56 ms·

For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads

734 points by steelstraw 5y ago

mediumsmart 5y ago
Using DDG for years and reading this thread I wanted to try Google but apparently I sent it to zero in the hosts file years ago when it was still good.
ssss11 5y ago
Yeah I’ve noticed this too. But also the rest of the front page is often either seo spam (like those Pinterest links which catch whatever search term you’ve used) or shopping sites. I’ve found google search to be increasingly hostile to its customers. I guess we’re not the customers. Use duckduckgo or something else.
- yostrovs 5y ago
  It's fraud, effectively. I've seen a bunch of people that are not tech savvy do Google searches, and they have no idea they're clicking on ads. I pointed this out a few times and they seem to not care anyways. Google knows this very well and they pretend like they're giving search results, but the majority of users are getting ad search results instead.
  - verve_rat 5y ago
    It is basically the yellow pages on the internet model that a few people tried and Google killed. I'm not sure what we can learn from the fact that Google is regressing into the model they killed in the first place.
  - ForOldHack 5y ago
    "the majority of users are getting ad search results instead." The Majority.
  - dazc 5y ago
    What's worse is that it's particularly acute with financial services where most ads are scams.
  - zbuf 5y ago
    Yup. Our competitor advertises against our company name, and Google helpfully optimises the text of their ad -- some ML algorithm finds text most likely to be confused with the search results. Optimising for "clicks" is just optimising garbage.
- omnicognate 5y ago
  You're not duckduckgo's customer either (their primary revenue source is keyword based advertising), or the customer of anything else you don't pay for. The only one I know of that at least plans to have a simple two-way relationship with search users as their customers is Kagi. Currently it's in free beta with a waitlist (took a week for me). When they go live they intend it to be a paid, subscription service with no advertising. So far I've found it good, and I'll gladly pay when the time comes.
  - echelon 5y ago
    I hope they penalize websites with heavy tracking or advertising. We might get back to a sane web if this takes off. They can grow their market by offering 10 free searches a day, and I think that would be enough to entice a lot of folks to switch. Offer a paid API, and I'd bet they'd have a real growth story.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      "I hope they penalize websites with heavy tracking or advertising." I hope they give me a easy way, to set my own priorities (but I would choose that option).
      - Closi 5y ago
        I'm on the beta and it has both of these things. You can choose to boost particular sites, or to down-rank sites with trackers.
        echelon 5y ago
        That's amazing. I can't wait!
        Closi 5y ago
        I've personally gone back to using Google from being on the Beta, but i'm sure other people will have more success.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I'd pay $10/month for a nerd-only, developer-friendly, pro-small-biz, precision search that works like 2008 version of Google. Something that I use dozens of times a day, is totally worth paying for. It is inevitable. It's coming. Algolia? Please?
  - yabones 5y ago
    I've seen some people mention Kagi[1], but it's a closed beta. Hope they're successful, because I would also gladly pay $10/month to get a search engine that actively resists spam. [1] https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/
  - rtsil 5y ago
    I'd pay probably more, particularly if it has no ads and no tracking (sorry, I meant "personalized results").
  - ddalex 5y ago
    But would you pay $120 / month ? Because AFAIK that's what Google makes using the current version. Disclaimer: I work for Google but in no way related to search, business models, or product decisions. My words are my own.
- twofornone 5y ago
  Kind of an aside but it seems like there are SEO pages which dynamically adjust their displayed text in the search results to your search query...how does that work? Isn't search result text indexed in advance? Or is this some sort of paid feature from google, where your search terms are injected into a template? Whatever it is it's really annoying because usually these results link to another search on a shopping site and more often than not those results come up empty anyway.
  - altdataseller 5y ago
    They are usually search result pages with the keyword in the url parameter, and they link to those search results elsewhere on their site for Google to find
    - l33tman 5y ago
      But they show up in the cached google search preview as well. I search for something that doesn't exist, and you get 5 "shopping" sites that have faked URLs and faked product entries for the non-existant product. Like you see in the cached textlines: "Buy reptilecandy here, low prices!!" or something, and the URL to the site seems legit, trustedstore.com/reptilecandy/ but if you click on it you just get to the shop top page with no reptile candy in sight.
