18 ms·

Google is not a search engine, but an ad engine

545 points by jlelse 7y ago

evilmoo 7y ago
Blog spam of: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1205582897593430017 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1205582897593430017
- lucb1e 7y ago
  Hmm. I don't like Twitter-the-website (the site is rather heavy and annoying to use on both mobile and desktop), so I do like a summary copy somewhere else, but indeed the author added very little of their own thoughts or additional sources or anything to supplement the content. The blog is also a lot shorter than the twitter thread, summarizing the issue, and it mentions the source. I'm not sure whether I'm in favor of changing the link.
- rmsaksida 7y ago
  Indeed. OP should have linked to the tweet instead as his blog post is not adding anything.
  - jlelse 7y ago
    I added a link to a list of alternatives for Google services. I wanted to link to it, but then forgot to actually do it.
AstroJetson 7y ago
I guess they are one of the last to figure it out? Next up "Sky is blue!"
Guest42 7y ago
Agreed, I used to easily be able to find our local info regarding volleyball tournaments and festivals, now the same searches don’t give anything even 7 pages down, it’s as though the engine removed the sites from the web
- pixl97 7y ago
  Did all of that move to Facebook and get stuck in a walled garde?
  - Guest42 7y ago
    I wish it had. Some of these are pretty important to me and I searched for them in exact terms.
zadeh 7y ago
Why can't they be both?
- pgm8705 7y ago
  They can, but I'd argue that if I type "basecamp" into a search engine, the first result should always be basecamp.com, not ads for their competitor.
- vortico 7y ago
  Some people are unable to classify things on a spectrum. You're either a programmer or you're not, a company is either evil or good, piracy either has no effect or a full effect on software sales, NPM is either a disaster bringing down the JS ecosystem or the reason it's great, the economy will either fail or become booming in 2020... IMO non-spectrum thinking is one of the largest falacies in thinking and debates in the modern era.
pearjuice 7y ago
A direct link to the tweet would have sufficed.
zarkov99 7y ago
Larry and Sergey are probably spinning in their graves, I mean private islands. Google has become what they so despised.
- rorykoehler 7y ago
  Looking at their earliest investors I don’t think google ever intended to be what they said they were.
dreamcompiler 7y ago
At some point, the slowly-increasing quality curve of DDG's results crosses the rapidly-decreasing organicity curve of Google's results and you switch. For me the curves crossed two years ago.
- godzillabrennus 7y ago
  Same for me. Switched to DDG toward end of 2017 on my desktops and early 2018 for my mobile phone. Actually using Google now feels like a downgrade. The AMP garbage is just another issue I’ve avoided.
- royal_ts 7y ago
  break out of your bubble. Try using DDG with sth. else than english. Then try sth. related to programming. Good luck. I'm so tired of people claming that DDG is better in every aspect, it's not.
  - bikeshaving 7y ago
    It’s not better. Specifically, autocomplete doesn’t work as well, and you’re missing not just google but maps, images, and translations. But it’s getting better all the time, and at this point you’ll be hard-pressed to come with a query (even programming related) which doesn’t have the result you want on the first page. The point of the original author is that the quality of DDG continues to improve, not that it’s better.
    - royal_ts 7y ago
      But the majority of people won't change if it's not clearly better, why would they? Also most of this doesn't matter if you are using AdBlock (or whatever) anyway. Of course this isn't ideal. Sure it might work for some using DDG, but it does not for the majority.
    - deng 7y ago
      > At this point you’ll be hard-pressed to come with a query (even programming related) which doesn’t have the result you want on the first page No problem for me, unfortunately. See my post below, but these really were my first three after switching to DDG. - 'debian convert from i386 to amd64' Should show https://wiki.debian.org/CrossGrading - 'kodi idx white box' Any bug report to idx subtitles showing white boxes - 'building kodi' https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Compile_Kodi_for_Linux It seems DDG has much more problems with SEO spam, which unfortunately is rampant for Kodi. However, it's a mistery why for instance the Debian Wiki would not show up in the first search.
fauigerzigerk 7y ago
Yes Google spams search results with ads. But instead of using a different search engine such as duckduckgo.com, we're calling for the government to break up Google? That's plain ridiculous. I'm not opposed to breaking up oligopolies, but calling for the government to fix this particular issue is like asking to be put under legal guardianship.
- rmsaksida 7y ago
  Yeah, I don't see how breaking up them up would fix this. Let's say there's a dedicated company called "Google Search". Why wouldn't Google Search, the search engine company, spam search results with ads? Breaking up a company is one thing, dictating how a company should operate is another. I think what DHH has in mind is a search company that operates more like an utility, but that's not necessarily what we would get if Google were broken up.
  - foobarian 7y ago
    I don't object that much to a search engine spamming results with ads if they really wish to. What I do object to is them using search to gain market knowledge to discover high margin opportunities and build them into the search engine, promoting them ahead of the 3rd parties.
    - lallysingh 7y ago
      .. but they haven't. Gmail and docs any fed from search, Android isn't related, and their other stuff hasn't really taken off. Edited for qualification.
      - isolli 7y ago
        But they have. They were fined $2.7bn for abusing their position to drive people to their own shopping service. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/27/534524024/google-hit-with-2-7-billion-fine-by-european-antitrust-monitor https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/27/534524024...
zmzrr 7y ago
Very profound.
rmsaksida 7y ago
It's really frustrating when you need to find information about a specific product on Google but anything you search for yields e-commerce related results. I don't mean the ads - even the organic results will mostly be for shopping or review websites. Google clearly tries to push the user towards those. Sometimes I'm looking for specific technical details and I have to dig around a lot to find anything meaningful.
- bluedino 7y ago
  It's not even ads but either crowdsourced or machine generated "lists of the best" and such. It's nearly impossible to do research on products these days
- decasteve 7y ago
  It is frustrating. The vast majority of results point to poorly written ‘best of’ lists with Amazon affiliate links (on pages full of Google ads). Have fun trying to find real product reviews if the product isn’t sold on Amazon.
- astonex 7y ago
  Nowadays my searches always consist of "reddit + search" to get actual user reviews or comments
  - zcid 7y ago
    I do the same, but it seems that more and more reddit comments are also astroturfed so my faith in them is faltering. Finding authentic recommendations at this point is extremely tiring because I have to constantly be gauging a user's sincerity. There are too many benefits to fake reviews and few downsides. And it's easy to spam these fake comments and reviews especially if you have the budget for a dedicated marketing team.
- jackcviers3 7y ago
  Or news articles.
- egdod 7y ago
Dwolb 7y ago
Sure thing - this is going to happen because their incentives aren’t fully aligned between users and their own long term vs short term goals. It’s fascinating to watch. It feels like the aging of any industry titan. First they were innovative, lean, and mission-focused. It seems like they’ve been progressing to a bloated company fully concerned only with short term profits. It’ll be curious to see where this goes and if they’ll continue to suffer from their own momentum. Maybe we’ll start to see newer, niche, nimble competitors start to pick off chunks of search.
jcfrei 7y ago
