let you add a custom search engine.
In principle making a some-of-the-web search engine is a tractable problem. Start by indexing known high quality, preferably moderated sites. Allow trusted users to upload their bookmarks for indexing. And so on...
My guess is the reason there are so few competitors is economics. You can't get investment as long as Google stock is a sure bet. Few will pay for your service as long as Google is answering their questions. Advertisers aren't interested as their money is more effectively spent on Google. Therefore you can't build an audience sure to lack of revenue/capital.
Firefox + Ublock & Privacy Badger, on desktop and mobile. I also use Blokada on Android. This combination stops most ads, and if a few sneak through it is easy to create a custom rule.
While I still find Google useful, especially Google Scholar, I've primarily moved to DuckDuckGo for most casual searches.
It’s a band-aid. Just let Google slowly die, it’s already time when you should pull the plug – the patient is brain-dead for several years and there is no hope.
Use DuckDuckGo it’s a lot better with relevant search results and privacy friendly.
today i bought another batch of Yandex stocks after they tanked 30% since a few weeks ago. I believe Yandex is able to fill a niche left empty by Google - good ole useful search results without censoring and ad infestation. I'm bullish on Yandex. they also have amazing image search (much more useful than googles) and they are planning to expand focus beyond Russia and neighboring countries.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 386 ms ] threadI guess we’re not the customers. Use duckduckgo or something else.
The Majority.
The only one I know of that at least plans to have a simple two-way relationship with search users as their customers is Kagi. Currently it's in free beta with a waitlist (took a week for me). When they go live they intend it to be a paid, subscription service with no advertising. So far I've found it good, and I'll gladly pay when the time comes.
They can grow their market by offering 10 free searches a day, and I think that would be enough to entice a lot of folks to switch.
Offer a paid API, and I'd bet they'd have a real growth story.
I hope they give me a easy way, to set my own priorities (but I would choose that option).
You can choose to boost particular sites, or to down-rank sites with trackers.
When did you apply? I filled out their survey at the end of december and haven't even received a confirmation email. I tried again a few weeks back with a gmail address, and still nothing. So I guess at least it's already at Google-level customer service.
There doesn't even appear to be any contact email aside from the discord which is also invite-only. Kind of soured me on the whole experience.
That makes this situation even weirder. Why not just re-send them, considering that they should have the collected email address sitting right there? If it's a typeform issue, then some sort of message on their site would have been nice. I mean it's one thing if this was a free product, but the fact that they are planning to provide a paid search engine but can't manage the task of sending email invites and don't have any contact address* just ruins any enthusiasm I had of being a customer.
* I realize the founder has his email listed in the FAQ page, but emailing the founder for an issue like this seems quite gauche. And besides I did try reaching out on social media but didn't get any response.
On the 70 searches point too, if you search for "business news" and then click the news360 tab to get news results, I believe this is actually counted as 2 searches so would get charged at 4 cents if in the overages category.
When I searched up I thought maybe $5 a month, or possibly $10 at a push, but $30+ will be too much for mass market adoption in my opinion. I also think there is an inevitable situation that someone searches a lot and suddenly finds themselves getting a $100 bill after they signed up for $10 a month!
Unfortunately there isn't a way around the price too from an architecture perspective because it's a high cost engine to run - the costs are driven by the fact that Kagi uses the paid Google and Bing api's, then adds a bit of it's own index and instant answers, but the Google and Bing API's both charge quite a lot per request (c$0.015 per request).
Search quality is usually pretty good (until it isn't), and it's getting better as it's manually tweaked to meet common queries, but the maps search is pretty much unusable. The search doesn't seem to "understand" queries in the same way Google does, particularly ones that are semantically hard (despite the results coming from google, Kagi reshuffles them). The founder, Vlad, seems pretty great though and is very active in the discord community. I really wish them luck, and particularly that they manage to crack the cost/pricing challenge they have.
However I have gone back to Google with adblock as my daily driver as I just didn't get the same quality of results, and found myself going back to Google enough times to make it frustrating. I appreciate it is a beta though, and that it will only get better over time.
Our $10 plan is likely going to give the user 1,000 searches. 80% of users search less than that monthly, even average HN users (who are majority of our beta users). We will also have pay as you go option ($1 per 80 searches) and $30/mo for people who want to support Kagi.
I would argue that our monetization strategy is valid as it is the only one that at least has a chance of making the business sustainable. Whether enough people would pay (which is what I think you were getting at) is another matter.