      - imwillofficial 5y ago
        Have you found a site that sells reptile candy? I’ve been searching forever. Failing to find it had been my greatest regret.
        l33tman 5y ago
        This actually turned out to be an example of what was discussed... if you google "reptilecandy" (as one word) you get some of these weird search results that do look like they have a category on the shop that has Reptile Candy, with the appropriate Title and search excerpt. Clicking on one of the sites linked in the search results gives: https://www.zazzle.com/reptile+candy+favors https://www.zazzle.com/reptile+candy+favors And on their shop page it seems they have a section called "Reptile Candy & Favors". But if you click on the category above, Candy & Favors, there is no sub-section list so the sub-section is probably entirely dynamically generated. So there's something weird going on, I wonder how those dynamic categories end up in googles search excerpts. Can they pay google to inject non-existant pages and sections into the results? (the search result in question was not marked as an Ad though)
- onphonenow 5y ago
  How is pinterest not just banned unless you do site:pintrest or whatever. If you are not logged into some of these sites you can't actually get to stuff either. Annoying.
  - dazc 5y ago
    I'm beginning to realise that Google are happy for Pinterest to monopolise all image search since it requires a lot of resource and is difficult to monetize. Not sure why they are allowing them to take over the rest of search though?
- XorNot 5y ago
  I don't get how Pinterest hasn't been removed from existence by Google. There is literally no one who is ever searching for things that wants a Pinterest link, but the incredible persistence of Google in showing me Pinterest is amazing. Though this kind of goes to the related question: why Google don't allow you to setup your profile to nuke domains from consideration when you search, I do not know - it would completely divorce them from any responsibility for search result manipulation and make everyone happier.
  - bane 5y ago
    There's a great chrome extension called "unpinterested" that automatically adds -site:pinterest.* to all google queries. It's improved my use of google by an east 20%. It's so bad you'd almost think google has a stake in pinterest at this point.
  - wiml 5y ago
    They did have exactly that feature for a while, unless I'm dreaming. But they got rid of it.
    - dazc 5y ago
      IIRC, it was canned because it was linked to search performance and was abused on an industrial scale for negative seo. Such a blacklist could be limited to one's personal account though but, I guess, since there is no monetisation benefit for google they don't care to offer it?
- squarefoot 5y ago
  Pinterest links can be removed from Google searches using the "Unpinterested" browser extension for Firefox and Chrome, but it breaks Google Maps searches and it was never patched to correct the issue.
- function_seven 5y ago
  My biggest feature request: A check box that says, "[ ] I'm not buying anything" I don't know how technically hard this would be to implement. Or what business model will resist adding it. I just know that most of my web searches are NOT me trying to buy stuff. They're usually looking up information. Like, how does the load sensing algorithm work on my LG washer? No chance I'll ever find out by searching the web. Only 200 links to different places I can buy a new one. Or maybe some videos explaining that the feature exists, and "oh and would you like to buy one?" Maybe I want to know if my GadgetMaster 3000 will work with my WidgetWanker Mark II. Nope, but here's 100 places you can buy those, or maybe the THINGDOODLE brand of knockoffs. Ok, I'm ranting. Point is: give me a way to restrict my search to only those pages that aren't selling anything. Maybe the heuristic is that the page hasn't changed in 6 months, or uses outdated tags like <marquee>, or some fancy semantic analysis of the page copy. I don't know. I just wish search results weren't so utterly dominated by e-commerce sites or affiliate spam.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
    Google is incentivised by you relying on them instead of a competitor, shortly followed by page loads. Giving you what you want immediately, particularly when they know that you know what your searching for is a niche interest, isn’t in their best interests.
  - jordigh 5y ago
    > My biggest feature request: A check box that says, "[ ] I'm not buying anything" The primary purpose of ads isn't to get you to buy something. It's to plant a brand in your brain so that next time you do want to buy something, you'll think of the brand. Ads are very good psychological manipulation.
    - function_seven 5y ago
      I’m not talking about ads. I’m talking about the “natural” search results. Of course those are also really ads in a sense, but somehow there’s got to be a way to provide a real search engine that doesn’t show only e-commerce sites. I’ll pay for it!
- lolinder 5y ago
  > Use duckduckgo or something else. Duckduckgo hasn't been any better for me lately. It seems like search as a whole is failing to respond to the latest round of SEO tricks. It takes a lot more work to find what I'm actually looking for, regardless of which engine I use.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    DDG uses Bing as its search provider, and Bing isn't any better than Google right now when it comes to prioritizing ads and dark patterns[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28517187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28517187
    - sp332 5y ago
      Bing is one source among many. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
  - dazc 5y ago
    You don't get the first page of ads on DDG though, a simple change of settings equals none at all.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > But also the rest of the front page is often either seo spam (like those Pinterest links which catch whatever search term you’ve used) or shopping sites. Hey now, SEO spam is often packed to the brim with high revenue ads.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Maybe Google should start a portrait mode monitor business; consumers could get even more ad results on their screen.