The US doesn't have a great history when it comes to the effectiveness of breaking up monopolies. The breakup of the Bell system just resulted in regional monopolies for example. How would you break up Google? Into search, sites, youtube, android (devices) and cloud hosting? Search and youtube would just stay monopolies on their own but they couldn't cross-finance android development and google sites anymore. And I don't think Android would be a worthy competitor to iOS without Google's ad billions. Stricter regulation with regards to privacy laws and online advertising would probably work out much better for the consumer.
- matthewdgreen 7y ago
  > The breakup of the Bell system just resulted in regional monopolies for example. The breakup resulted in a massive consumer bonanza, as long-distance communications became too cheap to meter. The regional monopolies it failed to address, on the other hand, held back the deployment regional broadband for decades -- and have since used the outsize profits from their lousy monopoly business to eat up many players in competitive markets. But the imperfection of the breakup isn't an argument for leaving monopolies alone. It's hard to believe that companies like Google would even exist today if AT&T had held their monopoly. What new "Googles" are we missing -- and don't even know we're missing -- because Google subsidized things like Android and YouTube?
- josho 7y ago
  Or break up search into a utility that provides crawling/indexing service, that provides an API to third party search result providers. Similar to how many power companies are split up. Then DuckDuckGo would have access to rebrand googles search but keep its privacy benefits, while other providers could compete on other search value add.
  - davidcbc 7y ago
    Considering they already provide the !g command how is that significantly different for DDG? They obviously have access to Google search results if they want them.
  - 7y ago
skinkestek 7y ago
Furthermore the quality of the attached search engine (measured as useful for a sw engineer) has been declining since 2009. At this point duckduckgo is just as good and less annoying, not because they are crazy good but because they are about as good as Google was in 2009 and because Google has been going downhill meanwhile.
- deng 7y ago
  > At this point duckduckgo is just as good and less annoying I see this repeated all the time and I'm starting to wonder if I'm the only person who finds DDG results to be much worse. I tried DDG again this week and turned back within an hour. Examples: - I wanted to migrate a Debian 32Bit system to 64Bit. So I searched "debian convert from i386 to amd64". Google's top results are the official Cross-Grading docs from Debian Wiki, whereas DDG points to some outdated private pages and mailing list posts, with the official Debian Wiki not even in the Top10. Completely useless. - I had the problem that with idx-Subtitles, Kodi would show white boxes instead of the proper text. So I searched "kodi idx white box". Google points to bug reports for my exact problem, whereas DDG shows pages for "fully loaded Kodi boxes" and "Best adult addons for Kodi". Again, completely useless. - I wanted to build Kodi from source. So I searched "building kodi". Top Google results is the building instruction in the Kodi Wiki, DDG again shows obscure pages for the Titanium build and Steamlink ports. This is all done in Firefox in private mode, so this is not because Google has tracked my behavior.
  - pcnix 7y ago
    I agree. I've found DDG results to be sub-par in a variety of situations as well, and Google Search is sometimes almost oracular in it's prediciton of my search queries and surfaces the right solutions. I really understand making the argument about privacy, , but Search is not the product to target here, it only seems to have gotten better these days, not worse.
  - itronitron 7y ago
    >> This is all done in Firefox in private mode, so this is not because Google has tracked my behavior. Other people have mentioned that your machine can still be tracked via browser fingerprinting despite being in private mode
Spearchucker 7y ago
Used to be borderline militant in avoiding anything Google. I've calmed down a bit in that I no longer preach at my girlfriend about it. But I have to this day not used any Google app or service other than when mandated by work. And never ever on my own hardware. And yes, still using Windows Phone. I also admit, to my shame, to feeling a bit smug about it.
danr4 7y ago
Can there exist such a search engine that can stay objective in the long haul? I'm not particularly mad about Google putting ads, since the world is waking up and I believe in the future it will be obsolete. But as I see it, the problem is that all search engines have this issue where the more volume it has, the more lucrative it is to game it. Let's say DuckDuckGo becomes vastly superior and widely used, what's preventing it from becoming another spam machine where SEO is the name of the game. As I see it, there's no really good solution here. Maybe some open source indexing algorithm and a different search engine for different types of content.
- claudeganon 7y ago
  Yes. There are well-funded university and scientific CS departments across the country that could design and maintain such a system, free of these influences as a technology iniative. It’s how the internet was built and where page rank came from originally.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Indexing is easy. It’s a solved computer science problem that you just need to throw hardware at. Ranking and relevant searching is the hard part and is partly influenced by adding usage data of millions of people.
- techdragon 7y ago
  The solution I’ve settled on is a paid search engine. Pass the costs on directly and have the customers be the ones actually performing searches. Then the search quality is the product and the companies incentives are focused on preventing other people gaming the system to the detriment of their customers. But nobody wants to pay for anything on the internet /only-half-kidding
- fghtr 7y ago
  >> Can there exist such a search engine that can stay objective in the long haul? Yes, if it's distributed: https://yacy.net https://yacy.net
rickncliff 7y ago
I'm guessing it's some sort of a rule here to have at least one anti-google link on the front page at all times but I think this needs addressing: 1. Ads keep the lights on and they are labeled as such. 2. The Basecamp guy was complaining that ads for competing services are showing when searching for his service which is something that courts have affirmed time and again as being pro consumer because it exposes new users to competing services. This describes a recent case and links to others: https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2018/05/another-court-says-competitive-keyword-advertising-doesnt-cause-confusion.htm https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2018/05/another-court-...
- GrumpyNl 7y ago
  Those are very big and bright lights
  - bagacrap 7y ago
    Thus very expensive to keep running.
- tooMuchCensor 7y ago
  The mods hand pick what is front page. HN is not a social media site, it's a curated news site. I agree with your sentiment. Google gives away services for free and display ads. I like this far better than the FAANG company that charges 2x the cost of competitors for medium quality products.
- sidcool 7y ago
  I agree with you. The fact that Google serves ads for search results is not the problem, the real issue is their indifference to user privacy. They would have to sell ads to keep lights running. But they can do away with privacy transgressions.
  - Infinitesimus 7y ago
    What privacy transgressions? Are you referring to the data they collect or their use of it (or both)
agumonkey 7y ago
Is there anything to "search" anymore ?
post_below 7y ago
I don't disagree with the core point, but I sort of hate click bait more. It's pretty hyperbolic to call Google results a "full page ad". For example, if I do a Google search for "clickbait", on mobile all I see above the fold is a dictionary definition stub followed by a wikipedia snippet. There is actually no sponsored content at all. Even scrolling doesn't turn up any ads. And yes, of course, there are other types of searches where the first thing you'll see is shopping results, followed by more sponsored results. And yes I hate it as much as everyone else. But I don't think it's reasonable to say it's an "ad engine". The amount of real estate devoted to monetization has been increasingly silly for years. It will no doubt get worse. They do have an effective monopoly. It sucks for the internet that this is the case. But Google is still an impressive search engine underneath all the monetization. One where a huge part of the mindshare at the company is still devoted to organic search. I don't think HN is a place where you can reasonably hope to get away with claiming otherwise.
- Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
  > It's pretty hyperbolic to call Google results a "full page ad". If I search for "lake district cottages" on Google, the first screen is covered by an ad; scroll down, and the second screen is covered by ads too. The third screen is a featured snippet with a map - I have no idea whether this is paid-for. Only halfway down the fourth screen do I get to a genuine organic search result. iPhone SE, Safari, standard text size.
  - adrianmonk 7y ago
    I tried the same search on Android. A "featured snippet" covers the first page and more. Tapping on "About Featured Snippets" at the bottom of its UI tile tells me a lot of stuff about it, but doesn't say it's an ad; it says they "come from web search listings" and are highlighted "if it would be useful". I haven't known Google to ever be evasive about whether something is an ad or not, so unless that's changed, I'm confident in concluding this is not an ad. The next thing I see is a tile with a map at the top and three "places" under it, with a way to expand the list via "More places". This doesn't appear to be an ad either. Again not identified as an ad, and I presume these are the most relevant objects from the "places" database that you normally see on Google Maps. After that, it's a series of tiles, each for a web site that appears to be coming from organic search results. So again, not ads. In summary, when I try the same thing on Android, I get no ads at all anywhere. I suppose your results might be different than mine, though. "Lake district cottages" is a term I'd never heard before, and it appears to refer to something in the UK. I'm not in the UK, but maybe you are since you thought to suggest that. (And maybe the ad systems know that and nobody wanted to buy an ad to show to me but somebody did want to buy an ad to show you. That's just speculation, though.)
prashnts 7y ago
Quite often I find useful information from blogs or forum posts. I never seem to get the right keywords to find those in search results. Another super annoying thing is that “filetype:pdf” is full of spam websites with same template, such as “we have <almost exact search term> pdf. Click here!”, while the data sheet I was looking for would be two pages down. It’s almost like that the content inside the linked results are no longer relevant to what you search for.
mriasat 7y ago
Yeh
haolez 7y ago
I'd prefer to let the market fix this when something better appears and gets traction. Giving more power to the government is the go-to solution in third world countries. The US is supposed to be better and much more mature as a nation. Disclaimer: I live in a third world country.
- abaga129 7y ago
  Absolutely. It bothers me that most people think the solution to fixing bad practices in companies is to have the government regulate it. It just gives the government more power and strangles the market. It prevents innovation IMO. We as the consumer have the power to fix it, and given time I believe we will.
- Finnucane 7y ago
  That is actually how anti-trust regulation is supposed to work. Competitive markets for goods and services tend to produce better results, or at least, that is the line we hear in Econ 101. But capitalist growth tends to concentration of wealth and power—success grows toward monopoly. So government must wield the hammer of anti-trust to free markets.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Because giving the government more power couldn’t possibly go wrong. What do you think are the chances that the Trump administration would go after Fox or a Democratic administration would go after a company full of “the liberal elite”?
    - Finnucane 7y ago
      More power? It’s a power they’ve had for 100 years.
  - haolez 7y ago
    Sometimes it's government policies themselves that unbalance the market and allow the proliferation of monopolies. I'm not sure it's the case with Google, though. Would appreciate a comment from someone more informed.
euske 7y ago
What I think would be interesting is to introduce something like "GPL for Ads". If you have a binary, you should be able to obtain its source code. Similarly, if you see an ad, you should be able to see who's paying for it, how much it cost, and what was its bidding/selection process, etc. This doesn't just apply to Google. All TV ads and paper ads will also have to provide a way to obtain this information. It doesn't necessarily have to be accompanying the ads. It can even charge a (reasonable) fee to access that information, but it has to be accessible to the end user (ad viewer). Rationale: consumer protection. This won't directly solve the monopoly situation, but it will force them to be transparent, and in a long run it will reduce their questionable ads and their revenue. And the consumer is more informed.
- soared 7y ago
  I very much like the idea and direction, but this is a good idea only in theory. It would be comparable to every financial firm opening up their bidding algorithms. Ad buyers work very hard and spend a lot of money to create the best strategy/algorithm and that solution would just let a competitor copy it for free. Not for search or social ads, but programmatic/display are literally bought by creating a very complicated algorithm with potentially unlimited variables to automatically (programmatically) place bids.
perspective1 7y ago
The US government has no authority to break up a monopoly just because users don't like its ads. Google continues to provide a valuable service, and your cost is the ads you're served that you don't want. Google's not a charity. I'm tired of opinions about "user hostility" and so on from tech people about valuable services as they ramp up user revenues. If you don't like Google's ads, use DuckDuckGo or Bing.
- anaganisk 7y ago
  There's another perspective to that, my clients, if google is spamming with ads how will i be able to reach them over search? Google had become somewhat too big, that me not using it, does harm too. But indirectly.
buboard 7y ago
Google's competition is not DDG, it's Brave
belissimojs 7y ago
Google is automated censorship engine for all communists.
dboreham 7y ago
Because: people love to take the Faustian deal.
dmos62 7y ago
I think until now there's been quite little talk about just how wild wild west the Web is, so I like the talk about breaking up Google. The problem is that Google can use its cross-platform cross-product cross-industry reach to have a significant uncompetitive advantage. A banal example would be Google hassling non-Chrome users to use Chrome, or a link to Gmail sitting at the corner of your Google Search screen. As far as the market goes, that's stealing, because you're getting market share not through competition, but by bypassing competition. Google didn't become a behemoth in so many markets just because its products are good, but because it had an uncompetitive advantage, which is a cryptic way of saying that they were very big in an unregulated environment and they used that. I'm not talking about how Google became big, which is a nicer story about a great product. I'm talking about how after it became big it became humongous.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Yeah, and once it became big, the government should have stepped in and forced it to split. Now it's too late, the only options now seem to be either nationalization or complete shutdown of the monopolies like Search, Maps and YouTube. And until that is done, the situation is only going to get worse...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ttoinou 7y ago
    The situation will be worse if you break it up, what do you think will happen to a nationalized Google Search, a nationalized Google maps and a nationalized YouTube ? The services will be badly managed and get worser and worser
- beagle3 7y ago
