22 ms·

How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

409 points by ecliptik 7y ago

delusionalwrit 7y ago
I'm ready for a pay per search tool that's as useful as google with the privacy focus of duck duck go. A penny a search - I'm game.
- gtirloni 7y ago
  I'd certainly pay a fixed price per month for unlimited searches. I think Google knows that won't work so they don't offer it. Or they couldn't ask the same price that they get selling your personal data? They do offer Youtube Premium without ads but the search engine space is really different. Microtransactions are not here yet.
  - mthoms 7y ago
    If they offered a premium "no ads" search option it would draw too much attention from the media/public to just how bad the situation currently is. So, even if they could increase revenue per power user (RPPU?) it would do irreparable harm to their ad-supported model (for non-power users) in the long term.
bronlund 7y ago
The more intelligent they try to make it, the more stupider it gets.
- anoncake 7y ago
  Their attempts to make their search more intelligent ends up keeping the user from using theirs. Which is practically always a bad thing: Regular users tend to suck at searching (e.g. formulating queries) because they haven't learned it, not because they wouldn't be smart enough or because it's something you need a special talent for.
geddy 7y ago
They've been terrible for years. I yearn for the days when you'd look up "x video game review" and you'd get actual human beings with personal sites showing up, and opinions from random people. Now that SEO has been beaten into a pulp, the first 8,000 pages are either major corporations or spam. So the modern internet in general, I suppose. Corporations in spam. Never mind, it'd be unreasonable of me to expect anything else.
- black_yarn 7y ago
  Wish I could up this a thousand times. I've had a personal site for some twenty years; nothing fancy, but I put a lot of effort into my content, and I used to get hundreds of unique visitors a day. Over the last ten years, my non-bot traffic has dropped to a tenth of that, and at the same time, my ability to find similar websites has disappeared. Now I see nothing but resume-padding blogs with generic WordPress templates, and pages of empty corporate bullshit.
JohnFen 7y ago
I don't trust Google's search results right now. Not because they've blurred the line between ads and results (although that certainly makes the situation much worse), but because I don't tend to get very good results from Google search.
- topkai22 7y ago
  Who do you use? I use Bing and like it, but I also used to work there.
  - atwebb 7y ago
    Not sure about everyone else but google is a proxy for other sites now where I can get relevant answers. So I have 2 clicks to the eventual site instead of 1. Similar to using site:www.reddit.com or something similar. I realize that's still using Google as a search engine but it is different than how I previously used it. Thinking briefly on it, the main thing I leverage Google for is phonebook like information or getting a quick definition/spellcheck.
    - Loughla 7y ago
      >Thinking briefly on it, the main thing I leverage Google for is phonebook like information or getting a quick definition/spellcheck. That is exactly right! I use it as a reference material, calculator, or map. There is no other use for google search due to optimization nonsense. For anything in-depth, I use technical resources and databases available through my local public library.
      - lanstin 7y ago
        It's better than github search or Wikipedia search. Haven't even tried stack over flow search. I don't put "site:stackoverflow.com" too much, but I always put "stack" for a stackoverflow search or "wiki" for a wiki search. For general searches, I've shifted from putting in keywords I was pretty sure would be in the answer to just putting in the question in natural language.
BitwiseFool 7y ago
I've actually moved to other search engines because the quality of the results have gone down dramatically. It seems like google will fixate on one or two keywords in my search (usually the most generic ones) and ignore the rest. In addition, the old google tricks like using quotes for literal values no longer seems to work. It is like google is guessing what I want, rather than trying to find what I have entered as a query. I don't know if this is because SEO has poisoned their index, or if I'm not googling "correctly" anymore.
- gregcrv 7y ago
  They are definitely trying to guess what you are searching for. One thing that drives me crazy is that they assume all of your searches are geographically or linguistically "local", they don't have an international search mode where the most relevant result in the world shows up.
  - extropy 7y ago
    Yes, Google is definately not a keyword search engine anymore, and not a great "question answering" engine yet. Uncanney walley?
    - scarejunba 7y ago
      "whats the movie where all the kids shoot ewch other on an island" Pretty good for me. Gives me Battle Royale. "whos the african warlord who has that laughing gif" Top result is video of "Idi Amin laughing on a boat". Just the thing I was thinking of. Pretty good. "whats the name of the principle that two particles csnt have the same characteristics" Pauli's Exclusion Principle as the top result. Great. Google has always worked really well for me.
  - hunter-gatherer 7y ago
    Google trying to guess everything I was doing before me is what finally broke me from them. The day (not terrible long ago) I started typing an email in gmail and they were auto-typing entire sentences for me I lost it. I don't need an algorithm to help dictate my sentence structure. I can do that on me own.
lnenad 7y ago
Google has removed favicons from search in an attempt to de-adsify their results. I don't think it's gonna work, I think with the latest change they've brought to light stuff most of the people using Google didn't even think about.
kvark 7y ago
Why even show ads? Perhaps, it would be easier to just have Alphabet spawning a company doing SEO that triggers the right strings of the Google page ranking algorithm, thus successfully putting stuff on top of search. Google still receives money, but no specific "this is an Ad" needed. At least, in that universe that would be no question on whether we can trust in "no-Ad" section of the results.
bordercases 7y ago
You can remove some bias by using startpage.com but it won't eliminate SEO. Maybe Yandex?
- geogra4 7y ago
  I wish baidu had an english version. But yeah, bing, yandex, ddg.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- rowathray 7y ago
  Switch to OneSearch. It's just an anonymizing wrapper around Bing like DuckDuckGo, but since it's run by a public utility (Verizon) rather than a private fly by night outfit like DDG, I trust it slightly more.
  - xp84 7y ago
    This seems fine and I'm not anti-onesearch or anti-Verizon in particular, but why do you feel that DDG is "fly by night"? Because they're small? I think more Americans have been scammed by Verizon, Comcast, or AT&T than have ever even heard of DuckDuckGo! I have plenty of tiny class-action settlement checks to prove it.
    - rowathray 7y ago
      Because they're not public. If they ever got exposed violating privacy the owner would just declare bankruptcy and move to the Bahamas.
      - bordercases 7y ago
        By that logic, if Verizon was ever caught violating privacy we would not be able to keep it accountable because it's too large to fail.
luxuryballs 7y ago
I trust them for dev stuff, error codes, obscure technical whatever, but not for news or political content, and I’m wary about certain scientific/medical topics.
jborichevskiy 7y ago
> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is billions of people use Google? Key paragraph of the article. You don't have to be good at ads when you have a firehose of most of the world's population coming directly to you, telling you exactly what they want to buy/find/learn/read/do in their native language combined with their geolocation and search history. It would be hard not to serve up relevant ads in that case.
- Disruptive_Dave 7y ago
  But that's precisely what makes Google "good at ads." They built the firehose. Own a destination where billions of people go everyday, find a way to measure their intent, serve my information to them. That = fantastic at ads.
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    I think it's pretty clear what Peretti was talking about--let's make an effort to respond to his intended meaning and not get caught up in semantics. Peretti is talking about quality versus quantity: maybe Google doesn't serve up quality ads, maybe they just serve up quantity ads.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
      He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does. As to the question posed by the article, isn't the answer obvious? I don't know if users even "trust" Google's responses now. But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers. As long as Google is still the best way to search up information on, e.g., obscure aspects of Stardew Valley's economy, users who want to do searches about such things will continue to prefer Google. If Google ceases to surface good results for queries compared to e.g. DDG, users will migrate to DDG.
thirdtry 7y ago
I miss the days when I could search with AND, OR, +word and -word. Now if I search google with more than one word it no longer searches the internet. Instead it searches for ads that are somewhat similar to my query and features those. Any useful links on the first page are accidental.
- nerdkid93 7y ago
  The -word syntax still tends to work for me on subsequent searches (when I searched for a similar query but without the -word).
moreoutput 7y ago
I've already moved on. Same expected junk at the top nowadays.
ogre_codes 7y ago