- riversflow 5y ago
  I think they've already done that–only since they are a software company they decided that it would be better to write an OS for portrait mode monitors, and make it free, off-loading those pesky manufacturing steps. Ideally the OS would be attached to a device that the consumer would bring with them everywhere and have fancy geo-locating tools that tell Google where they go, you know for better ad attr-err search relevance! (perhaps that's what you were going for?)
- heartbeats 5y ago
  If I recall correctly, some of the Chromebook models had 3:2 screens so you could get "more web on the screen".
ejb999 5y ago
thats why I don't use google anymore (well one of the many reasons actually)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tenpoundhammer 5y ago
Try neeva . com it's really similar to google but with none of the garbage experience from ads and SEO Spam. I switched from duckduckgo to neeva recently and have enjoyed it wayyy more.
- voisin 5y ago
  What do you like about Neeva vs DDG
  - foobarding 5y ago
    Unlike DDG, Neeva is ad free. It also has a bunch of additional features.
dmitriid 5y ago
"We sell advertisement, not search results" https://twitter.com/krebs_adrian/status/1488173888068542466 https://twitter.com/krebs_adrian/status/1488173888068542466 https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/ https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/ (Note: the url of this page is /honestresults/)
- post_break 5y ago
  I love that line. It's like coke saying we sell sugar water, not soda.
endisneigh 5y ago
Did anyone replicate this? I couldn’t on desktop and mobile. Seems like flame bait
- albertopv 5y ago
  There are many factors that could change your results. Since I disabled web & app activity I have seen a lot more ads.
- AlexanderTheGr8 5y ago
  Do you think he created that web-page by modifying HTML?
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    It’s literally a cropped image that no one has said they can reproduce
    - imwillofficial 5y ago
      So what if it is cropped, is the amount of ads shown in the screenshot with no actual search results acceptable to you? Does the fact OP has a smaller or larger resolution than you change your mind?
      - endisneigh 5y ago
        Literally the fifth result is what they were looking for. they crop that out and complain on twitter. so yes, it's acceptable. use ad-block if it's not to you.
        imwillofficial 5y ago
        So we disagree. Showing me 4 ads before seeing something that is also a thinly veiled ad is not acceptable. Running other software to make search usable is also not acceptable. Combined with your misinformation spread in other threads of this topic, your actions appear to be shilling.
gamerDude 5y ago
I wonder if there would be a good way to monetize a search engine such that returning great results gets them paid. Like a check in if you found what you were looking for, give a penny. Or potentially not what you were looking for, but something that you are happy you found. Thus giving back good info to the search engine and only pay a nominal amount when you get what you want.
iqanq 5y ago
no ublock origin = pebcak
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  how do you get adblock on mobile?
  - iqanq 5y ago
    I use adguard with safari. On android you can use brave.
    - MerelyMortal 5y ago
      On Android you can use Firefox with uBlock Origin.
  - Taywee 5y ago
    Firefox on Android has uBlock Origin. I think Kiwi and other browsers allow it too. No idea about Chrome or anything.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    Just install ublock origin? It works fine on Firefox on my phone.
- recursive 5y ago
  So you blame the user for not filtering the ads? And you don't blame Google for serving them?
  - iqanq 5y ago
    Google does what they think it's better for them and the user should do what it's better for him.
AviationAtom 5y ago
Google has become the very thing people ran from. Try Bing, as it's been well regarded.
kehrin 5y ago
A little bit ironic that you can see an actual result at the bottom of the already cropped screenshot.
imwillofficial 5y ago
That screenshot was shocking. It truly has been a slippery slope to get here. So subtle I barely noticed the group shifting beneath my feet.