Yes our Maps is completely broken now. But at least we are building our own Maps (together with our own Search and a Browser, not an easy feat). The vision is ambitious, I'd love a world where at least a portion of it is realized.
Do you intend to make the search limit a daily thing, or will it only apply over the whole month?
For me at least, I have spikes in my search behavior, like when I'm working on some difficult project, while on other days there's not much going on. While having a search budget would maybe get some getting used to, I could see myself working with it if I had a way to plan ahead.
It would help if there was UI support for this, similar to what mobile phones have in the "Mobile Data" settings (data used/remaining, usage graphs and so on). I'm also on the beta right now, but haven't seen anything like that when looking just now.
Monthly for sure, even passing unused one to next month.
We are building a UI for consumption data right now :)
I suspect 80% of your users also are not daily-driving though, are also using other search engines at the same time, and have not set Kagi as a default on all their computers and their mobile devices (which I did!). In order to do that I had to change my mobile browser from Safari to Firefox, which is part of the reason I suspect most people have not done this.
1000 sounds like a lot more than 33 a day - particularly when if it is a search with a lens applied that drops to c16 per day, or a search that then clicks through to images.
I also think that the people that are willing to pay for search are likely to be the 'power users' which use search more. If your target market is 'people who are willing to pay for search, but don't use search that much' I suspect you will be limiting the market that find the subscription valuable.
> I would argue that our monetization strategy is valid as it is the only one that at least has a chance of making the business sustainable. Whether enough people would pay (which is what I think you were getting at) is another matter.
I think the problem is a monetization strategy is only valid if people are willing to pay for it. Anyone can create a monetization strategy that is designed to cover costs, but it's not going to lead to a sustainable business unless it generates more value for customers than the fee provides.
My point being, there is a lot of potential for "show the same search results again, because the user re-searched 5 minutes later" and "show the same search results, but filter locally on an additional word" too.
If Google/Bing give "1000 results per search", then there is also value in storing that single search too. I guess:
- I'm not sure how the API works, so I can't add much value here
- But, even though it adds local cost for storage and DB, caching searches per user could reduce costs in some scenarios
Because, while I love the idea of paid search... I think I do 100s of searches per day, so if you pay for each page of search results, and winnowing down results with additional terms....
> But, even though it adds local cost for storage and DB, caching searches per user could reduce costs in some scenarios
There may be some opportunity to do this, and caching results would be a good idea, but most forms of caching are explicitly banned from the Google and Bing API T&Cs. Some caching is allowed in some circumstances, but this will limit the usefulness of caching to reduce costs.
> Because, while I love the idea of paid search... I think I do 100s of searches per day, so if you pay for each page of search results, and winnowing down results with additional terms....
Agree with this - and at your usage levels plus $1 per 80 searches plus the $10 fee for 30 / day, you will be talking about $40+ per month, or $480 per year - enough to buy a new Macbook every 2.5 years :)
But IMO having been on the discord group the founders have got themselves into a trap of thinking "Charging per query is the only way we can make the sums financially work because we use both the Bing and Google APIs, thus we will need to get users to accept to paying per query".
The proposed pay per use is an independent tier, not on top of any other.
Pay per use is on all tiers if you go above the quota, the quota just changes based on tier. It’s been made pretty clear on discord that none of the tiers will be ‘all you can eat’.
A bottom PAYG tier is different to what I last heard although it doesn’t actually change the monthly cost of $40 for OP though.
There are people willing to pay for it, the question is will there be enough. A doomed monetization strategy would be one where people are willing to pay for it, but you lose money on every transaction.
> 1000 sounds like a lot more than 33 a day - particularly when if it is a search with a lens applied that drops to c16 per day, or a search that then clicks through to images.
Not sure where you got this from. Search via lens does not cost as 2 searches. It is costing 1 search and we are making changes in the future where it will count as less than 1 search.
So far I've been quite pleasantly surprised. I didn't need to de-prioritize anything yet, and most of my queries are technical. I would pay for it, but like you say, I'm not sure how much.
5$ for unlimited searches is something I'd go for without even thinking. For 10$, I already question whether is it actually better than using searx where I get comparable results. I can get a VPS cheaper than than and run my own customizable searx instance for that cost.
I'm not doing anything fancy, but I don't want to think about the query count. You can stack-up hundreds of searches per day sometimes, just because you're looking up something interesting, then do next to nothing for days.
