8 ms·

What is going on inside Google? Far worse search results recently, verbal ads during Maps navigation directions, and stuff like this. Do they see some writing o

• monkeybutton 5y ago
  Verbal ads during navigation?! I haven't really been driving anywhere new since covid started so I must have missed it. What are they like? "Take the next exit for a delicious Big Mac!"
  • tesseract 5y ago
    "Turn after the Dunkin Donuts on the right onto Maple Street"
    • Groxx 5y ago
      This has been in my app for a couple years - I hate it every time. Not only is it very clearly advertising, it's nearly always useless because the restaurant/whatever is barely or not at all visible on the approach to the turn. It's pretty clear they're going for paid landmarks, not useful ones (though I don't like landmark-directions either way).
      • jjulius 5y ago
        Waaaaaaaiiiiittt, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold up. You mean the comment you're responding to isn't being sarcastic?
        • reustle 5y ago
          No. I've been living outside the US since 2014 and just noticed it recently as I was back using driving directions. Seems to be at least once a trip, once an hour. Only ever uses large chain restaurants / banks as landmarks. Doesn't happen at all in Japan (yet).
          • jjulius 5y ago
            Jesus wept, that's asinine. Edit: Oughta start taking bets on how long until this makes its way into Waze, and then how long until Google prevents us from turning Waze's voice nav off.
            • dylan604 5y ago
              Brawndo has what plants crave! We're getting closer and closer every day.
            • asdff 5y ago
              waze is even worse because the ads pop up on you during navigation like a malicious webpage from 2003. I pulled over and uninstalled the app the first time that happened and never looked back.
            • maest 5y ago
              > Oughta start taking bets on how long until this makes its way into Waze Waze is already serving very aggressive modal-type ads mid-navigation. I got a pop-up for a car repair shop 20 minutes out of my way, _mid-navigation_ with a big "add to route" option. Could not swipe it away, had to press a small 'x' button to close the ad. All this while driving and trying to figure out which way I should go the next intersection.
              • Groxx 5y ago
                I immediately bounced off Waze because of all the advertising strewn throughout it, and the couple times I've re-checked over the past few years were all as bad. It's incredibly intrusive and disruptive, I have no idea why people use it nowadays.
        • philliphaydon 5y ago
          Sometimes I’m glad I don’t live in the US. I heard these things on HN and I think, oh that’s absurd that doesn’t happen! Like advertising in windows 11, never seen it in Singapore and Taiwan. But then people show screen grabs and I’m like wow wtf!
        • Groxx 5y ago
          Not dunkin donuts specifically yet, despite being near one, but yes to Wendy's, Taco Bell (in particular), Walmart, Best Buy, and several others at least. Edit: ah, yeah, as reustle says, banks have made multiple appearances. Far less than fast food though. Honestly they're a usually reasonable landmark choice, they tend to be at corners and are intentionally eye-catching and recognizable. But I hate it. And I'm pretty sure that's just being used as justification for why the "feature" as a whole is acceptable (it's not).
      • snowwrestler 5y ago
        Could someone please point me to the spot in Google’s ads product to purchase these ads-in-navigation-directions? If these are really ads, there will be a place to buy them. Google doesn’t run ads for free.
        • pessimizer 5y ago
          They don't have to let small customers buy them, or put them up for auction like their other ads. Just offer it to big companies directly, especially ones that might be visual landmarks like a McDonald's or a Dunkin Donuts.
          • snowwrestler 5y ago
            Google does not do this; they don’t have secret offline ad sales. Even their largest customers have to go through a UI to place every ad. That’s why ads are so profitable for Google. The entire system is highly automated, which lowers costs.
            • Groxx 5y ago
              It's kinda funny that you think there are no B2B sales or promotions involved in the world's largest advertising business, even in the face of increasingly-numerous evidence of them doing so multiple times for many years. I agree most cases don't, but zero is laughably, trivially false. Big businesses absolutely have inside access to get things done that are not generally available. Heck, that's practically Google's entire support strategy - know someone who knows someone, otherwise deal with the automation which just repeats "no" in a loop. Sometimes it's just because it's not ready for wider onboarding (big customers get tapped for trialing big new features (like Uber/Lyft/etc's rideshare integration in maps), not all of which ever go further), sometimes very clearly not. E.g. current Facebook/Google legal battles, like https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/14/google-facebook-ceos-oversaw-a-2018-ad-auction-deal-states-allege.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/14/google-facebook-ceos-oversaw... , and that's far from the first. It's just the latest and greatest and stands a chance of actually going somewhere. Sure, they may not be phoning up a friend and passing $$ directly to dodge using the UI's pricing. Instead they get automation built for them, so they don't have to do that. Because you're right, it doesn't scale.
    • thunderrabbit 5y ago
      This actually happens in Japan, and until now I assumed it was not advertising. I would translate it as "turn at the next left; where there is a ______." The ______ is often a convenience store. hmmmm!
      • quartesixte 5y ago
        The flipside though is that Japanese urban planning doesn’t use street names the way American/European countries do and literally the only marker is the local konbini at the corner. And turn at the corner 2-chome 4-ban 5-gou isn’t a helpful thing either.
    • foota 5y ago
      These aren't ads, they're intended to provide a point of reference for users.