I have to disagree fundamentally with the author on this point: > but then Google was always ugly until relatively recently Google was originally and for many years extremely elegant in it’s simplicity. There is nothing ugly about getting people exactly what they need instantly. As for the main thrust of the article, I’ve already found Google’s results mostly untrustworthy. For some time search results have been so dominated by adverts that frequently the results I was looking for are buried under the fold. Search is a simple task and for 99% of searches there are at least 2 competitors who serve 90% fewer adverts per page. For the other 1% of searches I’m 3 keystrokes away from getting Google’s search laden results as a second opinion.
- monadic2 7y ago
  > Google was originally and for many years extremely elegant in it’s simplicity. What, no ads?
  - caymanjim 7y ago
    Google has always and still does have the least-obtrusive ads. I don't like when ads masquerade as content, but if I have to receive ads, I'd prefer Google-managed ads over anyone else's. Even Stack Overflow fills their pages with hideous animated ads, and they're about the second-least-objectionable ad-bearing site.
    - Cyclone_ 7y ago
      Agree 100% about the least obtrusive ads. The ads on the verge jump out at you and are pretty in your face.
    - ogre_codes 7y ago
      > Google has always and still does have the least-obtrusive ads. This is no longer true. DuckDuckGo definitely has less obtrusive advertising now versus Google. There are fewer adverts per search and adverts are better labeled. Ads have gotten so pervasive, on a typical Google search, organic results are frequently below the fold.
grecy 7y ago
Does anyone here even really use Google's search engine anymore? I do search for stuff a lot, but to be honest I know perfectly when it will be a stackoverflow page I want, or a wikipedia page, or it will have that link to maps. I can't remember the last time I searched for something and I didn't already know what domain I actually wanted to end up on.
- rahuldottech 7y ago
  > Does anyone here even really use Google's search engine anymore? Yeah. Plenty of people do. I know I do when searching for PDFs because DuckDuckGo randomly ignores "filetype:pdf" when it feels like it, and also sometimes ignores word in the the query that are within quotes. It's also not great with localised results, at least in many parts of the world. My first preference is DDG, but it's not perfect.
- ardfard 7y ago
  Maybe that's the point. Google is much so much easier that even if I want to read article on Wikipedia, I still search it first on Google.
- treebornfrog 7y ago
  You need to keep in mind that HN is a bubble. The responses here do not represent the masses. Yes, most people will search for 'insurance quotes' and click an ad.
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    Yes? Why are you asking us to keep that in mind?
- JohnFen 7y ago
  I don't use Google's search engine, but I do use search engines heavily. Unlike you, I rarely know what site will have what I'm looking for in advance -- it's rarely SO, Wikipedia, or maps.
  - 7y ago
lustigmacher 7y ago
I don't think it's practical. None of the search engines give me results of quality high enough for my daily software development problem, but Google. Tried them all. If you want to get stuff done, you google it. If you want to play socially responsible society member role, you try alternative browsers, until you run out of time, then you google it.
- pmlnr 7y ago
  I don't know what you're searching, but I found the opposite to be true. Exceptions being local to geo area shopping, searching for images with text on them with the text - think xkcd -, and extremely obscure software error messages - apart from these, DDG beats google for me. Has been for quite a while.
caymanjim 7y ago
I've seen various stories about this for a week, and I kept wondering when they were going to roll the change out so that I could see. It turns out that I just don't see any of the ads/sponsored links at all normally, presumably because uBlock is hiding them. I guess I'm surprised that enough HN users would even notice this.
- gtirloni 7y ago
  The search results were changed to add a favicon and hide the URL. Adblockers wouldn't help with that.
  - caymanjim 7y ago
    Of course they can. Ad blockers like uBlock remove DOM elements.
jiveturkey 7y ago
I'm done with Google as of today. The evil genius of making links look like ads, is not just the straw that broke the camel's back; it's the entire bale. There is mass hysteria about Google in general. They aren't the privacy nightmare the pitchfork wielding folks would have you believe. That said, they inspire others that are indeed nightmares. The entire third party tracking industry is a nightmare. And it was already, before Google. (Google bought doubleclick, don't forget.) But people see Google doing it and want to get in on it, nevermind the internal controls and oversight. So the net net is that it's a bad thing -- nobody can be trusted to hold so much PII. I'm switching to Bing. DDG never did it for me. As an aggregator of other engine's work, I do not enjoy their business model either.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > They aren't the privacy nightmare the pitchfork wielding folks would have you believe. Wait, so they aren't collecting as much information about me and my use of my machines as they can anymore? When did that change?
  - jiveturkey 7y ago
    No they aren't and never did. They don't, for example, install a supercookie (like AT&T has done) so that they can track you the person vs "you" some uniquely identified user. Where are the pitchforks for AT&T? To the extent they do collect as much data as they can, they limit it to identify you as a unique user, not you as a specific person. In the cases they necessarily identify you the person (e.g. Google Pay where they know who you are), they firewall that data and do not make the connection to you, some anonymous but unique user. They do an excellent job of not pulling a FB and selling the raw data. Their internal controls are extreme. They "quickly" aggregate and anonymize the data so that they can sell their customers (ad buyers) demographics, not individual people. They could collect much more information than they do.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      > No they aren't and never did. That you can say this make me think that we are using different definitions. Have they also stopped buying real-world credit card usage and correlating it with your other actions? > To the extent they do collect as much data as they can, they limit it to identify you as a unique user, not you as a specific person. That doesn't really make it much better, in my opinion. > They do an excellent job of not pulling a FB and selling the raw data. Their internal controls are extreme. I never thought they did sell raw data. Having strong internal controls is wonderful, but a bit beside the point in my criticism. I object to the collection. How the data is handled post-collection is a separate issue.
gojomo 7y ago
How much longer will I, personally, fully trust Google’s search results? Until about negative-ten years from now.
TillE 7y ago
Because unfortunately I still find Google indispensable (it's fast and gives me better results than the alternatives), I'm now using the "Better Google" userscript which reverts to the old look. Saves me a lot of pain and suffering. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/395257-better-google https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/395257-better-google
corobo 7y ago
Minus two years if I’m remembering correctly. Only time I hit up Google is if DDG has trouble understanding what I’m after
bplot 7y ago
I'm surprised nobody has been talking about the fact that muddying the distinction between ads and organic results is illegal. Google, Amazon, and others have been moving this way for a while, despite the FTC sending a warning a few years ago: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2013/06/ftc-staff-search-engines-differentiate-ads-natural-results https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2013/06/...
- suifbwish 7y ago
  This is literally what the Facebook post feed is made of.
- justincredible 7y ago
  I'm not surprised because I didn't even know that was a thing.
- xp84 7y ago
  Wow. I actually didn't know that there was any law or regulation that even in theory could make Google do this at least in the USA. But then again, this is the same FTC that has proven unable for decades to rein in the MLM industry, whose blatant scamminess makes Google look like a Boy Scout. So I am over here not holding my breath at all that they will ever draw a line. Google will just keep making that "Ad" label smaller and smaller and fainter and fainter, and the FTC will do nothing other than maybe extracting a tiny fine in a settlement every 10 years or something.
thrwaway69 7y ago
Here is a list of alternatives: Ecosia: https://www.ecosia.org https://www.ecosia.org Duckduckgo: https://duck.com https://duck.com Yandex: https://yandex.com https://yandex.com Cliqz: https://beta.cliqz.com https://beta.cliqz.com Qwant: https://www.qwant.com https://www.qwant.com Startpage: https://www.startpage.com https://www.startpage.com Searx: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx https://github.com/asciimoo/searx Bing: https://bing.com https://bing.com Resources to build your own: https://github.com/topics/search-engine https://github.com/topics/search-engine https://openwebindex.eu https://openwebindex.eu https://commoncrawl.org https://commoncrawl.org
- Retr0spectrum 7y ago
  I regularly use yandex for reverse image search, it does much better than google and bing.
  - mindfulhack 7y ago
    You're right. Wow. Just tried it. (yandex.com/images) This thread is really opening up the truth which is that Google is no longer the be all and end all of search. This is a great feeling. Thanks for the Yandex tip.
wcchandler 7y ago