  > Google didn't become a behemoth in so many markets just because its products are good, but because it had an uncompetitive advantage, which is a cryptic way of saying that they were very big in an unregulated environment and they used that. gmail gave 1GB with great email search when the standard at the time was 20-50MB; when it was announced on 1-apr, everyone thought it was a joke. Now, it's not so great - but email is hard/costly to switch, and gmail absolutely was better. google maps was and still is way way better than the competition (originally bought, was great then, continuously improved). Same with waze. google search was, and still is, much better. Chrome was insanely fast when it came out, and had many switching for that; It was only later than the google might helped it become the most prevalent. Compared to e.g. Microsoft and even Facebook, google made very little use of their monopoly position to become big in many markets, although they do use it to maintain it.
RiOuseR 7y ago
Google bad, my blog good!
marban 7y ago
Have people forgotten that there used to be search engines that did the same pre-Google?
- ttoinou 7y ago
  Altavista wasn't as good
  - marban 7y ago
    Good enough for its time and Goto.com was built on this very premise.
DenisM 7y ago
In my view 90% of the Silicon Vally is either Entertainment and Advertising, or IT support for such. Uber and ABnB make for some exception. I’m not hating, just saying we need to know where we stand in the grand scheme.
dvduval 7y ago
If other search engines had the same data available as Google, they could offer similar search results without ads. This includes the auto complete feature, and much more. No other company is in a position to ever catch up in terms of data collection and utilization. Google has become so important for advertisers that in many cases there is no similar alternative. The percentage of users searching Google is such a high percentage, as well as the primary way people search for product X or Service Y that failing to pay Google can make or break their success.
mrtweetyhack 7y ago
Don't use it
tehjoker 7y ago
Maybe we should publicly fund it search since splitting up Google would not change the incentive structure.
azangru 7y ago
I just don't understand the sentiment. I've been googling for things since at least mid-noughties, typically finding relevant information, and practically never clicked on an ad. What am I doing wrong? The loudest complaints about Google's ads that I am hearing are generally coming from entrepreneurs who want their company/page to be in the top of search results rather than from people who are searching for things.
qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
> Google is not a search engine, but an ad engine Google was a search engine, but is now an ad engine. When I legitimately want to research something, the first few pages are prices and where I can buy. So infuriating.
fnord77 7y ago
perhaps we need a nationalized search engine that is independent of financial motive.
alkibiades 7y ago
DHH is obnoxious. someone needs to take him down a peg
tyingq 7y ago
No surprise. Larry and Sergey said pretty much the same, themselves, some time ago. "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users." http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
- dehrmann 7y ago
  I used to work for a company that ran a vertical search engine (products/shopping). Search results were essentially results for ads. One of the engineers demoed a project where you change the weighting of relevancy and yield in the results. The internal complaints of bad results were mostly explained by yield optimization. The company ~died when Google started removing aggregators like this from its results (the Panda update) and doing product ads, itself.
spicyramen 7y ago
Mmm this is nonsense, from economíc perspective most of the money Google generates comes from search. What are you going to do? Have a single search company, other one a browser? To match technology that Google has developed through the years is close to impossible. From both business and Tech perspective there is no easy fix. Let the world runs as it is.
spazzpp2 7y ago
No surprise. Also, who can seriously claim that other proprietary search engines (yandex, Baidu) don't sell uprankings?
lorec0re 7y ago
I'm so sick of this continuous ranting against google, if you dont like big G services/product use something alse! but please please stop busting our balls!
- jtdev 7y ago
  I don’t use Google for search, and I don’t use Chrome for browsing... yet a large number of calls go to google ad network endpoints from within my home network. It’s no longer a simple matter of opting out - google’s intrusive practices have become so pervasive that end users have to go to great lengths to detach from the Google surveillance apparatus.
aSplash0fDerp 7y ago
When the incentive to monetize crosses the line into manipulating and exploiting results, users and policy, I think there is a dynamic threshold there where some folks will consider it heavy-handed capitalism (required for profitability), where others will clearly see a monopoly. Take the money out of the equation and look at the product for even wider perspective. If knowledge is power, the for profit, curated Internet is trash. Google has turned into a librarian that puts misinformation and diversions before actual results. I liked them better when they were more like the dewey decimal system of search, instead of the manic, bipolar curator with low quality information, just like MSM.
dghughes 7y ago
Maybe not the entire Internet but certainly the Web is an advertising machine. People are often berated "How dare you block ads" in your browser taking money away from websites. As if ads were the sole purpose for anything to exist. Even if you do block ads your mere existence as a user is valuable data so I'm not sorry for blocking every advertisement I can. In the early days of the Web or even just the public Internet in general the Ineternet was an infrequent pastime. If nobody was using the one telephone your entire family owned you could surf the Web, maybe. Even then you only used your dial-up account to briefly use some of your limited hours per month. Most of the time people with computers were offline. From my point of view advertising has really ruined the Web and the Web itself has made people less computer literate. People use maybe a half dozen websites and that's it most probably use a tablet. I know back when I had my first PC in the early 1990s you had to be much more aware of configuring it. That wasn't a bad thing it really meant you learned about how the computer and OS worked. Being aware of its operation meant you were able to fix it, and your data wasn't stored anywhere but your PC locally at best on a floppy, or dozen. I know people would counter with the "free" services we use like webmail, streaming video, search engines. I'd pay for it if they were cheap enough but even then your information would be right back in the hands of a large corporation. It's to the point now where the Internet is vital for government services. If anything governments are going to have to offer cheap (or "free") Internet access, email, and other basics.
s17n 7y ago
DHH's point that Google is just an ads engine is only true for searches of a commercial nature. If you're searching for something like a programming problem or a snippet of poetry or whatever, it' still an amazing search engine. So when he says it's "a catalogue with a search engine attached" I think he's exactly correct, but I don't see it as negatively as he does - it's great that the money from Google ads is being used to fund the continued development of one of the most important contributions to society ever (and I don't think it's just for "PR purposes", I think that having the best search engine is in fact the core of Google's long term success, so their incentives are aligned well). As the owner of a commercial enterprise, I think DHH comes off as entitled and whiny here. The period of time where you could get free traffic to your business from search was a brief historical anomaly. Advertising isn't going to be free.
dang 7y ago
Url changed from https://jlelse.blog/links/2019/12/google-ad-engine/ https://jlelse.blog/links/2019/12/google-ad-engine/, which points to this.
gerash 7y ago
How come a sensational post like this finds its way to HN front page?
t0ughcritic 7y ago
Been saying this for the past 5 years seems only when a tech celeb says it it gains momentum in news
subject117 7y ago
Regulation is not necessary. DuckDuckGo is a great alternative. YouTube on the other hand..
mbrodersen 7y ago
Google is an ad company. What do you expect?
Fire-Dragon-DoL 7y ago
What about Amazon search engine, can we use that for recycling? All I get from it is garbage...
rreichman 7y ago
Competition is literally a click away. The truth is that Google is the best so people are willing to put up with the shitty ads on some searches.