I'm not saying I wouldn't pay for more, but I don't see the gain.
I definitely see the problem with the API cost of the underlying calls though. That feels like a huge argument that having your own index is important to compete in the market.
A Google size index that is potentially able to replace google results would probably cost $100m-$1B to build. We have a fraction of that built for noncommercial results (try Noncommercial lens in Kagi to see how it works).
I guess kagi is currently running at a loss?
My best guess is at about $0.5 per 1,000.
> I guess kagi is currently running at a loss
We are in beta and not chargining any money, so yeah by definition we are running at loss.
Unfortunately, I’m sure they rake in magnitudes more cash from ads than they ever would from subscriptions.
I do believe we should pay (a reasonably small amount! :)) for products that companies provide. It’s the “free” model that got us into this mess.
It is inevitable. It's coming. Algolia? Please?
[1] https://kagi.com/
Disclaimer: I work for Google but in no way related to search, business models, or product decisions. My words are my own.
Whatever it is it's really annoying because usually these results link to another search on a shopping site and more often than not those results come up empty anyway.
Like you see in the cached textlines: "Buy reptilecandy here, low prices!!" or something, and the URL to the site seems legit, trustedstore.com/reptilecandy/ but if you click on it you just get to the shop top page with no reptile candy in sight.
Clicking on one of the sites linked in the search results gives:
https://www.zazzle.com/reptile+candy+favors
And on their shop page it seems they have a section called "Reptile Candy & Favors". But if you click on the category above, Candy & Favors, there is no sub-section list so the sub-section is probably entirely dynamically generated.
So there's something weird going on, I wonder how those dynamic categories end up in googles search excerpts. Can they pay google to inject non-existant pages and sections into the results? (the search result in question was not marked as an Ad though)
If you are not logged into some of these sites you can't actually get to stuff either. Annoying.
Not sure why they are allowing them to take over the rest of search though?
Though this kind of goes to the related question: why Google don't allow you to setup your profile to nuke domains from consideration when you search, I do not know - it would completely divorce them from any responsibility for search result manipulation and make everyone happier.
It's so bad you'd almost think google has a stake in pinterest at this point.
Such a blacklist could be limited to one's personal account though but, I guess, since there is no monetisation benefit for google they don't care to offer it?
I don't know how technically hard this would be to implement. Or what business model will resist adding it. I just know that most of my web searches are NOT me trying to buy stuff. They're usually looking up information.
Like, how does the load sensing algorithm work on my LG washer? No chance I'll ever find out by searching the web. Only 200 links to different places I can buy a new one. Or maybe some videos explaining that the feature exists, and "oh and would you like to buy one?"
Maybe I want to know if my GadgetMaster 3000 will work with my WidgetWanker Mark II. Nope, but here's 100 places you can buy those, or maybe the THINGDOODLE brand of knockoffs.
Ok, I'm ranting. Point is: give me a way to restrict my search to only those pages that aren't selling anything. Maybe the heuristic is that the page hasn't changed in 6 months, or uses outdated tags like <marquee>, or some fancy semantic analysis of the page copy. I don't know. I just wish search results weren't so utterly dominated by e-commerce sites or affiliate spam.
The primary purpose of ads isn't to get you to buy something. It's to plant a brand in your brain so that next time you do want to buy something, you'll think of the brand.
Ads are very good psychological manipulation.
Of course those are also really ads in a sense, but somehow there’s got to be a way to provide a real search engine that doesn’t show only e-commerce sites. I’ll pay for it!
Here's a thing that I am absolutely convinced happens. Ad network tracks purchases. Ad network track ad impressions. Ad network correlates the two and finds that 90% of people who saw the ad also bought the product. But they conveniently "forgot" to check if the ad impression was before or after the purchase.
I'm confident this is happening because the only times I see ads for anything I'd be interested in buying is after I've already bought the damn thing.
But do they at all take into account the fact that probably about 50 out of 100 ad impressions lead to an "I'll NEVER purchase anything from the purveyor of this ad-spam shit!" reaction?
> A built-in load sensor automatically detects the laundry load and a microprocessor optimizes washing conditions such as ideal WATER LEVEL and washing time. Turbo drum washing (option) When "Punch + 3" washing wings turn, the washing tub turns in the opposite direction.
I accidentally searched for this:
load sensing algorithm work on my LG washer?