I’m a sysadmin/engineer. Google results have gotten so bad in the past year I’m debating about taking some training courses from our vendors just so I’m not so reliant on a search engine. I feel like this is dark times for my profession.
valdiorn 7y ago
I switched to bing on my work machine at the start of this week, and have found I've been getting better results than google gives me. Especially if I'm trying to do any type of complex query, like filtering by domain or multiple search phrases, google dumbed down their query handing some years ago so it's basically useless now. I've started treating google more like the Yellow Pages; a good source when you WANT ads, i.e. you're looking for a tradesman in your area, or a restaurant to go to. For organic search, it's rubbish. Edit: the dumbed down search has begun on youtube as well, YT routinely ignores what I searched for and just shows me videos related to what I was watching previously. I search for guitar amps and get videos for DIY kitchens, because I was looking at that stuff last night. Beyond moronic.
puranjay 7y ago
I've switched to DDG. I'll take slightly inferior results if it means a more open web. Google's results are now nearly all ads above the fold. The ads are also deceptively marked. Really scummy tactic. The sort of thing you'd expect from crappy credit card companies. If this is the direction Google is going to take under Pichai, then I'm out.
ignoramous 7y ago
I don't, anymore. Just as I now don't trust and download a gazillion apps on my phone anymore. I've personally switched to https://duckduckgo.com/lite https://duckduckgo.com/lite (wished it was available in dark-mode, may be I should write a greasemonkey script) and make it a point to change search engine defaults on all phones in the household and remove or disable google-search and chrome apps. For most basic searches, ddg/lite works just as good and is lighting fast. I do find myself !g redirecting searches to Google which admittedly does a remarkably better job at answering certain class of queries. I used to search on startpage.com, before it sold to an ad-company, which proxies Google search results minus the tracking and ads. Speaking of proxy search engines, there're various searx mirrors too, but I haven't yet used them.
- nreece 7y ago
  Too bad their lite mode doesn't support region setting.
ineedasername 7y ago
> What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I don't think that's the case. I mean, in some case yes there are companies buying ads when they would have been among the top search results anyway. But assuming that many ad creators are probably savvy enough to know where they rate in organic search results, they're likely not targeting adwords where they'd be high in those organic results. I.e., competent users of google advertising are, by definition, users that avoid paying for results they would have gotten otherwise.
ineedasername 7y ago
I think a better question that isn't asked is the following: Has Google created a market for ads where non would exist if they simply provided only organic results? By this I mean that it's possible the main reason Google Ads are useful for companies is because Google has reinforced a sort of negative Nash equilibrium by allowing competitors to squat on organic results by purchasing ads against those better results. I.e. So the best organic results lose user share & clicks because Google lets competitors set ads against them. Given this situation, those targeted by their competitors have no choice but to try & outbid their rivals. Meaning Google Ads are only useful to companies because they exist at all, and assuming minimal gaming of the organic results system with SEO, both companies and users would be better off if there were no ads and the best most relevant results won out on their own merit.
- oehpr 7y ago
  If you put the question to people "Would you have an easier time finding good products and services if there were no advertisements?" I think the majority of people would answer "no". It's sad state of affairs we're in if we can't even imagine finding out about something without that knowledge being forced down our throats.
  - feanaro 7y ago
    I haven't seen an internet ad in years due to using uBlock Origin with very strict block lists. I feel like I find products and services I need effortlessly. Am I missing something?
    - oehpr 7y ago
      Yes. We are discussing googles advertising, and the strategic decisions it forces on companies operating within googles context. And in my post more generally, how that same game plays out in wider society, and with the general public We are not discussing your personal advertising experience. Nor even the general technocratic audience of HN's advertising experience.
zentiggr 7y ago
I'd like to frame this question as "What percentage of people have left Google for other better SEs?" I'm curious to see that number climb.
munk-a 7y ago
Given how little I trust Ads (and I think others are in the same boat) I'm a bit surprised Google hasn't started interspersing Ads more at this point - having your Ad as the second result below an organic search result would probably give you more clicks... that first search result slot is slowly becoming a dead zone.
xenologist 7y ago
The question of trusting Google's search results go far beyond it obfuscating ads in the results pages. Google's executives exert absolute granular control over what results end up at the top. Research shows that users are most likely to click only the top few results, meaning the this control has a massive influence on public awareness. What's more, Google has been shown to be ideologically driven when ranking its results. Including, for instance, down-ranking news sites with left-leaning or socialist views such as the World Socialist Website, Common Dreams, Democracy Now and others as part of a concerted scheme with other information controllers like Facebook to marginalize ideological viewpoints counter to their preferences. One can only speculate how much "meta-googling" (googling google to find out what it's up to) is rigged and cherrypicked.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ineedasername 7y ago
I think it's not impossible to dethrone Google from its dominant Search position if it continues a trend of serving up less relevant paid results, provided a competitor is able to step up. It's what happened with Google initially. I remember the late 90's search engine landscape. Result were hit or miss, but one of a few search engines would usually give what you needed, so you had to try a few: Yahoo, Alta Vista, MSN, Hotbox... there were even sites the aggregated a few engines to provide results from multiple: I don't remember the name, but there was one such that had 4 quadrants, each one a different engine and you'd get results from all 4. It was my default for a while. Then Google came along, and I'm not sure it always provided better results than all of the other engines, but it consistently provided results that were good enough that you didn't need hop around much anymore. And as we all know, virtually in the blink of an eye they dominated the market. This is why I think they can be dethroned if they go too far down a path of weakening their results. Just a bit too far, and a competitor with a little momentum and word of mouth network effects could really gain a toe hold. It's a long shot, but over time.... there was once a time IBM seemed unbeatable. It took years of chipping away from multiple competitors, but they had a big fall.
- claudiulodro 7y ago
  > I don't remember the name, but there was one such that had 4 quadrants, each one a different engine and you'd get results from all 4. It was my default for a while. Dogpile? Looks like they are still around, but a quick test shows it to be even more full of ads than Google nowadays.
ineedasername 7y ago
Peripheral question to the article: are there any vendor-independent tools that attempt to objectively measure result relevance among various search engines? Or even user-rated studies where the user tried multiple engines and rated their results?
jhoechtl 7y ago
I still do trust Google --- because I knowingly feed the search engine with terms I really hope no one can monetize. That's the only way I do not feel betrayed.
neiman 7y ago
I find it quite ironic that search engines were working better for me 10 years ago than they do now.
gre 7y ago
I've been prefixing all my searches with reddit and then filtering by within last month or last year, and something seems to have changed lately. The reddit results say some number of days within the time constraint, but then the result is actually years old which makes it all pointless. This is literally the only way I search google right now because their results are so spammy otherwise.
- MiroF 7y ago
  This is exactly the same for me. I only search reddit through google (and ddg otherwise), but it no longer is providing me with recent results even when I filter.
rackforms 7y ago
Consider the following from personal experience: If you rank highly on Google search as I once did you may become the target of malicious actors trying to leach from your ranking. In my case this leaching appeared to Google as if /we/ were trying to game the system with link farms (we were not). Google penalized us in 2011 and we've yet to recover. The point: when you use Google search you're often served sub-standard results, as over time generations of ranking penalties has lead to lower quality sites ranking higher.
dang 7y ago
There's also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22141125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22141125 ("Google is Backtracking on its Controversial Desktop Search Results Redesign"). We don't need two. Which is better? Edit: we've got https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144210 now.
iamleppert 7y ago