545 points by jlelse 7y ago

evilmoo 7y ago

Blog spam of: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1205582897593430017 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1205582897593430017

lucb1e 7y ago
Hmm. I don't like Twitter-the-website (the site is rather heavy and annoying to use on both mobile and desktop), so I do like a summary copy somewhere else, but indeed the author added very little of their own thoughts or additional sources or anything to supplement the content. The blog is also a lot shorter than the twitter thread, summarizing the issue, and it mentions the source. I'm not sure whether I'm in favor of changing the link.
rmsaksida 7y ago
Indeed. OP should have linked to the tweet instead as his blog post is not adding anything.
- jlelse 7y ago
  I added a link to a list of alternatives for Google services. I wanted to link to it, but then forgot to actually do it.

AstroJetson 7y ago

I guess they are one of the last to figure it out? Next up "Sky is blue!"

Guest42 7y ago

Agreed, I used to easily be able to find our local info regarding volleyball tournaments and festivals, now the same searches don’t give anything even 7 pages down, it’s as though the engine removed the sites from the web

pixl97 7y ago
Did all of that move to Facebook and get stuck in a walled garde?
- Guest42 7y ago
  I wish it had. Some of these are pretty important to me and I searched for them in exact terms.

zadeh 7y ago

Why can't they be both?

pgm8705 7y ago
They can, but I'd argue that if I type "basecamp" into a search engine, the first result should always be basecamp.com, not ads for their competitor.
vortico 7y ago
Some people are unable to classify things on a spectrum. You're either a programmer or you're not, a company is either evil or good, piracy either has no effect or a full effect on software sales, NPM is either a disaster bringing down the JS ecosystem or the reason it's great, the economy will either fail or become booming in 2020... IMO non-spectrum thinking is one of the largest falacies in thinking and debates in the modern era.

pearjuice 7y ago

A direct link to the tweet would have sufficed.

zarkov99 7y ago

Larry and Sergey are probably spinning in their graves, I mean private islands. Google has become what they so despised.

rorykoehler 7y ago
Looking at their earliest investors I don’t think google ever intended to be what they said they were.

dreamcompiler 7y ago

At some point, the slowly-increasing quality curve of DDG's results crosses the rapidly-decreasing organicity curve of Google's results and you switch. For me the curves crossed two years ago.

godzillabrennus 7y ago
Same for me. Switched to DDG toward end of 2017 on my desktops and early 2018 for my mobile phone. Actually using Google now feels like a downgrade. The AMP garbage is just another issue I’ve avoided.
royal_ts 7y ago
break out of your bubble. Try using DDG with sth. else than english. Then try sth. related to programming. Good luck. I'm so tired of people claming that DDG is better in every aspect, it's not.
- bikeshaving 7y ago
  It’s not better. Specifically, autocomplete doesn’t work as well, and you’re missing not just google but maps, images, and translations. But it’s getting better all the time, and at this point you’ll be hard-pressed to come with a query (even programming related) which doesn’t have the result you want on the first page. The point of the original author is that the quality of DDG continues to improve, not that it’s better.
  - royal_ts 7y ago
    But the majority of people won't change if it's not clearly better, why would they? Also most of this doesn't matter if you are using AdBlock (or whatever) anyway. Of course this isn't ideal. Sure it might work for some using DDG, but it does not for the majority.
  - deng 7y ago
    > At this point you’ll be hard-pressed to come with a query (even programming related) which doesn’t have the result you want on the first page No problem for me, unfortunately. See my post below, but these really were my first three after switching to DDG. - 'debian convert from i386 to amd64' Should show https://wiki.debian.org/CrossGrading - 'kodi idx white box' Any bug report to idx subtitles showing white boxes - 'building kodi' https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Compile_Kodi_for_Linux It seems DDG has much more problems with SEO spam, which unfortunately is rampant for Kodi. However, it's a mistery why for instance the Debian Wiki would not show up in the first search.

fauigerzigerk 7y ago

Yes Google spams search results with ads. But instead of using a different search engine such as duckduckgo.com, we're calling for the government to break up Google? That's plain ridiculous. I'm not opposed to breaking up oligopolies, but calling for the government to fix this particular issue is like asking to be put under legal guardianship.

rmsaksida 7y ago
Yeah, I don't see how breaking up them up would fix this. Let's say there's a dedicated company called "Google Search". Why wouldn't Google Search, the search engine company, spam search results with ads? Breaking up a company is one thing, dictating how a company should operate is another. I think what DHH has in mind is a search company that operates more like an utility, but that's not necessarily what we would get if Google were broken up.
- foobarian 7y ago
  I don't object that much to a search engine spamming results with ads if they really wish to. What I do object to is them using search to gain market knowledge to discover high margin opportunities and build them into the search engine, promoting them ahead of the 3rd parties.
  - lallysingh 7y ago
    .. but they haven't. Gmail and docs any fed from search, Android isn't related, and their other stuff hasn't really taken off. Edited for qualification.
    - isolli 7y ago
      But they have. They were fined $2.7bn for abusing their position to drive people to their own shopping service. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/27/534524024/google-hit-with-2-7-billion-fine-by-european-antitrust-monitor https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/27/534524024...

zmzrr 7y ago

Very profound.

rmsaksida 7y ago

It's really frustrating when you need to find information about a specific product on Google but anything you search for yields e-commerce related results. I don't mean the ads - even the organic results will mostly be for shopping or review websites. Google clearly tries to push the user towards those. Sometimes I'm looking for specific technical details and I have to dig around a lot to find anything meaningful.

bluedino 7y ago
It's not even ads but either crowdsourced or machine generated "lists of the best" and such. It's nearly impossible to do research on products these days
decasteve 7y ago
It is frustrating. The vast majority of results point to poorly written ‘best of’ lists with Amazon affiliate links (on pages full of Google ads). Have fun trying to find real product reviews if the product isn’t sold on Amazon.
astonex 7y ago
Nowadays my searches always consist of "reddit + search" to get actual user reviews or comments
- zcid 7y ago
  I do the same, but it seems that more and more reddit comments are also astroturfed so my faith in them is faltering. Finding authentic recommendations at this point is extremely tiring because I have to constantly be gauging a user's sincerity. There are too many benefits to fake reviews and few downsides. And it's easy to spam these fake comments and reviews especially if you have the budget for a dedicated marketing team.
jackcviers3 7y ago
Or news articles.
egdod 7y ago

Dwolb 7y ago

Sure thing - this is going to happen because their incentives aren’t fully aligned between users and their own long term vs short term goals. It’s fascinating to watch. It feels like the aging of any industry titan. First they were innovative, lean, and mission-focused. It seems like they’ve been progressing to a bloated company fully concerned only with short term profits. It’ll be curious to see where this goes and if they’ll continue to suffer from their own momentum. Maybe we’ll start to see newer, niche, nimble competitors start to pick off chunks of search.