      • pclmulqdq 5y ago
        These aren't supposed to be seen as ads, but they are ads. I've never heard "turn right at the public library," but I have heard "turn right at the tiny dunkin donuts across the street from the huge public library."
        • MerelyMortal 5y ago
          Yep, it only does this for a single Jack In The Box for me at a trafficlight-eqiuped, large, clearly-marked cross street.
      • autoexec 5y ago
        You _really_ need to brush up on your ability to recognize when you're being manipulated. If you can't see these as advertising you're probably misidentifying countless other ads in your life.
• sergiotapia 5y ago
  A gigantic pile of cash yet no world changing ideas to throw money at. No big ideas. Google is essentially search and ads today. Nothing more. A series of startups will begin to cut away at the fat and the cycle will continue.
  • HWR_14 5y ago
    Well, they have a giant pile of cash. Their goal is to buy those startups.
• kornhole 5y ago
  This is the spiral of businesses based on personal data. They are pressured to meet quarterly earnings targets. As more people flee with their data, they must squeeze more out of what they have and can get. They are trying to diversify into business services and hardware, but those are struggling even though often heavily discounted. Their tarnished reputation is making it harder for customers in those markets to trust them.
  • lamontcg 5y ago
    Its the same way that everything on TV turns into crap. It is all about maximizing profits while minimizing effort and focusing on the least common denominator of customers/viewers/users, and actually shrinking the userbase to maximize user profitability. So the result is the shit that half the people out there will just put up with.
  • mikro2nd 5y ago
    "quarterly earnings targets" It's worse than that: It's YoY revenue growth targets that really matter to the stock price, hence the never-ending push to put more ads into places you never expected to see them. FWIW I've pretty-much given up on YouTube due to the aggressive ad insertions.
    • BLKNSLVR 5y ago
      NewPipe / Invidious or Youtube Vanced. So good, except when you accidentally experience raw YT again.
    • marcosdumay 5y ago
      Or, in other words, the huge price/earnings of all stocks (even large companies) require that those companies grow even when this is physically impossible. Otherwise there is a huge downwards correction on the price, and people that brought it by the unrealistic price (that's anybody that brought it) lose most of their money. This is the price of participating in an irrational market.
    • mikro2nd 5y ago
      Replying to myself so as to add the following quote from Rudy Rucker that seems to me terribly apropos: "I never really understood the ideas in economics, in fact I almost failed to graduate from college because I couldn’t stand going to economics lectures. Hate, hate, hate the stuff. It’s like studying Bible stories or pseudoscience—economics has so little connection to daily reality. For instance, it’s completely obvious that companies can’t in fact grow forever, year after year, without hitting some debilitating limits. But the so-called value of a company is based on how much they grow from quarter to quarter. Economics as practiced by bankers is complete horseshit, but they’ve bought out all the politicians, so nothing reasonable ever gets done. In the long run, of course, the situation will resolve itself. Meanwhile we’re seeing a resurgence of the dystopic SF novel!"
• mtgx 5y ago
• duxup 5y ago
  Spam in Gmail
• userbinator 5y ago
  It's not only Google; I've noticed this slow-but-accelerating decline for a few years now, and my theory is probably a bit too controversial even for HN, so I'll just be oblique about it: this is the result when hire people for who they are rather than what they can do. You end up with docile, obedient employees who don't care about anything other than the fact that they're working for Google and making $$$, and they're not going to push back against any decisions.
  • dataflow 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure large companies like Google often hire to prevent competitors from getting those employees, not for what those employees would bring to the company itself. Or maybe that's what you were getting at?
  • Smoosh 5y ago
    Or is it because these companies (not just Google) have now saturated their markets and to sustain revenue growth the only solution they see is to squeeze harder regardless of the ethics? (upon thinking about it, the above is not incompatible with your POV).
  • codeduck 5y ago
    Beyond a certain size it becomes impossible for normal individuals to influence technology or product directions.
• kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  They're near or past peak growth. Juicing the profits means they have to extract value by reducing costs and monetizing as much as possible. Steady dependable revenue with good customer service isn't good enough for American businesses any more.
  • staplers 5y ago
    The result of a system that legally binds corporations to maximize profits enforced via shareholder lawsuit.
    • pseudalopex 5y ago
      "While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so."[1] [1] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html
      • account42 5y ago
        How is a comment in a lawsuit against a private company relevant to a comment about the negative incentives of publicly traded companies?
  • invalidname 5y ago
    They didn't build a significantly commercially successful product since gmail. Android was an acquisition. They are in panic mode since they realize growth will be over. Search has stagnated, they missed on social (repeatedly) and they have nowhere to improve. Ventures like the self driving car etc. were all an expensive detour. Google is the new Microsoft (or worse, Oracle). It's just a matter of time until the rest of the world figures this out.
    • asdff 5y ago
      Every single enterprise company I know of pays for gsuite. Every university too. They could just lean into that.
• BLKNSLVR 5y ago
  > verbal ads during Maps navigation directions Say what? I've neither experienced nor heard others mention this, is this recent? Coincidentally, as a result of an HN post earlier in the day (wifi required for GPS) I installed Osmand+ to try out for navigation.
  • MerelyMortal 5y ago
    There's another reply-chain, but yes, I get that ads for Jack In The Box, and it sounds like another user gets it for Dunkin Donuts. And it's not for lankmark purposes.