I think the logical next step is for Google to start showing old-school banner ads at the top of the page and pop-ups, and pop-under's. Once that happens (and I am thinking it will be relatively soon), their transformation and subsequent and inevitable slow decline will be fully complete.
StanislavPetrov 7y ago
Advertising aside, Google's search problems also extend to their political and/or economic agenda (outside of paid advertisements). I do a lot of writing, and often look up articles I have read in the past, sometimes the distant past, in order to reference them in the footnotes of my articles and posts. Many articles on politically controversial subjects (especially those that reflect poorly on "establishment" positions) either don't come up at all or are extremely hard to find, despite putting in numerous, specific keywords. Doubtless this is (at least in part) a function of Google's curated "reliability algorithm" that deranks (and in some cases hides completely) sites and sources that Google deems less credible than mainstream, establishment sources (a black-box decision making process that often ranks credible sites below larger, "corporate" outlets with a much worse track record of accuracy). While one could argue that this sort of algorithmic sorting has some use in its news section, when it comes to search this is a terrible policy. A search engine that hides or obfuscates the specific information or article I'm looking for because it doesn't match their agenda is worthless as a search tool.
moultano 7y ago
> Last week we updated the look of Search on desktop to mirror what’s been on mobile for months. We’ve heard your feedback about the update. We always want to make Search better, so we’re going to experiment with new placements for favicons…. https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1220768238490939394 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1220768238490939394
cletus 7y ago
I would love to be a fly on the wall for the decisions that led to Google making the distinction between ads and search results more ambiguous with the latest redesign because whoever signed off on this needs to be fired, for Google's sake. Google SERPs are the one form of advertising I don't mind and are most effective because: 1. Unlike pretty much every other form of online advertising, you have the benefit of user intent in that they actually want to find something and an advertised result may be what they're looking for. Most other forms of online advertising are deliberately intrusive because attention = $$$; and 2. Google ads are paid for on a CPC basis rather than CPM basis so Google is incentivized to show you something relevant to you and your search rather than just churning impressions (like those pages that split an article into a gallery of 11 pages; ad impressions is why they do this). But a key part of this is user trust that Google clearly differentiated an ad from an organic search result. I wonder what short term metrics and thinking went into this. I'm sure there was a short term topline revenue gain but it's one of those things that you're not actually increasingly value, you're just cashing in your brand's value for cash now. But hey I'm sure a bunch of people got promoted, so it's fine.
_emacsomancer_ 7y ago
As far as I can tell, there are four major search providers: Google, Bing, Baidu, & Yandex. Qwant seems to do some amount of their own indexing, falling back to Bing for other things ( https://betterweb.qwant.com/web-indexation-where-does-qwants-independence-stand/ https://betterweb.qwant.com/web-indexation-where-does-qwants... ). Most of the 'alternative' search engines (DDG &c.) seem to rely on Bing and a few (like StartPage) on Google, and I continue to find regular Bing-based search results worse than Google-based search results. Searx is interesting (and what I largely use), and can aggregate from various providers, but it's hard to find reliable working Searx instances.
- crocodiletears 7y ago
  Search engines like Google and Bing are like a new pair of shoes, imho. You've got to give them a week or rwo of use before they really fit your use case. I used to use Searx, and DDG, and kept having to fall back on Google regularly. I went to Bing, and had a similar issue. But after its personalization kicked in, I haven't had to go back to Google more than once or twice a month, and in general, I'm happier with my results when I compare the two. YMMV, though. I trust Google less than I trust Microsoft for search, because the company and its employees seem to lack a "save the world" pathology which I keep getting hints of whenever someone pulls back the curtain on the company's culture. I can intuitively understand a corporate Megalith like MS's interest a lot more easily, so I'm more comfortable deciding whether or not I'm getting a good response from Bing. But as a daily driver, unless you're really concerned about Google, I don't think there's any material advantage to making the switch.
ketzo 7y ago
Realized I was reading this alongside another link on the HN front page right now, [We Wasted $50k On Google Ads So You Don't Have To](https://www.indiehackers.com/article/we-wasted-50k-on-google-ads-so-you-dont-have-to-355a425b27 https://www.indiehackers.com/article/we-wasted-50k-on-google...)... the comparison was a little funny and a little.. scary?
Animats 7y ago
I switched to Bing last summer because Google was mostly showing me useless ads. Bing is years behind Google, but that's a good thing.
Tagbert 7y ago
their quality has definitely gone down and they are really pushing their own results for domains like travel. They seem to have mixed goals there or maybe not.
stebann 7y ago
The beginning of the great fall...
Phait 7y ago
I don't understand why we get daily articles about Google ads on HN's front page. Install an adblocker, problem solved.
- anoncake 7y ago
  For us, yes. Not for the average user that we, being the experts here, have a certain responsibility for. Besides adblocking is a bit of a cludge.
tylerl 7y ago
"You should not trust them because they show ads that are easily mistaken for legitimate content!" ... Declared the news site, in a paragraph sandwiched between two ads carefully disguised to look like legitimate content... You can debate about whether you believe the message, but there's no reasonable argument that you should believe the messenger. WTF, journalism. Seriously.
sparaker 7y ago
1. Google search ads look like search results. While they used to not allow website owners to make their content look like their text ads. 2. Uber shows the rate (and eventually charges) for the maximum possible route from any two locations, when the actual route is generally smaller than that. 3. Amazon charges Import Fee Deposit based on a calculation and when less than that is actually charged, they don't refund it, unless someone actually asks them to. It seems that world has fallen prey to the mindset, "Screw customer experience, let's extort the maximum amount of money we can." Technology companies are no longer in the business of making things easier, instead they are in the business of making the most amount of money they can, while not loosing their business entirely. If these companies actually valued the consumer/customer in the past, they've certainly moved beyond that point.
smsm42 7y ago
In what meaning we could ever "trust" Google's search results? We have already witnesses myriad of examples of Google removing and modifying search results to mollify various governments and private groups. We witnessed how Google banned substring "gun" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16479204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16479204) from Google Shopping results. We have seen people in Google discussing "ML fairness" (modifying algorithms to fit their perceptions of what results should be instead of showing what they actually are) and more broadly, their responsibility to shape political discussion and national election results. We now know they have the tools, the means and the motivation to influence search results, and that they have done it many times in the past. Commercial considerations add to this mess, but I think if the "trust" is the idea that Google just shows the search results as they are, without any outside considerations not related to the quality of search intervening, then this "trust" is long gone. Now the question is only who gets the power to play with it. Is it worse if Google sells a bit of this power instead of keeping it all to themselves? I don't know, maybe, but by then I don't think talking about any "trust" has any point.
joshdance 7y ago
I am trying DuckDuckGo for a week.
bonzer 7y ago
We’ve gotten to a place where Ads have become the backbone of the Web. Google says it’s mission is to make the worlds content organized and useable. That isn’t quite true. It’s to monetize the organization of that content. They claim ads “keep the internet free”. “Free” from paying sure, but free from questionable untruthful ads, con artists Ads, and Horrible content that is monetized by ads that shouldn’t be? Google will say those are “hard computer science” problems they are tackling. The reality is they tackle the problem as long as it doesn’t impact revenue and put just enough resources on it to make it look like they care. Or retroactively share data and say they are ahead of the problem (like YouTube CEO on 60 minutes). How a trillion dollar company of the Self proclaimed worlds Smartest people don’t know a pedophile ring is using YouTube kids comments Section is reckless. Why google even needs to monetize Kids content is pure greed. Do kids really want to see an Ad or benefit from it? Maybe to burn into their habits that “Ads are just part of life” Life With Google in charge of the worlds Information.
fjabre 7y ago
Just came here to say that Google's new ad layout is deliberately misleading and Google's search results are starting to look like spam all over. Who in the hell is in charge of search at Google right now? What a god awful job. The engineer in charge should be fired for such an abomination.