dvngnt_ 5y ago
been using ublock origin for years I have no idea what you're talking about. good luck though
enumjorge 5y ago
The Facebook stock debacle from yesterday makes me think that maybe there is a limit to how user-hostile a tech giant can be before it really starts to hurt their bottom line. For a while it seemed like companies like FB had captured enough of the market that they seemed impervious to backlash from their many controversies, too big to fail in a way. It’s too early to tell if this is the beginning of FB’s demise, but it looks like letting resentment towards your product build among your user base can come bite you in a very real way after all. FB used outrage as a way to increase engagement and it worked for a while, but now FB is increasingly a non-desirable place to hang out. Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content. When Apple added restrictions that cut off oxygen to FB, FB started a PR campaign to paint it as one grave injustice. It seems like that was met with a collective shrug. Who cheers for the bad guy? All that is to say, it seems like Google has been in this value extraction mode for a while and I don’t see what the long term plan is. They don’t seem to be innovating much, but are instead intent on squeezing as much money as they can from their existing assets. And while that may work in the short term, FB has shown tech giants are not invincible. I’ve seen a lot of talk online lately about how bad the quality of search results have gotten. If a credible competitor emerges, I think a lot of users would gladly switch. If/when that happens, Google better hope they don’t find themselves in FB’s position where they can’t acquire their way out of their rut.
- el-salvador 5y ago
  > FB used outrage as a way to increase engagement with their product and it worked for a while, but now FB is increasingly a non-desirable place to hang out. > Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content. Tiktok does this very well. I usually end up feeling good after using TikTok. On the other hand Twitter makes me stressed, FB is not much used by my friends age group or only used for memes, and Instagram is now showing me two ads every three stories that is really a pain to use.
  - eftychis 5y ago
    Should we be concerned if the goal of a social network is to just make people feel well? (This is a serious question to ponder as a society perhaps (or just for me).) The goal of these products of course is to keep people around.
bell-cot 5y ago
I often prepend my searches with strings such as "wikipedia " - typically there's a big improvement on the SRP end...but the borG will fix that if it catches on. Coming soon - "Ad Infinitum(tm)" Google search results pages, which start to slowly scroll 5 seconds after being displayed...
- pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
  Better yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search
aparsons 5y ago
This has been the case for a long time on mobile. 1.5 vertical screens of ads is not uncommon.
jart 5y ago
I feel like using search engines has become a "jargon arms race" where you have to be smart enough to figure out the right combination of synonyms for what you want, that advertisers, seo spammers, and regulators haven't figured out how to stimey yet. Jargon is almost like a different language at this point, where if you know how to speak in esoteric jargon you have unfettered access to information, and if you don't, then information rapidly approaches unobtainable.
- sjcoles 5y ago
  Even that doesn't help in cases as Google will interpret your jargon filled query to something that's a lower common denominator and return irrelevant results regardless.
  - danuker 5y ago
    Absolutely. It will either ignore the terms, or claim that no results are found. Perhaps it no longer indexes as much as it used to, at least for noncommercial content.
only4here 5y ago
I've noticed that this happens a lot more when SafeSearch is turned on, not sure why this happens though.
cmckn 5y ago
To be fair, it depends on the screen. The submission makes it sound like the whole first page is ads, but there’s 4 ads at the top instead of the usual 2-3. It happens to extend to the fold in this Twitter user’s browser. I scroll past all ads out of habit[0], so honestly this doesn’t impact my Google usage. Wish I didn’t have to train that muscle, but here we are. :( [0] my pihole breaks the links anyway
- endisneigh 5y ago
  UBlock Origin - available on all major browsers, including iOS (er, this has adblock, but not uBlock in particular) and Android, my friend.
  - fignews 5y ago
    uBlock Origin available on iOS? Please explain!
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      Ah, my bad - though you can use many of the same block lists, iOS only has a concept of content blockers, so you have to use DNS Cloak with a content blocker. Or you can use Brave on iOS which has adblock.
      - cmckn 5y ago
        Or you can run pihole and get DNS-level blocking for your entire network with no extensions/config on individual devices. Also with pihole, you almost never run into the dreaded “it looks like you’re using ad block!”.
        koolba 5y ago
        Can you also setup iOS to tunnel home so as to leverage your pihole DNS on mobile?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
blhack 5y ago
Now that I think about it, I don't use search engines very much anymore, at least not in the traditional way. My searches are almost all site:$foo. Actually, a good majority of my searches are site:reddit.com {product I am looking for}, or site:news.ycombinator.com {some tech thing I want to find again}. I think there is a comparison here to how inbound telephone calls, or to some extent email, have been made useless by marketers. Google searches for "Phoenix {thing}" tend to be almost all yelp/yelp clone spam. edit: this made me actually look in my history. It seems that by far the thing I am using google for the most is image search. Second from that is spelling/grammar sanity checks.
