3 ms·
> It had to do, especially, with selling search placement, which was something that search engines before Google regularly did. Whether you bought ads on Searc
by titzer 5y ago
> It had to do, especially, with selling search placement, which was something that search engines before Google regularly did. Whether you bought ads on Search or not had no bearing on where you came out in the Search results, and you can doubt that all you like but it was true.
Which, with the slow boil of reducing the yellow background of ads down to next to nothing, then moving them ahead of results, and slowly fading the background to nothing, whittling the little "Ad" chip down to nothing [1], is today exactly what Google is doing.
[1] https://www.webprofits.com.au/blog/google-search-change https://www.webprofits.com.au/blog/google-search-change
> another evil practice which inspired the slogan was: giving preference to your own products in search results.
Which it absolutely does, and did worse (sued in EU over Google shopping results).
I joined in 2010. At no point did I ever drink the koolaid that Google would ever really live up to this vague ideal, but I was, at the time, impressed by how ethical and careful the company seemed to be. That completely changed, little by little, and I lost that trust, or rather, that trust was broken and slowly evaporated. Today, Google is a behemoth that will seemingly stop at nothing to keep that 20% YoY gravy train going. It's getting ridiculous. They're paving over cyberspace with ads and gobbling every profitable thing and potential competitor. They won't be stopping the growth mindset. The self deception at the top is staggering. Google is becoming everything the internet never should have been.
- Groxx 5y agoThe ad marker isn't even colored any more, it's just plain text: "Ad · https:// https://..."
- ok_dad 5y agoI use a adblocker, but I turned it off and made this screenshot to show how it's really hard to differentiate ads now: https://i.ibb.co/pwt1JT0/image.png https://i.ibb.co/pwt1JT0/image.png
- titzer 5y agoThe whole first page is ads. It's pretty disgusting. The entire apparatus treats every query as having commercial intent, or even if it doesn't, force commercial intent, on users. The abject hunger to monetize literally every interaction you will ever have with a computer is what finally turned my stomach and I really couldn't take it anymore. I run an adblocker, unapologetically. Even then, you notice the next level of distortion; the search engine will push you to over-optimized ad-laden, super-dumbed down and aggregated sites that are practically devoid of information but loaded with trackers and spying and ads. Google sends you there because it will inevitably send you to what is in its interest, which is either one of its own properties or something participating in the great ad sideshow, all of which are subject to its tax as the biggest monkey in the jungle.
- native_samples 5y agoOh come on. What non commercial results do you expect for a query like "new computers"? Do you really think anyone who searched that is looking for Wikipedia?
- titzer 5y ago> Oh come on. Completely unnecessary tone here, but yeah, I do think that some percentage of queries for "new computers" might just be interested in finding out what new computers are out there, and not just buy the first thing shoved in their faces. Stupid search engine rounds up 90 or 95% to 100% and forces everyone to think about buying stuff all the time. It's really grating being lumped into whatever crap category the engine thinks is the most profitable and being shown the result of a bidding war for my attention for every. single. thing. in this life.
- jrochkind1 5y agoThat URL is not working for me. It redirects to `https://cdn.i.ibb.co/1/392979222/0 https://cdn.i.ibb.co/1/392979222/0`, and `cdn.i.ibb.co` is not in DNS for my machine.
- ok_dad 5y agoI just googled for a free image host, not sure about your issue, sorry.