409 points by ecliptik 7y ago

I'm ready for a pay per search tool that's as useful as google with the privacy focus of duck duck go. A penny a search - I'm game.

gtirloni 7y ago
I'd certainly pay a fixed price per month for unlimited searches. I think Google knows that won't work so they don't offer it. Or they couldn't ask the same price that they get selling your personal data? They do offer Youtube Premium without ads but the search engine space is really different. Microtransactions are not here yet.
- mthoms 7y ago
  If they offered a premium "no ads" search option it would draw too much attention from the media/public to just how bad the situation currently is. So, even if they could increase revenue per power user (RPPU?) it would do irreparable harm to their ad-supported model (for non-power users) in the long term.

bronlund 7y ago

The more intelligent they try to make it, the more stupider it gets.

anoncake 7y ago
Their attempts to make their search more intelligent ends up keeping the user from using theirs. Which is practically always a bad thing: Regular users tend to suck at searching (e.g. formulating queries) because they haven't learned it, not because they wouldn't be smart enough or because it's something you need a special talent for.

geddy 7y ago

They've been terrible for years. I yearn for the days when you'd look up "x video game review" and you'd get actual human beings with personal sites showing up, and opinions from random people. Now that SEO has been beaten into a pulp, the first 8,000 pages are either major corporations or spam. So the modern internet in general, I suppose. Corporations in spam. Never mind, it'd be unreasonable of me to expect anything else.

black_yarn 7y ago
Wish I could up this a thousand times. I've had a personal site for some twenty years; nothing fancy, but I put a lot of effort into my content, and I used to get hundreds of unique visitors a day. Over the last ten years, my non-bot traffic has dropped to a tenth of that, and at the same time, my ability to find similar websites has disappeared. Now I see nothing but resume-padding blogs with generic WordPress templates, and pages of empty corporate bullshit.

JohnFen 7y ago

I don't trust Google's search results right now. Not because they've blurred the line between ads and results (although that certainly makes the situation much worse), but because I don't tend to get very good results from Google search.

topkai22 7y ago
Who do you use? I use Bing and like it, but I also used to work there.
- atwebb 7y ago
  Not sure about everyone else but google is a proxy for other sites now where I can get relevant answers. So I have 2 clicks to the eventual site instead of 1. Similar to using site:www.reddit.com or something similar. I realize that's still using Google as a search engine but it is different than how I previously used it. Thinking briefly on it, the main thing I leverage Google for is phonebook like information or getting a quick definition/spellcheck.
  - Loughla 7y ago
    >Thinking briefly on it, the main thing I leverage Google for is phonebook like information or getting a quick definition/spellcheck. That is exactly right! I use it as a reference material, calculator, or map. There is no other use for google search due to optimization nonsense. For anything in-depth, I use technical resources and databases available through my local public library.
    - lanstin 7y ago
      It's better than github search or Wikipedia search. Haven't even tried stack over flow search. I don't put "site:stackoverflow.com" too much, but I always put "stack" for a stackoverflow search or "wiki" for a wiki search. For general searches, I've shifted from putting in keywords I was pretty sure would be in the answer to just putting in the question in natural language.

BitwiseFool 7y ago

I've actually moved to other search engines because the quality of the results have gone down dramatically. It seems like google will fixate on one or two keywords in my search (usually the most generic ones) and ignore the rest. In addition, the old google tricks like using quotes for literal values no longer seems to work. It is like google is guessing what I want, rather than trying to find what I have entered as a query. I don't know if this is because SEO has poisoned their index, or if I'm not googling "correctly" anymore.

gregcrv 7y ago
They are definitely trying to guess what you are searching for. One thing that drives me crazy is that they assume all of your searches are geographically or linguistically "local", they don't have an international search mode where the most relevant result in the world shows up.
- extropy 7y ago
  Yes, Google is definately not a keyword search engine anymore, and not a great "question answering" engine yet. Uncanney walley?
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    "whats the movie where all the kids shoot ewch other on an island" Pretty good for me. Gives me Battle Royale. "whos the african warlord who has that laughing gif" Top result is video of "Idi Amin laughing on a boat". Just the thing I was thinking of. Pretty good. "whats the name of the principle that two particles csnt have the same characteristics" Pauli's Exclusion Principle as the top result. Great. Google has always worked really well for me.
- hunter-gatherer 7y ago
  Google trying to guess everything I was doing before me is what finally broke me from them. The day (not terrible long ago) I started typing an email in gmail and they were auto-typing entire sentences for me I lost it. I don't need an algorithm to help dictate my sentence structure. I can do that on me own.

lnenad 7y ago

Google has removed favicons from search in an attempt to de-adsify their results. I don't think it's gonna work, I think with the latest change they've brought to light stuff most of the people using Google didn't even think about.

kvark 7y ago

Why even show ads? Perhaps, it would be easier to just have Alphabet spawning a company doing SEO that triggers the right strings of the Google page ranking algorithm, thus successfully putting stuff on top of search. Google still receives money, but no specific "this is an Ad" needed. At least, in that universe that would be no question on whether we can trust in "no-Ad" section of the results.

bordercases 7y ago

You can remove some bias by using startpage.com but it won't eliminate SEO. Maybe Yandex?

geogra4 7y ago
I wish baidu had an english version. But yeah, bing, yandex, ddg.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
rowathray 7y ago
Switch to OneSearch. It's just an anonymizing wrapper around Bing like DuckDuckGo, but since it's run by a public utility (Verizon) rather than a private fly by night outfit like DDG, I trust it slightly more.
- xp84 7y ago
  This seems fine and I'm not anti-onesearch or anti-Verizon in particular, but why do you feel that DDG is "fly by night"? Because they're small? I think more Americans have been scammed by Verizon, Comcast, or AT&T than have ever even heard of DuckDuckGo! I have plenty of tiny class-action settlement checks to prove it.
  - rowathray 7y ago
    Because they're not public. If they ever got exposed violating privacy the owner would just declare bankruptcy and move to the Bahamas.
    - bordercases 7y ago
      By that logic, if Verizon was ever caught violating privacy we would not be able to keep it accountable because it's too large to fail.

luxuryballs 7y ago

I trust them for dev stuff, error codes, obscure technical whatever, but not for news or political content, and I’m wary about certain scientific/medical topics.

jborichevskiy 7y ago

> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is billions of people use Google? Key paragraph of the article. You don't have to be good at ads when you have a firehose of most of the world's population coming directly to you, telling you exactly what they want to buy/find/learn/read/do in their native language combined with their geolocation and search history. It would be hard not to serve up relevant ads in that case.