Adding "how does the" to the beginning of the search gives this as the second hit:
> Water level sensing in LG washers is done differently from how you may be used to seeing it done in other brands. Whirlpool, GE, Electrolux and others use an air tube connecting an air dome on the tub to a pressure sensor with a physical diaphragm or transducer that "feels" the water level increase as an increase in pressure inside the air tube.
Which seems more promising, but I didn't click through.
I've watched it at work and as best as I can tell, it takes inertial mass readings by wiggling the drum using a specified current, and measuring how far the drum oscillates. Or maybe it predetermines the amplitude and measures the power required?
I'm just guessing. What I want to find out: is either of my guesses close? Is there something else I'm not seeing? Why does it do this 4 times in a row? (In between "wiggles" it will rotate the drum a few times to—my guess—redistribute the load and get an average from the four readings.
Maybe its rose-tinted glasses looking at the web of yesterday, but I have this sneaking suspicion some nerd out there has an entire website devoted to arcane appliance details like this. I would very much like to find and bookmark that site!
Hopefully DDG and others don’t turn into that tho
As long as you click on an Ad, google makes money, regardless if you buy something or not.
Duckduckgo hasn't been any better for me lately. It seems like search as a whole is failing to respond to the latest round of SEO tricks. It takes a lot more work to find what I'm actually looking for, regardless of which engine I use.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28517187
Hey now, SEO spam is often packed to the brim with high revenue ads.
(perhaps that's what you were going for?)
https://twitter.com/krebs_adrian/status/1488173888068542466
https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/ (Note: the url of this page is /honestresults/)
Seems like flame bait
so yes, it's acceptable. use ad-block if it's not to you.
Running other software to make search usable is also not acceptable.
Combined with your misinformation spread in other threads of this topic, your actions appear to be shilling.
Don’t use Google, or any search engine for that matter, I’d you don’t like ads. Try out Kagi or Neeva.
Edit: I now see 3 ad results after disabling uBlock origin, but still far from the entire thing being ads. I didn't think it removed ads from the search results themselves (since I see 'sponsored ads' occasionally in my search and things). My bad.
Here's "mattress," which has ads that extend beyond the fold: https://i.imgur.com/Z9dGSKR.png
Those two I just took. I mercifully cannot replicate this one anymore, but here's one for "indeed" I took in December, where LinkedIn had an ad that took up my entire laptop screen: https://i.imgur.com/x7g5Uo3.png
I can't replicate OP's specific one, but remember that ad buy is very dynamic. I do get the top two positions as competitors, one of which is seen in OP's link as well: https://i.imgur.com/hYjaWm4.png. I certainly do not think this post is fake.
And yes, people are shocked at the amount of ads google is pushing.
It's sad how any resistance and the resistor must be a troll.
Even in your own video without adblock the ads display sparingly. If you count the instance you'll see that after reduction (meaning you take the average distance from the first link) the "correct" link is probably #3 or #2.
You have done nothing to clear up misinformation, argue in good faith, or concede a disproven claim. All these are required for arguments in good faith.
I swear people always say nonsense like this and when I ask for specific queries they stop replying. Check my history if you doubt it.
I don't doubt you saw ads, but Google very strictly limits the percentage of the screen that can be ads or percentage of results. If you can find a single query in which every result on the first page is a sponsored ad I'll send you $5 via Venmo right now, no questions asked.
people just like saying 'omg all my screen is ads' and then they crop their screen showing like 20% of the screen on a 1080p monitor. >_>
https://i.imgur.com/AkQWJeF.png
100% ads.
DDG for the same search is better, but not by much:
https://i.imgur.com/pcpxr4l.png
this scenario of all of the results being ads is nonexistent. again if anyone can show me a reproducible query in which all results are ads, $5 - easy.
omg DDG 100% ads !111
https://imgur.com/a/A1bxnVQ
It is nice how passionate you are, though.
Also, appropriately, your screenshot of DDG does not showcase all ads.
Nobody's saying the search results are only ads, they're saying that the only results that are shown to consumers without some action on their part are ads...
The title of this post and point of the twitter thread is:
"For some searches literally the whole screen!! on google is now ads."
It seems that all of the search engines just suck huh.
>"For some searches literally the whole screen!! on google is now ads."
And that's what you see in the screenshots. What's the problem?
Sheesh.
I care about accuracy and quantifiable metrics. I can show screenshots for Bing, DDG, and Google showing all ads. OK what's the point? What percentage of results on the first page for each are ads. More accurate and easier to compare.
