I'm not using an ad blocker; when I search for Midjourney on Google the real thing is my first result; I don't even see any sponsored content. Not sure what's happening for OP.
(Please don't read this as a defense of Google on the whole.)
My dad stopped using Google like 20 years ago for exactly this reason. He was not happy when his relevant local small business was pushed off the first page by out-of-state providers of tenuously related services
They do the same thing on the Play Store, for example I just searched for Firefox and the first result is a sponsored spot for Opera. Does Apple do that on the App Store?
A funnier example: searching for Amazon gives Temu as the first result. Searching for Temu gives Shein as the first result. Searching for Shein gives Shein as the first result! ...but only because they outbid everyone else for the ad spot on their own name, resulting in Double Shein: https://i.imgur.com/0buR8Hq.png
As a user, I'm still baffled that the interface to view and manage the apps I have installed on the system - which is 90 out of 100 times why I'm opening the play store - is tucked away in some obscure corner of the app.
The other 10 times, it's because I want to install some specific app that I already know and I just want to get to the page of that exact app - either through a direct link or through the store's search.
There were exactly zero times where I opened the store with the motivation "gee, I really feel like installing a new app, but I have no idea what it should be... Let's check out the recommendations!"
Yet this seems to be what the entire UI is optimized for.
Yes. In fact, I often get sponsored stuff before Apple’s own apps, when I’m searching for the Apple app. I’ll also get things like games, when I’m looking for development or productivity apps. It’s crazy.
One of the things that I do, each morning, is take a long walk, listening to music.
I’m an Apple One subscriber, so there’s no limit to the music from the catalog. I don’t buy individual songs. It’s already been paid, so they aren’t selling me anything.
I use the “Discovery Station” playlist, which gives you random songs, based on your preferences.
It used to be quite good, but lately, it’s been stuffing weird pop songs into the playlist. These are ones that I’d never listen to, otherwise. I will tell Siri that I don’t like the songs, but they keep coming, anyway. I often dislike up to five songs in a row; at which time, the phone gives up on the station, and starts feeding me random songs from my library.
This renders the “Discovery Station” pretty much worthless.
It’s fairly obvious that the playlist has been corrupted by paid results.
Pandora has always done the best job of selecting relevant unknown music for me, but the limit on skips (even for paid accounts), makes it worthless. Undiscovered music is frequently obscure for a reason, so I can sometimes skip a majority of the selections. I’ve always been puzzled about why Pandora never got borged by Apple or Microsoft. They were excellent, a decade before the AI hype bubble was even a broken rubber on the drug store shelf.
The sponsored spot is appalling, I reported something that looked dodgy which appeared above the UK gov identity verification for passports and such app. When people search for a specific app, putting something else in front only makes me think you are untrustworthy scum, so my trust in the play store is fundamentally broken. There's a fundamental incompatibility between giving the right result for what was searched for and pushing promoted irrelevant results.
I would love to see trademark law changed to ban this practice. Google, etc should not be allowed to, in effect, charge money to avoid having one’s trademark become a search term for a competitor.
Paying for ad slots to raise brand awareness is one thing, but a search for a trademark should resolve first to a valid holder of that trademark.
The iOS AppStore is just as bad. Even if your search term is the exact app name, they’ll show you random stuff first (maybe they’re hoping you buy before realizing it wasn’t what you were looking for). And since App Store contents are like 98% crap, the chances of randomly finding something worthwhile are miniscule.
Letting users do what they want to is just not a business model for these megacorps.
And yet they always knew that ad-supported business is going mean enshittification. Kagi website has this epic quote from the original Google paper to drive the point home:
"The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
— The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998
Its sad but I think at this point its kind of a safety issue not to use an ad blocker. Those results are not clearly ads and I've clicked on fake links in the past when they were.
When I search for "midjourney" without an adblocker a bunch of times, I'm getting:
- No ads, with correct midjourney.com as the top result, about half the time
- A legit ad for midjourney.com with the title "Your Imagination, Unlocked", the other half the time. It's the only ad, and the correct midjourney.com is also still directly below it as the first organic result
So both seem fine for me. I've never seen ads on Google with the kind of formatting shown by OP either.
Obviously everybody's search experience is different, based on geography, profile, who else is running ads for those keywords, Google runs different formatting experiences as A/B testing, etc.
For what it's worth, when you view a Google search results page, part of the page is populated by ads (results come from the Google Ads teams) and part of it by search results (results come from the Google Search team, and unaffected by anything to do with ads).
The post points out a problem with the fraction that is allocated to Ads, but pretty sure that's not "everything that's wrong with Google Search" (if true, it would actually be an endorsement of the quality of the organic search results, which I doubt is the intent).
I don't have a problem with this in general, I do have a problem when they deceive users, which happens often. If I search for Amazon and get Temu ad - that's OK. But often when I search for X they will show sponsored results that pretend to be that X. This is esp true with apps on their play store, which is something fairly new. I barely use Google Search these days so don't know how bad it is with search.
This is a pattern you see often. A product gets to a point where it's hard to grow revenue as the market expects, so the company does everything they can to squeeze more revenue.
At least it was on the first page. I just searched for Midjourney on the iPhone App Store. It put 2 other results first. Each result is about 2/3rds the height of the screen meaning the actual "midjourney" result was a screen and a half down, so off the screen.