Disruptive_Dave 7y ago
But that's precisely what makes Google "good at ads." They built the firehose. Own a destination where billions of people go everyday, find a way to measure their intent, serve my information to them. That = fantastic at ads.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  I think it's pretty clear what Peretti was talking about--let's make an effort to respond to his intended meaning and not get caught up in semantics. Peretti is talking about quality versus quantity: maybe Google doesn't serve up quality ads, maybe they just serve up quantity ads.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does. As to the question posed by the article, isn't the answer obvious? I don't know if users even "trust" Google's responses now. But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers. As long as Google is still the best way to search up information on, e.g., obscure aspects of Stardew Valley's economy, users who want to do searches about such things will continue to prefer Google. If Google ceases to surface good results for queries compared to e.g. DDG, users will migrate to DDG.

thirdtry 7y ago

I miss the days when I could search with AND, OR, +word and -word. Now if I search google with more than one word it no longer searches the internet. Instead it searches for ads that are somewhat similar to my query and features those. Any useful links on the first page are accidental.

nerdkid93 7y ago
The -word syntax still tends to work for me on subsequent searches (when I searched for a similar query but without the -word).

moreoutput 7y ago

I've already moved on. Same expected junk at the top nowadays.

ogre_codes 7y ago

I have to disagree fundamentally with the author on this point: > but then Google was always ugly until relatively recently Google was originally and for many years extremely elegant in it’s simplicity. There is nothing ugly about getting people exactly what they need instantly. As for the main thrust of the article, I’ve already found Google’s results mostly untrustworthy. For some time search results have been so dominated by adverts that frequently the results I was looking for are buried under the fold. Search is a simple task and for 99% of searches there are at least 2 competitors who serve 90% fewer adverts per page. For the other 1% of searches I’m 3 keystrokes away from getting Google’s search laden results as a second opinion.

monadic2 7y ago
> Google was originally and for many years extremely elegant in it’s simplicity. What, no ads?
- caymanjim 7y ago
  Google has always and still does have the least-obtrusive ads. I don't like when ads masquerade as content, but if I have to receive ads, I'd prefer Google-managed ads over anyone else's. Even Stack Overflow fills their pages with hideous animated ads, and they're about the second-least-objectionable ad-bearing site.
  - Cyclone_ 7y ago
    Agree 100% about the least obtrusive ads. The ads on the verge jump out at you and are pretty in your face.
  - ogre_codes 7y ago
    > Google has always and still does have the least-obtrusive ads. This is no longer true. DuckDuckGo definitely has less obtrusive advertising now versus Google. There are fewer adverts per search and adverts are better labeled. Ads have gotten so pervasive, on a typical Google search, organic results are frequently below the fold.

grecy 7y ago

Does anyone here even really use Google's search engine anymore? I do search for stuff a lot, but to be honest I know perfectly when it will be a stackoverflow page I want, or a wikipedia page, or it will have that link to maps. I can't remember the last time I searched for something and I didn't already know what domain I actually wanted to end up on.

rahuldottech 7y ago
> Does anyone here even really use Google's search engine anymore? Yeah. Plenty of people do. I know I do when searching for PDFs because DuckDuckGo randomly ignores "filetype:pdf" when it feels like it, and also sometimes ignores word in the the query that are within quotes. It's also not great with localised results, at least in many parts of the world. My first preference is DDG, but it's not perfect.
ardfard 7y ago
Maybe that's the point. Google is much so much easier that even if I want to read article on Wikipedia, I still search it first on Google.
treebornfrog 7y ago
You need to keep in mind that HN is a bubble. The responses here do not represent the masses. Yes, most people will search for 'insurance quotes' and click an ad.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  Yes? Why are you asking us to keep that in mind?
JohnFen 7y ago
I don't use Google's search engine, but I do use search engines heavily. Unlike you, I rarely know what site will have what I'm looking for in advance -- it's rarely SO, Wikipedia, or maps.
- 7y ago

lustigmacher 7y ago

I don't think it's practical. None of the search engines give me results of quality high enough for my daily software development problem, but Google. Tried them all. If you want to get stuff done, you google it. If you want to play socially responsible society member role, you try alternative browsers, until you run out of time, then you google it.

pmlnr 7y ago
I don't know what you're searching, but I found the opposite to be true. Exceptions being local to geo area shopping, searching for images with text on them with the text - think xkcd -, and extremely obscure software error messages - apart from these, DDG beats google for me. Has been for quite a while.

caymanjim 7y ago

I've seen various stories about this for a week, and I kept wondering when they were going to roll the change out so that I could see. It turns out that I just don't see any of the ads/sponsored links at all normally, presumably because uBlock is hiding them. I guess I'm surprised that enough HN users would even notice this.

gtirloni 7y ago
The search results were changed to add a favicon and hide the URL. Adblockers wouldn't help with that.
- caymanjim 7y ago
  Of course they can. Ad blockers like uBlock remove DOM elements.

jiveturkey 7y ago

I'm done with Google as of today. The evil genius of making links look like ads, is not just the straw that broke the camel's back; it's the entire bale. There is mass hysteria about Google in general. They aren't the privacy nightmare the pitchfork wielding folks would have you believe. That said, they inspire others that are indeed nightmares. The entire third party tracking industry is a nightmare. And it was already, before Google. (Google bought doubleclick, don't forget.) But people see Google doing it and want to get in on it, nevermind the internal controls and oversight. So the net net is that it's a bad thing -- nobody can be trusted to hold so much PII. I'm switching to Bing. DDG never did it for me. As an aggregator of other engine's work, I do not enjoy their business model either.

JohnFen 7y ago
> They aren't the privacy nightmare the pitchfork wielding folks would have you believe. Wait, so they aren't collecting as much information about me and my use of my machines as they can anymore? When did that change?
- jiveturkey 7y ago
  No they aren't and never did. They don't, for example, install a supercookie (like AT&T has done) so that they can track you the person vs "you" some uniquely identified user. Where are the pitchforks for AT&T? To the extent they do collect as much data as they can, they limit it to identify you as a unique user, not you as a specific person. In the cases they necessarily identify you the person (e.g. Google Pay where they know who you are), they firewall that data and do not make the connection to you, some anonymous but unique user. They do an excellent job of not pulling a FB and selling the raw data. Their internal controls are extreme. They "quickly" aggregate and anonymize the data so that they can sell their customers (ad buyers) demographics, not individual people. They could collect much more information than they do.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > No they aren't and never did. That you can say this make me think that we are using different definitions. Have they also stopped buying real-world credit card usage and correlating it with your other actions? > To the extent they do collect as much data as they can, they limit it to identify you as a unique user, not you as a specific person. That doesn't really make it much better, in my opinion. > They do an excellent job of not pulling a FB and selling the raw data. Their internal controls are extreme. I never thought they did sell raw data. Having strong internal controls is wonderful, but a bit beside the point in my criticism. I object to the collection. How the data is handled post-collection is a separate issue.

gojomo 7y ago

How much longer will I, personally, fully trust Google’s search results? Until about negative-ten years from now.

TillE 7y ago

Because unfortunately I still find Google indispensable (it's fast and gives me better results than the alternatives), I'm now using the "Better Google" userscript which reverts to the old look. Saves me a lot of pain and suffering. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/395257-better-google https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/395257-better-google

corobo 7y ago

Minus two years if I’m remembering correctly. Only time I hit up Google is if DDG has trouble understanding what I’m after

bplot 7y ago

I'm surprised nobody has been talking about the fact that muddying the distinction between ads and organic results is illegal. Google, Amazon, and others have been moving this way for a while, despite the FTC sending a warning a few years ago: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2013/06/ftc-staff-search-engines-differentiate-ads-natural-results https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2013/06/...

suifbwish 7y ago
This is literally what the Facebook post feed is made of.
justincredible 7y ago
I'm not surprised because I didn't even know that was a thing.
xp84 7y ago
Wow. I actually didn't know that there was any law or regulation that even in theory could make Google do this at least in the USA. But then again, this is the same FTC that has proven unable for decades to rein in the MLM industry, whose blatant scamminess makes Google look like a Boy Scout. So I am over here not holding my breath at all that they will ever draw a line. Google will just keep making that "Ad" label smaller and smaller and fainter and fainter, and the FTC will do nothing other than maybe extracting a tiny fine in a settlement every 10 years or something.

thrwaway69 7y ago

Here is a list of alternatives: Ecosia: https://www.ecosia.org https://www.ecosia.org Duckduckgo: https://duck.com https://duck.com Yandex: https://yandex.com https://yandex.com Cliqz: https://beta.cliqz.com https://beta.cliqz.com Qwant: https://www.qwant.com https://www.qwant.com Startpage: https://www.startpage.com https://www.startpage.com Searx: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx https://github.com/asciimoo/searx Bing: https://bing.com https://bing.com Resources to build your own: https://github.com/topics/search-engine https://github.com/topics/search-engine https://openwebindex.eu https://openwebindex.eu https://commoncrawl.org https://commoncrawl.org