By the way, if you want to attack Google you should attack them for things that actually matter, like their egregious Play Store fees and anti competitiveness by misleading buyers in their ad bidding market, tax evasive, anti-trust, and adherence to censorship in various countries.
A good faith argument shouldn't come down to semantics. Once you realize that the other side isn't using a term in the way you think it should be used, you can either stop the debate to argue the semantics, or accept their definition as the terms for the debate.
So I think there's just a communication breakdown here.
meaningless because that's an subjective thing.
Just dark patterns. Sad it used to be a good search engine.
https://i.imgur.com/CFeWDY1.png
As for your question, there is no point in trying to replicate results for the same query, search results and the displayed ads can wildly differ for the same query based on a large number of factors.
It seems like most of the claims you've made in the this thread are false.
Like a check in if you found what you were looking for, give a penny. Or potentially not what you were looking for, but something that you are happy you found. Thus giving back good info to the search engine and only pay a nominal amount when you get what you want.
Try Bing, as it's been well regarded.
FB used outrage as a way to increase engagement and it worked for a while, but now FB is increasingly a non-desirable place to hang out. Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content. When Apple added restrictions that cut off oxygen to FB, FB started a PR campaign to paint it as one grave injustice. It seems like that was met with a collective shrug. Who cheers for the bad guy?
All that is to say, it seems like Google has been in this value extraction mode for a while and I don’t see what the long term plan is. They don’t seem to be innovating much, but are instead intent on squeezing as much money as they can from their existing assets. And while that may work in the short term, FB has shown tech giants are not invincible. I’ve seen a lot of talk online lately about how bad the quality of search results have gotten. If a credible competitor emerges, I think a lot of users would gladly switch. If/when that happens, Google better hope they don’t find themselves in FB’s position where they can’t acquire their way out of their rut.
> Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content.
Tiktok does this very well. I usually end up feeling good after using TikTok. On the other hand Twitter makes me stressed, FB is not much used by my friends age group or only used for memes, and Instagram is now showing me two ads every three stories that is really a pain to use.
Users defecting from FB have a number of options, driven by their in person network, search doesn't. How do new search engines communicate that Google is turning up the (ad/spam) heat and they need to escape the pot? Search results are subjective (that's why Google uses human raters), so what does it take for users, en masse, to start questioning their search results quality and/or excessive number of ads?
Reading that line I just realized that google lost me as a YouTube viewer in the past two weeks. I used to follow a bunch of ~100k subscriber channels that produced content every couple of weeks on building things and how to build things. I'd generally watch one or two 10-30 minute videos a day.
They've cranked the ads through the roof to the point that I'd see the same 6 second Liberty Mutual bit three times before the video even got through its introduction along with a couple other ads.
I now realize its been days since I even went to the site. So I guess for this n=1 we've found the limit.
Also, why are you not using uBlock origin?
Ended up getting an ad blocker on my iphone and deleting the app. I now have to use youtube.com and settle for 720p, but it's far and away better than the shit ads it served.
Don't get me started on the relevancy of the ads.
I, at least, have never seen that 1080p option on the mobile site.
There is the Scottish electrical engineer, that although his accent is really thick, its refreshing, but with the adds for cell phones/no and FHP/no.
Now, if they would only stop with the censorship. When in the history of mankind have the censors ever been the good guys?
I mean.....removing pedo or gore content from Youtube is still censorship. Just the kind that we probably all agree with. The way you view censorship(and censors) mostly depends on whether they remove content you want removed or not, and that line can massively vary even in western societies(for instance I love the fact that in Germany any nazi-related content is actually criminal, but many Americans gasp at the very concept - however the line is there even in America, but it's just placed in at a different point).
It's not called censorship when it is the right and reasonable thing to do. In many cases, it is simply decision making done collectively by society. For example, we don't tend to allow blatantly religious proselytizing in public schools by teachers. Is that censorship? Maybe? Is it controversial? Not really.
Education is actually a good example -- as decisions are constantly made in terms of what is and is not made available to students. It's easy to find decisions that are blatantly wrong -- for example, banning "A Big Mooncake for Little Star," which is a book about a little kid eating a cake. (But there are other choices that are obviously correct, such as banning books in school libraries that are blatantly misleading.
Whether something is considered censorship is often a matter of perspective.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/germanys-laws-ant...
I also like having access to YouTube music but like so many things with streaming, you're not certain to get continued access to stuff you like. I've started buying MP3's of songs that I like again so that I don't have to worry that Google will stop carrying the music any more or raise prices on YouTube Premium to a level I don't like.