jcfrei 7y ago

The US doesn't have a great history when it comes to the effectiveness of breaking up monopolies. The breakup of the Bell system just resulted in regional monopolies for example. How would you break up Google? Into search, sites, youtube, android (devices) and cloud hosting? Search and youtube would just stay monopolies on their own but they couldn't cross-finance android development and google sites anymore. And I don't think Android would be a worthy competitor to iOS without Google's ad billions. Stricter regulation with regards to privacy laws and online advertising would probably work out much better for the consumer.

matthewdgreen 7y ago
> The breakup of the Bell system just resulted in regional monopolies for example. The breakup resulted in a massive consumer bonanza, as long-distance communications became too cheap to meter. The regional monopolies it failed to address, on the other hand, held back the deployment regional broadband for decades -- and have since used the outsize profits from their lousy monopoly business to eat up many players in competitive markets. But the imperfection of the breakup isn't an argument for leaving monopolies alone. It's hard to believe that companies like Google would even exist today if AT&T had held their monopoly. What new "Googles" are we missing -- and don't even know we're missing -- because Google subsidized things like Android and YouTube?
josho 7y ago
Or break up search into a utility that provides crawling/indexing service, that provides an API to third party search result providers. Similar to how many power companies are split up. Then DuckDuckGo would have access to rebrand googles search but keep its privacy benefits, while other providers could compete on other search value add.
- davidcbc 7y ago
  Considering they already provide the !g command how is that significantly different for DDG? They obviously have access to Google search results if they want them.
- 7y ago

skinkestek 7y ago

Furthermore the quality of the attached search engine (measured as useful for a sw engineer) has been declining since 2009. At this point duckduckgo is just as good and less annoying, not because they are crazy good but because they are about as good as Google was in 2009 and because Google has been going downhill meanwhile.

deng 7y ago
> At this point duckduckgo is just as good and less annoying I see this repeated all the time and I'm starting to wonder if I'm the only person who finds DDG results to be much worse. I tried DDG again this week and turned back within an hour. Examples: - I wanted to migrate a Debian 32Bit system to 64Bit. So I searched "debian convert from i386 to amd64". Google's top results are the official Cross-Grading docs from Debian Wiki, whereas DDG points to some outdated private pages and mailing list posts, with the official Debian Wiki not even in the Top10. Completely useless. - I had the problem that with idx-Subtitles, Kodi would show white boxes instead of the proper text. So I searched "kodi idx white box". Google points to bug reports for my exact problem, whereas DDG shows pages for "fully loaded Kodi boxes" and "Best adult addons for Kodi". Again, completely useless. - I wanted to build Kodi from source. So I searched "building kodi". Top Google results is the building instruction in the Kodi Wiki, DDG again shows obscure pages for the Titanium build and Steamlink ports. This is all done in Firefox in private mode, so this is not because Google has tracked my behavior.
- pcnix 7y ago
  I agree. I've found DDG results to be sub-par in a variety of situations as well, and Google Search is sometimes almost oracular in it's prediciton of my search queries and surfaces the right solutions. I really understand making the argument about privacy, , but Search is not the product to target here, it only seems to have gotten better these days, not worse.
- itronitron 7y ago
  >> This is all done in Firefox in private mode, so this is not because Google has tracked my behavior. Other people have mentioned that your machine can still be tracked via browser fingerprinting despite being in private mode

Spearchucker 7y ago

Used to be borderline militant in avoiding anything Google. I've calmed down a bit in that I no longer preach at my girlfriend about it. But I have to this day not used any Google app or service other than when mandated by work. And never ever on my own hardware. And yes, still using Windows Phone. I also admit, to my shame, to feeling a bit smug about it.

danr4 7y ago

Can there exist such a search engine that can stay objective in the long haul? I'm not particularly mad about Google putting ads, since the world is waking up and I believe in the future it will be obsolete. But as I see it, the problem is that all search engines have this issue where the more volume it has, the more lucrative it is to game it. Let's say DuckDuckGo becomes vastly superior and widely used, what's preventing it from becoming another spam machine where SEO is the name of the game. As I see it, there's no really good solution here. Maybe some open source indexing algorithm and a different search engine for different types of content.

claudeganon 7y ago
Yes. There are well-funded university and scientific CS departments across the country that could design and maintain such a system, free of these influences as a technology iniative. It’s how the internet was built and where page rank came from originally.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Indexing is easy. It’s a solved computer science problem that you just need to throw hardware at. Ranking and relevant searching is the hard part and is partly influenced by adding usage data of millions of people.
techdragon 7y ago
The solution I’ve settled on is a paid search engine. Pass the costs on directly and have the customers be the ones actually performing searches. Then the search quality is the product and the companies incentives are focused on preventing other people gaming the system to the detriment of their customers. But nobody wants to pay for anything on the internet /only-half-kidding
fghtr 7y ago
>> Can there exist such a search engine that can stay objective in the long haul? Yes, if it's distributed: https://yacy.net https://yacy.net

rickncliff 7y ago

I'm guessing it's some sort of a rule here to have at least one anti-google link on the front page at all times but I think this needs addressing: 1. Ads keep the lights on and they are labeled as such. 2. The Basecamp guy was complaining that ads for competing services are showing when searching for his service which is something that courts have affirmed time and again as being pro consumer because it exposes new users to competing services. This describes a recent case and links to others: https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2018/05/another-court-says-competitive-keyword-advertising-doesnt-cause-confusion.htm https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2018/05/another-court-...

GrumpyNl 7y ago
Those are very big and bright lights
- bagacrap 7y ago
  Thus very expensive to keep running.
tooMuchCensor 7y ago
The mods hand pick what is front page. HN is not a social media site, it's a curated news site. I agree with your sentiment. Google gives away services for free and display ads. I like this far better than the FAANG company that charges 2x the cost of competitors for medium quality products.
sidcool 7y ago
I agree with you. The fact that Google serves ads for search results is not the problem, the real issue is their indifference to user privacy. They would have to sell ads to keep lights running. But they can do away with privacy transgressions.
- Infinitesimus 7y ago
  What privacy transgressions? Are you referring to the data they collect or their use of it (or both)

agumonkey 7y ago

Is there anything to "search" anymore ?

post_below 7y ago

I don't disagree with the core point, but I sort of hate click bait more. It's pretty hyperbolic to call Google results a "full page ad". For example, if I do a Google search for "clickbait", on mobile all I see above the fold is a dictionary definition stub followed by a wikipedia snippet. There is actually no sponsored content at all. Even scrolling doesn't turn up any ads. And yes, of course, there are other types of searches where the first thing you'll see is shopping results, followed by more sponsored results. And yes I hate it as much as everyone else. But I don't think it's reasonable to say it's an "ad engine". The amount of real estate devoted to monetization has been increasingly silly for years. It will no doubt get worse. They do have an effective monopoly. It sucks for the internet that this is the case. But Google is still an impressive search engine underneath all the monetization. One where a huge part of the mindshare at the company is still devoted to organic search. I don't think HN is a place where you can reasonably hope to get away with claiming otherwise.

Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
> It's pretty hyperbolic to call Google results a "full page ad". If I search for "lake district cottages" on Google, the first screen is covered by an ad; scroll down, and the second screen is covered by ads too. The third screen is a featured snippet with a map - I have no idea whether this is paid-for. Only halfway down the fourth screen do I get to a genuine organic search result. iPhone SE, Safari, standard text size.
- adrianmonk 7y ago
  I tried the same search on Android. A "featured snippet" covers the first page and more. Tapping on "About Featured Snippets" at the bottom of its UI tile tells me a lot of stuff about it, but doesn't say it's an ad; it says they "come from web search listings" and are highlighted "if it would be useful". I haven't known Google to ever be evasive about whether something is an ad or not, so unless that's changed, I'm confident in concluding this is not an ad. The next thing I see is a tile with a map at the top and three "places" under it, with a way to expand the list via "More places". This doesn't appear to be an ad either. Again not identified as an ad, and I presume these are the most relevant objects from the "places" database that you normally see on Google Maps. After that, it's a series of tiles, each for a web site that appears to be coming from organic search results. So again, not ads. In summary, when I try the same thing on Android, I get no ads at all anywhere. I suppose your results might be different than mine, though. "Lake district cottages" is a term I'd never heard before, and it appears to refer to something in the UK. I'm not in the UK, but maybe you are since you thought to suggest that. (And maybe the ad systems know that and nobody wanted to buy an ad to show to me but somebody did want to buy an ad to show you. That's just speculation, though.)

prashnts 7y ago

Quite often I find useful information from blogs or forum posts. I never seem to get the right keywords to find those in search results. Another super annoying thing is that “filetype:pdf” is full of spam websites with same template, such as “we have <almost exact search term> pdf. Click here!”, while the data sheet I was looking for would be two pages down. It’s almost like that the content inside the linked results are no longer relevant to what you search for.

mriasat 7y ago

Yeh

haolez 7y ago

I'd prefer to let the market fix this when something better appears and gets traction. Giving more power to the government is the go-to solution in third world countries. The US is supposed to be better and much more mature as a nation. Disclaimer: I live in a third world country.

abaga129 7y ago
Absolutely. It bothers me that most people think the solution to fixing bad practices in companies is to have the government regulate it. It just gives the government more power and strangles the market. It prevents innovation IMO. We as the consumer have the power to fix it, and given time I believe we will.
Finnucane 7y ago
That is actually how anti-trust regulation is supposed to work. Competitive markets for goods and services tend to produce better results, or at least, that is the line we hear in Econ 101. But capitalist growth tends to concentration of wealth and power—success grows toward monopoly. So government must wield the hammer of anti-trust to free markets.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Because giving the government more power couldn’t possibly go wrong. What do you think are the chances that the Trump administration would go after Fox or a Democratic administration would go after a company full of “the liberal elite”?
  - Finnucane 7y ago
    More power? It’s a power they’ve had for 100 years.
- haolez 7y ago
  Sometimes it's government policies themselves that unbalance the market and allow the proliferation of monopolies. I'm not sure it's the case with Google, though. Would appreciate a comment from someone more informed.

euske 7y ago

What I think would be interesting is to introduce something like "GPL for Ads". If you have a binary, you should be able to obtain its source code. Similarly, if you see an ad, you should be able to see who's paying for it, how much it cost, and what was its bidding/selection process, etc. This doesn't just apply to Google. All TV ads and paper ads will also have to provide a way to obtain this information. It doesn't necessarily have to be accompanying the ads. It can even charge a (reasonable) fee to access that information, but it has to be accessible to the end user (ad viewer). Rationale: consumer protection. This won't directly solve the monopoly situation, but it will force them to be transparent, and in a long run it will reduce their questionable ads and their revenue. And the consumer is more informed.

soared 7y ago
I very much like the idea and direction, but this is a good idea only in theory. It would be comparable to every financial firm opening up their bidding algorithms. Ad buyers work very hard and spend a lot of money to create the best strategy/algorithm and that solution would just let a competitor copy it for free. Not for search or social ads, but programmatic/display are literally bought by creating a very complicated algorithm with potentially unlimited variables to automatically (programmatically) place bids.

perspective1 7y ago

The US government has no authority to break up a monopoly just because users don't like its ads. Google continues to provide a valuable service, and your cost is the ads you're served that you don't want. Google's not a charity. I'm tired of opinions about "user hostility" and so on from tech people about valuable services as they ramp up user revenues. If you don't like Google's ads, use DuckDuckGo or Bing.

anaganisk 7y ago
There's another perspective to that, my clients, if google is spamming with ads how will i be able to reach them over search? Google had become somewhat too big, that me not using it, does harm too. But indirectly.

buboard 7y ago

Google's competition is not DDG, it's Brave

belissimojs 7y ago

Google is automated censorship engine for all communists.

dboreham 7y ago

Because: people love to take the Faustian deal.

dmos62 7y ago

I think until now there's been quite little talk about just how wild wild west the Web is, so I like the talk about breaking up Google. The problem is that Google can use its cross-platform cross-product cross-industry reach to have a significant uncompetitive advantage. A banal example would be Google hassling non-Chrome users to use Chrome, or a link to Gmail sitting at the corner of your Google Search screen. As far as the market goes, that's stealing, because you're getting market share not through competition, but by bypassing competition. Google didn't become a behemoth in so many markets just because its products are good, but because it had an uncompetitive advantage, which is a cryptic way of saying that they were very big in an unregulated environment and they used that. I'm not talking about how Google became big, which is a nicer story about a great product. I'm talking about how after it became big it became humongous.

BlueTemplar 7y ago
Yeah, and once it became big, the government should have stepped in and forced it to split. Now it's too late, the only options now seem to be either nationalization or complete shutdown of the monopolies like Search, Maps and YouTube. And until that is done, the situation is only going to get worse...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ttoinou 7y ago
  The situation will be worse if you break it up, what do you think will happen to a nationalized Google Search, a nationalized Google maps and a nationalized YouTube ? The services will be badly managed and get worser and worser
beagle3 7y ago
> Google didn't become a behemoth in so many markets just because its products are good, but because it had an uncompetitive advantage, which is a cryptic way of saying that they were very big in an unregulated environment and they used that. gmail gave 1GB with great email search when the standard at the time was 20-50MB; when it was announced on 1-apr, everyone thought it was a joke. Now, it's not so great - but email is hard/costly to switch, and gmail absolutely was better. google maps was and still is way way better than the competition (originally bought, was great then, continuously improved). Same with waze. google search was, and still is, much better. Chrome was insanely fast when it came out, and had many switching for that; It was only later than the google might helped it become the most prevalent. Compared to e.g. Microsoft and even Facebook, google made very little use of their monopoly position to become big in many markets, although they do use it to maintain it.