Retr0spectrum 7y ago
I regularly use yandex for reverse image search, it does much better than google and bing.
- mindfulhack 7y ago
  You're right. Wow. Just tried it. (yandex.com/images) This thread is really opening up the truth which is that Google is no longer the be all and end all of search. This is a great feeling. Thanks for the Yandex tip.

wcchandler 7y ago

I’m a sysadmin/engineer. Google results have gotten so bad in the past year I’m debating about taking some training courses from our vendors just so I’m not so reliant on a search engine. I feel like this is dark times for my profession.

valdiorn 7y ago

I switched to bing on my work machine at the start of this week, and have found I've been getting better results than google gives me. Especially if I'm trying to do any type of complex query, like filtering by domain or multiple search phrases, google dumbed down their query handing some years ago so it's basically useless now. I've started treating google more like the Yellow Pages; a good source when you WANT ads, i.e. you're looking for a tradesman in your area, or a restaurant to go to. For organic search, it's rubbish. Edit: the dumbed down search has begun on youtube as well, YT routinely ignores what I searched for and just shows me videos related to what I was watching previously. I search for guitar amps and get videos for DIY kitchens, because I was looking at that stuff last night. Beyond moronic.

puranjay 7y ago

I've switched to DDG. I'll take slightly inferior results if it means a more open web. Google's results are now nearly all ads above the fold. The ads are also deceptively marked. Really scummy tactic. The sort of thing you'd expect from crappy credit card companies. If this is the direction Google is going to take under Pichai, then I'm out.

ignoramous 7y ago

I don't, anymore. Just as I now don't trust and download a gazillion apps on my phone anymore. I've personally switched to https://duckduckgo.com/lite https://duckduckgo.com/lite (wished it was available in dark-mode, may be I should write a greasemonkey script) and make it a point to change search engine defaults on all phones in the household and remove or disable google-search and chrome apps. For most basic searches, ddg/lite works just as good and is lighting fast. I do find myself !g redirecting searches to Google which admittedly does a remarkably better job at answering certain class of queries. I used to search on startpage.com, before it sold to an ad-company, which proxies Google search results minus the tracking and ads. Speaking of proxy search engines, there're various searx mirrors too, but I haven't yet used them.

nreece 7y ago
Too bad their lite mode doesn't support region setting.

ineedasername 7y ago

> What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I don't think that's the case. I mean, in some case yes there are companies buying ads when they would have been among the top search results anyway. But assuming that many ad creators are probably savvy enough to know where they rate in organic search results, they're likely not targeting adwords where they'd be high in those organic results. I.e., competent users of google advertising are, by definition, users that avoid paying for results they would have gotten otherwise.

ineedasername 7y ago

I think a better question that isn't asked is the following: Has Google created a market for ads where non would exist if they simply provided only organic results? By this I mean that it's possible the main reason Google Ads are useful for companies is because Google has reinforced a sort of negative Nash equilibrium by allowing competitors to squat on organic results by purchasing ads against those better results. I.e. So the best organic results lose user share & clicks because Google lets competitors set ads against them. Given this situation, those targeted by their competitors have no choice but to try & outbid their rivals. Meaning Google Ads are only useful to companies because they exist at all, and assuming minimal gaming of the organic results system with SEO, both companies and users would be better off if there were no ads and the best most relevant results won out on their own merit.

oehpr 7y ago
If you put the question to people "Would you have an easier time finding good products and services if there were no advertisements?" I think the majority of people would answer "no". It's sad state of affairs we're in if we can't even imagine finding out about something without that knowledge being forced down our throats.
- feanaro 7y ago
  I haven't seen an internet ad in years due to using uBlock Origin with very strict block lists. I feel like I find products and services I need effortlessly. Am I missing something?
  - oehpr 7y ago
    Yes. We are discussing googles advertising, and the strategic decisions it forces on companies operating within googles context. And in my post more generally, how that same game plays out in wider society, and with the general public We are not discussing your personal advertising experience. Nor even the general technocratic audience of HN's advertising experience.

zentiggr 7y ago

I'd like to frame this question as "What percentage of people have left Google for other better SEs?" I'm curious to see that number climb.

munk-a 7y ago

Given how little I trust Ads (and I think others are in the same boat) I'm a bit surprised Google hasn't started interspersing Ads more at this point - having your Ad as the second result below an organic search result would probably give you more clicks... that first search result slot is slowly becoming a dead zone.

xenologist 7y ago

The question of trusting Google's search results go far beyond it obfuscating ads in the results pages. Google's executives exert absolute granular control over what results end up at the top. Research shows that users are most likely to click only the top few results, meaning the this control has a massive influence on public awareness. What's more, Google has been shown to be ideologically driven when ranking its results. Including, for instance, down-ranking news sites with left-leaning or socialist views such as the World Socialist Website, Common Dreams, Democracy Now and others as part of a concerted scheme with other information controllers like Facebook to marginalize ideological viewpoints counter to their preferences. One can only speculate how much "meta-googling" (googling google to find out what it's up to) is rigged and cherrypicked.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

ineedasername 7y ago

I think it's not impossible to dethrone Google from its dominant Search position if it continues a trend of serving up less relevant paid results, provided a competitor is able to step up. It's what happened with Google initially. I remember the late 90's search engine landscape. Result were hit or miss, but one of a few search engines would usually give what you needed, so you had to try a few: Yahoo, Alta Vista, MSN, Hotbox... there were even sites the aggregated a few engines to provide results from multiple: I don't remember the name, but there was one such that had 4 quadrants, each one a different engine and you'd get results from all 4. It was my default for a while. Then Google came along, and I'm not sure it always provided better results than all of the other engines, but it consistently provided results that were good enough that you didn't need hop around much anymore. And as we all know, virtually in the blink of an eye they dominated the market. This is why I think they can be dethroned if they go too far down a path of weakening their results. Just a bit too far, and a competitor with a little momentum and word of mouth network effects could really gain a toe hold. It's a long shot, but over time.... there was once a time IBM seemed unbeatable. It took years of chipping away from multiple competitors, but they had a big fall.

claudiulodro 7y ago
> I don't remember the name, but there was one such that had 4 quadrants, each one a different engine and you'd get results from all 4. It was my default for a while. Dogpile? Looks like they are still around, but a quick test shows it to be even more full of ads than Google nowadays.

ineedasername 7y ago

Peripheral question to the article: are there any vendor-independent tools that attempt to objectively measure result relevance among various search engines? Or even user-rated studies where the user tried multiple engines and rated their results?

jhoechtl 7y ago

I still do trust Google --- because I knowingly feed the search engine with terms I really hope no one can monetize. That's the only way I do not feel betrayed.

neiman 7y ago

I find it quite ironic that search engines were working better for me 10 years ago than they do now.

gre 7y ago

I've been prefixing all my searches with reddit and then filtering by within last month or last year, and something seems to have changed lately. The reddit results say some number of days within the time constraint, but then the result is actually years old which makes it all pointless. This is literally the only way I search google right now because their results are so spammy otherwise.

MiroF 7y ago
This is exactly the same for me. I only search reddit through google (and ddg otherwise), but it no longer is providing me with recent results even when I filter.

rackforms 7y ago

Consider the following from personal experience: If you rank highly on Google search as I once did you may become the target of malicious actors trying to leach from your ranking. In my case this leaching appeared to Google as if /we/ were trying to game the system with link farms (we were not). Google penalized us in 2011 and we've yet to recover. The point: when you use Google search you're often served sub-standard results, as over time generations of ranking penalties has lead to lower quality sites ranking higher.

dang 7y ago

There's also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22141125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22141125 ("Google is Backtracking on its Controversial Desktop Search Results Redesign"). We don't need two. Which is better? Edit: we've got https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144210 now.

iamleppert 7y ago

I think the logical next step is for Google to start showing old-school banner ads at the top of the page and pop-ups, and pop-under's. Once that happens (and I am thinking it will be relatively soon), their transformation and subsequent and inevitable slow decline will be fully complete.