Every time this comes up, I don’t understand what the alternative is supposed to be.
X (Midjourney in this case) may/not be trademarked in the user’s country - so what makes X so special that Google/others should rank this one over others? Does this mean X owns the keyword and other related searches on Google forever? That sounds worse than domain squatting!
Speaking of, quite often, X.com is already registered, so companies buy getX.com or just non-.com TLDs. Now which one is the right result for searches for X? The pre existing one or the new company? What if they’re in different industries?
Almost all SaaS companies have multiple comparison pages or blogs/articles/etc that mention and compare themselves with competitors - specifically for SEO to show up in those searches. Should this also be banned?
I could go on, but I just don’t see a situation where Google can solve this satisfactorily for everyone, without becoming opinionated and picking/choosing/preferring one competitor over the other. As such, they’ve gone for the easiest model we have in modern day capitalism - put it up for auction and let the market figure it out!
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] thread(Please don't read this as a defense of Google on the whole.)
We built our entire company for that 1%.
A funnier example: searching for Amazon gives Temu as the first result. Searching for Temu gives Shein as the first result. Searching for Shein gives Shein as the first result! ...but only because they outbid everyone else for the ad spot on their own name, resulting in Double Shein: https://i.imgur.com/0buR8Hq.png
The other 10 times, it's because I want to install some specific app that I already know and I just want to get to the page of that exact app - either through a direct link or through the store's search.
There were exactly zero times where I opened the store with the motivation "gee, I really feel like installing a new app, but I have no idea what it should be... Let's check out the recommendations!"
Yet this seems to be what the entire UI is optimized for.
Yes. In fact, I often get sponsored stuff before Apple’s own apps, when I’m searching for the Apple app. I’ll also get things like games, when I’m looking for development or productivity apps. It’s crazy.
One of the things that I do, each morning, is take a long walk, listening to music.
I’m an Apple One subscriber, so there’s no limit to the music from the catalog. I don’t buy individual songs. It’s already been paid, so they aren’t selling me anything.
I use the “Discovery Station” playlist, which gives you random songs, based on your preferences.
It used to be quite good, but lately, it’s been stuffing weird pop songs into the playlist. These are ones that I’d never listen to, otherwise. I will tell Siri that I don’t like the songs, but they keep coming, anyway. I often dislike up to five songs in a row; at which time, the phone gives up on the station, and starts feeding me random songs from my library.
This renders the “Discovery Station” pretty much worthless.
It’s fairly obvious that the playlist has been corrupted by paid results.
Pandora has always done the best job of selecting relevant unknown music for me, but the limit on skips (even for paid accounts), makes it worthless. Undiscovered music is frequently obscure for a reason, so I can sometimes skip a majority of the selections. I’ve always been puzzled about why Pandora never got borged by Apple or Microsoft. They were excellent, a decade before the AI hype bubble was even a broken rubber on the drug store shelf.
Yes, this has been my experience, at least on mobile. Is this different for others?
Paying for ad slots to raise brand awareness is one thing, but a search for a trademark should resolve first to a valid holder of that trademark.
The iOS AppStore is just as bad. Even if your search term is the exact app name, they’ll show you random stuff first (maybe they’re hoping you buy before realizing it wasn’t what you were looking for). And since App Store contents are like 98% crap, the chances of randomly finding something worthwhile are miniscule.
Letting users do what they want to is just not a business model for these megacorps.
> You wouldn't want someone looking for your website to find your competitor instead. For a small fee, I can make sure that doesn't happen.
"The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
— The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998
Product being search users. Customers being advertisers.
- No ads, with correct midjourney.com as the top result, about half the time
- A legit ad for midjourney.com with the title "Your Imagination, Unlocked", the other half the time. It's the only ad, and the correct midjourney.com is also still directly below it as the first organic result
So both seem fine for me. I've never seen ads on Google with the kind of formatting shown by OP either.
Obviously everybody's search experience is different, based on geography, profile, who else is running ads for those keywords, Google runs different formatting experiences as A/B testing, etc.
The post points out a problem with the fraction that is allocated to Ads, but pretty sure that's not "everything that's wrong with Google Search" (if true, it would actually be an endorsement of the quality of the organic search results, which I doubt is the intent).
This is a pattern you see often. A product gets to a point where it's hard to grow revenue as the market expects, so the company does everything they can to squeeze more revenue.
Midjourney.com is second on the list. Not good. But better.
X (Midjourney in this case) may/not be trademarked in the user’s country - so what makes X so special that Google/others should rank this one over others? Does this mean X owns the keyword and other related searches on Google forever? That sounds worse than domain squatting!
Speaking of, quite often, X.com is already registered, so companies buy getX.com or just non-.com TLDs. Now which one is the right result for searches for X? The pre existing one or the new company? What if they’re in different industries?
Almost all SaaS companies have multiple comparison pages or blogs/articles/etc that mention and compare themselves with competitors - specifically for SEO to show up in those searches. Should this also be banned?
I could go on, but I just don’t see a situation where Google can solve this satisfactorily for everyone, without becoming opinionated and picking/choosing/preferring one competitor over the other. As such, they’ve gone for the easiest model we have in modern day capitalism - put it up for auction and let the market figure it out!