RiOuseR 7y ago

Google bad, my blog good!

marban 7y ago

Have people forgotten that there used to be search engines that did the same pre-Google?

ttoinou 7y ago
Altavista wasn't as good
- marban 7y ago
  Good enough for its time and Goto.com was built on this very premise.

DenisM 7y ago

In my view 90% of the Silicon Vally is either Entertainment and Advertising, or IT support for such. Uber and ABnB make for some exception. I’m not hating, just saying we need to know where we stand in the grand scheme.

dvduval 7y ago

If other search engines had the same data available as Google, they could offer similar search results without ads. This includes the auto complete feature, and much more. No other company is in a position to ever catch up in terms of data collection and utilization. Google has become so important for advertisers that in many cases there is no similar alternative. The percentage of users searching Google is such a high percentage, as well as the primary way people search for product X or Service Y that failing to pay Google can make or break their success.

mrtweetyhack 7y ago

Don't use it

tehjoker 7y ago

Maybe we should publicly fund it search since splitting up Google would not change the incentive structure.

azangru 7y ago

I just don't understand the sentiment. I've been googling for things since at least mid-noughties, typically finding relevant information, and practically never clicked on an ad. What am I doing wrong? The loudest complaints about Google's ads that I am hearing are generally coming from entrepreneurs who want their company/page to be in the top of search results rather than from people who are searching for things.

qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago

> Google is not a search engine, but an ad engine Google was a search engine, but is now an ad engine. When I legitimately want to research something, the first few pages are prices and where I can buy. So infuriating.

fnord77 7y ago

perhaps we need a nationalized search engine that is independent of financial motive.

alkibiades 7y ago

DHH is obnoxious. someone needs to take him down a peg

tyingq 7y ago

No surprise. Larry and Sergey said pretty much the same, themselves, some time ago. "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users." http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

dehrmann 7y ago
I used to work for a company that ran a vertical search engine (products/shopping). Search results were essentially results for ads. One of the engineers demoed a project where you change the weighting of relevancy and yield in the results. The internal complaints of bad results were mostly explained by yield optimization. The company ~died when Google started removing aggregators like this from its results (the Panda update) and doing product ads, itself.

spicyramen 7y ago

Mmm this is nonsense, from economíc perspective most of the money Google generates comes from search. What are you going to do? Have a single search company, other one a browser? To match technology that Google has developed through the years is close to impossible. From both business and Tech perspective there is no easy fix. Let the world runs as it is.

spazzpp2 7y ago

No surprise. Also, who can seriously claim that other proprietary search engines (yandex, Baidu) don't sell uprankings?

lorec0re 7y ago

I'm so sick of this continuous ranting against google, if you dont like big G services/product use something alse! but please please stop busting our balls!

jtdev 7y ago
I don’t use Google for search, and I don’t use Chrome for browsing... yet a large number of calls go to google ad network endpoints from within my home network. It’s no longer a simple matter of opting out - google’s intrusive practices have become so pervasive that end users have to go to great lengths to detach from the Google surveillance apparatus.

aSplash0fDerp 7y ago

When the incentive to monetize crosses the line into manipulating and exploiting results, users and policy, I think there is a dynamic threshold there where some folks will consider it heavy-handed capitalism (required for profitability), where others will clearly see a monopoly. Take the money out of the equation and look at the product for even wider perspective. If knowledge is power, the for profit, curated Internet is trash. Google has turned into a librarian that puts misinformation and diversions before actual results. I liked them better when they were more like the dewey decimal system of search, instead of the manic, bipolar curator with low quality information, just like MSM.

dghughes 7y ago

Maybe not the entire Internet but certainly the Web is an advertising machine. People are often berated "How dare you block ads" in your browser taking money away from websites. As if ads were the sole purpose for anything to exist. Even if you do block ads your mere existence as a user is valuable data so I'm not sorry for blocking every advertisement I can. In the early days of the Web or even just the public Internet in general the Ineternet was an infrequent pastime. If nobody was using the one telephone your entire family owned you could surf the Web, maybe. Even then you only used your dial-up account to briefly use some of your limited hours per month. Most of the time people with computers were offline. From my point of view advertising has really ruined the Web and the Web itself has made people less computer literate. People use maybe a half dozen websites and that's it most probably use a tablet. I know back when I had my first PC in the early 1990s you had to be much more aware of configuring it. That wasn't a bad thing it really meant you learned about how the computer and OS worked. Being aware of its operation meant you were able to fix it, and your data wasn't stored anywhere but your PC locally at best on a floppy, or dozen. I know people would counter with the "free" services we use like webmail, streaming video, search engines. I'd pay for it if they were cheap enough but even then your information would be right back in the hands of a large corporation. It's to the point now where the Internet is vital for government services. If anything governments are going to have to offer cheap (or "free") Internet access, email, and other basics.

s17n 7y ago

DHH's point that Google is just an ads engine is only true for searches of a commercial nature. If you're searching for something like a programming problem or a snippet of poetry or whatever, it' still an amazing search engine. So when he says it's "a catalogue with a search engine attached" I think he's exactly correct, but I don't see it as negatively as he does - it's great that the money from Google ads is being used to fund the continued development of one of the most important contributions to society ever (and I don't think it's just for "PR purposes", I think that having the best search engine is in fact the core of Google's long term success, so their incentives are aligned well). As the owner of a commercial enterprise, I think DHH comes off as entitled and whiny here. The period of time where you could get free traffic to your business from search was a brief historical anomaly. Advertising isn't going to be free.

dang 7y ago

Url changed from https://jlelse.blog/links/2019/12/google-ad-engine/ https://jlelse.blog/links/2019/12/google-ad-engine/, which points to this.

gerash 7y ago

How come a sensational post like this finds its way to HN front page?

t0ughcritic 7y ago

Been saying this for the past 5 years seems only when a tech celeb says it it gains momentum in news

subject117 7y ago

Regulation is not necessary. DuckDuckGo is a great alternative. YouTube on the other hand..

mbrodersen 7y ago

Google is an ad company. What do you expect?

Fire-Dragon-DoL 7y ago

What about Amazon search engine, can we use that for recycling? All I get from it is garbage...

rreichman 7y ago

Competition is literally a click away. The truth is that Google is the best so people are willing to put up with the shitty ads on some searches.