StanislavPetrov 7y ago

Advertising aside, Google's search problems also extend to their political and/or economic agenda (outside of paid advertisements). I do a lot of writing, and often look up articles I have read in the past, sometimes the distant past, in order to reference them in the footnotes of my articles and posts. Many articles on politically controversial subjects (especially those that reflect poorly on "establishment" positions) either don't come up at all or are extremely hard to find, despite putting in numerous, specific keywords. Doubtless this is (at least in part) a function of Google's curated "reliability algorithm" that deranks (and in some cases hides completely) sites and sources that Google deems less credible than mainstream, establishment sources (a black-box decision making process that often ranks credible sites below larger, "corporate" outlets with a much worse track record of accuracy). While one could argue that this sort of algorithmic sorting has some use in its news section, when it comes to search this is a terrible policy. A search engine that hides or obfuscates the specific information or article I'm looking for because it doesn't match their agenda is worthless as a search tool.

moultano 7y ago

> Last week we updated the look of Search on desktop to mirror what’s been on mobile for months. We’ve heard your feedback about the update. We always want to make Search better, so we’re going to experiment with new placements for favicons…. https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1220768238490939394 https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1220768238490939394

cletus 7y ago

I would love to be a fly on the wall for the decisions that led to Google making the distinction between ads and search results more ambiguous with the latest redesign because whoever signed off on this needs to be fired, for Google's sake. Google SERPs are the one form of advertising I don't mind and are most effective because: 1. Unlike pretty much every other form of online advertising, you have the benefit of user intent in that they actually want to find something and an advertised result may be what they're looking for. Most other forms of online advertising are deliberately intrusive because attention = $$$; and 2. Google ads are paid for on a CPC basis rather than CPM basis so Google is incentivized to show you something relevant to you and your search rather than just churning impressions (like those pages that split an article into a gallery of 11 pages; ad impressions is why they do this). But a key part of this is user trust that Google clearly differentiated an ad from an organic search result. I wonder what short term metrics and thinking went into this. I'm sure there was a short term topline revenue gain but it's one of those things that you're not actually increasingly value, you're just cashing in your brand's value for cash now. But hey I'm sure a bunch of people got promoted, so it's fine.

_emacsomancer_ 7y ago

As far as I can tell, there are four major search providers: Google, Bing, Baidu, & Yandex. Qwant seems to do some amount of their own indexing, falling back to Bing for other things ( https://betterweb.qwant.com/web-indexation-where-does-qwants-independence-stand/ https://betterweb.qwant.com/web-indexation-where-does-qwants... ). Most of the 'alternative' search engines (DDG &c.) seem to rely on Bing and a few (like StartPage) on Google, and I continue to find regular Bing-based search results worse than Google-based search results. Searx is interesting (and what I largely use), and can aggregate from various providers, but it's hard to find reliable working Searx instances.

crocodiletears 7y ago
Search engines like Google and Bing are like a new pair of shoes, imho. You've got to give them a week or rwo of use before they really fit your use case. I used to use Searx, and DDG, and kept having to fall back on Google regularly. I went to Bing, and had a similar issue. But after its personalization kicked in, I haven't had to go back to Google more than once or twice a month, and in general, I'm happier with my results when I compare the two. YMMV, though. I trust Google less than I trust Microsoft for search, because the company and its employees seem to lack a "save the world" pathology which I keep getting hints of whenever someone pulls back the curtain on the company's culture. I can intuitively understand a corporate Megalith like MS's interest a lot more easily, so I'm more comfortable deciding whether or not I'm getting a good response from Bing. But as a daily driver, unless you're really concerned about Google, I don't think there's any material advantage to making the switch.

ketzo 7y ago

Realized I was reading this alongside another link on the HN front page right now, [We Wasted $50k On Google Ads So You Don't Have To](https://www.indiehackers.com/article/we-wasted-50k-on-google-ads-so-you-dont-have-to-355a425b27 https://www.indiehackers.com/article/we-wasted-50k-on-google...)... the comparison was a little funny and a little.. scary?

Animats 7y ago

I switched to Bing last summer because Google was mostly showing me useless ads. Bing is years behind Google, but that's a good thing.

Tagbert 7y ago

their quality has definitely gone down and they are really pushing their own results for domains like travel. They seem to have mixed goals there or maybe not.

stebann 7y ago

The beginning of the great fall...

Phait 7y ago

I don't understand why we get daily articles about Google ads on HN's front page. Install an adblocker, problem solved.

anoncake 7y ago
For us, yes. Not for the average user that we, being the experts here, have a certain responsibility for. Besides adblocking is a bit of a cludge.

tylerl 7y ago

"You should not trust them because they show ads that are easily mistaken for legitimate content!" ... Declared the news site, in a paragraph sandwiched between two ads carefully disguised to look like legitimate content... You can debate about whether you believe the message, but there's no reasonable argument that you should believe the messenger. WTF, journalism. Seriously.

sparaker 7y ago

1. Google search ads look like search results. While they used to not allow website owners to make their content look like their text ads. 2. Uber shows the rate (and eventually charges) for the maximum possible route from any two locations, when the actual route is generally smaller than that. 3. Amazon charges Import Fee Deposit based on a calculation and when less than that is actually charged, they don't refund it, unless someone actually asks them to. It seems that world has fallen prey to the mindset, "Screw customer experience, let's extort the maximum amount of money we can." Technology companies are no longer in the business of making things easier, instead they are in the business of making the most amount of money they can, while not loosing their business entirely. If these companies actually valued the consumer/customer in the past, they've certainly moved beyond that point.

smsm42 7y ago

In what meaning we could ever "trust" Google's search results? We have already witnesses myriad of examples of Google removing and modifying search results to mollify various governments and private groups. We witnessed how Google banned substring "gun" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16479204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16479204) from Google Shopping results. We have seen people in Google discussing "ML fairness" (modifying algorithms to fit their perceptions of what results should be instead of showing what they actually are) and more broadly, their responsibility to shape political discussion and national election results. We now know they have the tools, the means and the motivation to influence search results, and that they have done it many times in the past. Commercial considerations add to this mess, but I think if the "trust" is the idea that Google just shows the search results as they are, without any outside considerations not related to the quality of search intervening, then this "trust" is long gone. Now the question is only who gets the power to play with it. Is it worse if Google sells a bit of this power instead of keeping it all to themselves? I don't know, maybe, but by then I don't think talking about any "trust" has any point.

joshdance 7y ago

I am trying DuckDuckGo for a week.

bonzer 7y ago

We’ve gotten to a place where Ads have become the backbone of the Web. Google says it’s mission is to make the worlds content organized and useable. That isn’t quite true. It’s to monetize the organization of that content. They claim ads “keep the internet free”. “Free” from paying sure, but free from questionable untruthful ads, con artists Ads, and Horrible content that is monetized by ads that shouldn’t be? Google will say those are “hard computer science” problems they are tackling. The reality is they tackle the problem as long as it doesn’t impact revenue and put just enough resources on it to make it look like they care. Or retroactively share data and say they are ahead of the problem (like YouTube CEO on 60 minutes). How a trillion dollar company of the Self proclaimed worlds Smartest people don’t know a pedophile ring is using YouTube kids comments Section is reckless. Why google even needs to monetize Kids content is pure greed. Do kids really want to see an Ad or benefit from it? Maybe to burn into their habits that “Ads are just part of life” Life With Google in charge of the worlds Information.

fjabre 7y ago

Just came here to say that Google's new ad layout is deliberately misleading and Google's search results are starting to look like spam all over. Who in the hell is in charge of search at Google right now? What a god awful job. The engineer in charge should be fired for such an abomination.