I have less and less trust for the big companies that provide these services so I'm focusing more on self-hosting and some form of ownership. It's not just MP3's. I'm also making sure that I'm using FOSS for my note taking (Joplin), backups (duplicati) and other such things. Some of this stuff is too valuable to me to risk losing access to.
I’ll probably look through the Patreon pages in a few weeks, see who I still care about, and see if they have alternative video feeds that aren’t so ad littered. Those can remain, the rest I’ll cancel.
Popular sort was a great way to find what a new channel was about
> further evidence to long $GOOG tbh
To be fair, everything in Monsters, Inc. was made up.
Once they do that they become lost to Google forever.
Perhaps the only holdout is mobile. But otherwise ad-tech is poisoning the well for themselves.
It seems the most profitable users don't care and typically engage with the ads. Or they used to before apple came in and lowered the quality.
Arguments about ethics/ads aside
TikTok has by far the best recommender system I have ever tried. After an hour of use the system had correctly narrowed down my interests of exoplanets, space exploration, technology, and startups.
However that also means TikTok is the most hypertuned echochamber. I hope people don't get their political views from TikTok.
[0] https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/tiktoks-algorithm-leads-...
“ We defined “prominent far-right figures/prominent far right talking points” posts as those that contain prominent far-right figures such as Ben Shapiro, Alex Jones…”
“ We defined “racist/white supremacist” posts as those which… support white supremacy by using white supremacist talking points such as “white pride” or “white lives matter.””
So do white lives not matter? Seems like whoever wrote this hates themselves and is racist.
I mean, it's nice and noble but the vast majority of people don't follow you and corporations don't care as long as you don't become a social and political landmark. If you go quietly for sure it doesn't matter to their bottom line.
People generally give stuff up for prosaic reasons, instead such as: too many ads, favorite content producers moved to another platform, content they like becomes paid, their social circles don't consider the platform cool anymore, etc.
>.., favorite content producers moved to another platform,..
This was my grip against youtube, it wasn't merely a principled stand. Numerous independent content creators that I had followed and subscribed to on Youtube have been either censored, demonetized or blocked completely in the last couple of years. It doesn't matter to your bottom line until you censor, discourage, or otherwise drive away enough people where it does start to matter, as Facebook found out a few days ago. Perhaps Youtube/Google is such a monopolistic revenue juggernaut that it can continue to censor, demonetize and ban content creators liberally and without any coherent standards and still churn out a profit. We'll see.
And keep in mind that content creators have their own interests ($$$, fame, etc) not all of which align with their viewers' interests.
Coming soon - "Ad Infinitum(tm)" Google search results pages, which start to slowly scroll 5 seconds after being displayed...
Perhaps it no longer indexes as much as it used to, at least for noncommercial content.
I scroll past all ads out of habit[0], so honestly this doesn’t impact my Google usage. Wish I didn’t have to train that muscle, but here we are. :(
[0] my pihole breaks the links anyway
Also with pihole, you almost never run into the dreaded “it looks like you’re using ad block!”.
That said, pihole or any DNS level blocking is pretty weak compared to what uBlock Origin and provide. Like a parent commenter said, it doesn’t prevent you from seeing the google ads, it just keeps the links from working. Most big sites know not to make their ads so easily blocked.
Actually, a good majority of my searches are site:reddit.com {product I am looking for}, or site:news.ycombinator.com {some tech thing I want to find again}.
I think there is a comparison here to how inbound telephone calls, or to some extent email, have been made useless by marketers. Google searches for "Phoenix {thing}" tend to be almost all yelp/yelp clone spam.
edit: this made me actually look in my history. It seems that by far the thing I am using google for the most is image search. Second from that is spelling/grammar sanity checks.
I find it easier than typing out “site:” especially since my browser allows me to just start the URL and then tab into a search on that site.
My guess is the reason there are so few competitors is economics. You can't get investment as long as Google stock is a sure bet. Few will pay for your service as long as Google is answering their questions. Advertisers aren't interested as their money is more effectively spent on Google. Therefore you can't build an audience sure to lack of revenue/capital.
While I still find Google useful, especially Google Scholar, I've primarily moved to DuckDuckGo for most casual searches.
Use DuckDuckGo it’s a lot better with relevant search results and privacy friendly.
thus removing one of the major reasons to use Yandex.