- ViViDboarder 5y ago
  I just try to do as close to first party searches as I can instead. Like, use the Reddit search to search Reddit, or use Yelp to search for businesses, and when I don’t know what site to search from, I just use DuckDuckGo. I find it easier than typing out “site:” especially since my browser allows me to just start the URL and then tab into a search on that site.
  - foxrider 5y ago
    I've been using shorthands for websites for a while now, "aw pipewire" looks for "pipewire" on Arch Wiki, "c cassandra" looks through my confluence, "re hotas" is for reddit and so on. It's very easy an intuitive. I'm using Vivaldi, but I'm pretty sure it's a feature in many other browsers that let you add a custom search engine.
soheil 5y ago
That’s above the fold, not the whole screen.
alangibson 5y ago
In principle making a some-of-the-web search engine is a tractable problem. Start by indexing known high quality, preferably moderated sites. Allow trusted users to upload their bookmarks for indexing. And so on... My guess is the reason there are so few competitors is economics. You can't get investment as long as Google stock is a sure bet. Few will pay for your service as long as Google is answering their questions. Advertisers aren't interested as their money is more effectively spent on Google. Therefore you can't build an audience sure to lack of revenue/capital.
vlark 5y ago
Firefox + Ublock & Privacy Badger, on desktop and mobile. I also use Blokada on Android. This combination stops most ads, and if a few sneak through it is easy to create a custom rule. While I still find Google useful, especially Google Scholar, I've primarily moved to DuckDuckGo for most casual searches.
- lukestateson 5y ago
  It’s a band-aid. Just let Google slowly die, it’s already time when you should pull the plug – the patient is brain-dead for several years and there is no hope. Use DuckDuckGo it’s a lot better with relevant search results and privacy friendly.
- collsni 5y ago
  Do you find a advantage of privacy badger vs blocking all third party cookies? I just dump my full cache everytime I close Firefox.
t8e56vd4ih 5y ago
today i bought another batch of Yandex stocks after they tanked 30% since a few weeks ago. I believe Yandex is able to fill a niche left empty by Google - good ole useful search results without censoring and ad infestation. I'm bullish on Yandex. they also have amazing image search (much more useful than googles) and they are planning to expand focus beyond Russia and neighboring countries.
- GeorgeWBasic 5y ago
  It's possible that they tanked because of this news: https://www.aroged.com/2021/12/13/sites-with-pirated-content-will-be-removed-from-yandex-and-other-domestic-search-engines/ https://www.aroged.com/2021/12/13/sites-with-pirated-content... thus removing one of the major reasons to use Yandex.
PaulHoule 5y ago
... been that way for a long time.
ForOldHack 5y ago
It has been that way for a while, Printer cartridge, Memory, and drivers. No useful content what so ever.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
It's just another argument for (1) using ublock origin or equivalent (2) refusing to use browsers that do not allow ublock origin or equivalent to function.
flenserboy 5y ago
Imagine how fast the Web would be if it were user-oriented.
- ForOldHack 5y ago
  Like say... Altavista?
varispeed 5y ago
Now that Google has killed their G suite accounts I am looking to move everything somewhere else and planning to completely stop using any of their services. What would you recommend to jump to (paid service)? What tools I could use to move my emails? (I have my own domains etc.)
- ForOldHack 5y ago
  This sounds like a grand top level question. I am in the same boat.
scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
I work in medical education related tech and I make content. I spend a lot of time searching for information related to medicine online - knowledge aimed more at the actual medical practitioners. One of the big irritants in this research is how much the ad model has warped everything to be centered on the patient. I'm not totally blocked but I do feel hindered. For example if I'm looking for a procedure it's far more likely for the results to be from sources which dilute and simplify because they're intended on selling patients on something. If I were presented with an information search product capable of being aware of my specific needs and adapting itself for these needs, I could probably convince my higher-ups to actually pay for something like this. I really wish I could get the same experience doing medical research as the one I get when searching programming related questions, which often return detailed explanations on stackoverflow, actual documentation and other valuable content. On another and somewhat different note I'm from a specific European country and I've noticed searching in my language in topics related to my country is even worse. If I'm searching for important information regarding something specific for my country, like taxes/institutional affairs, the google search is basically unusable because the results are infested with obnoxious endless clickbait/GDPRconsent/cookies/garbage/websites. I vividly remember how search results in my country used to return forums and conversations, but from what I understand everyone is on FB groups which aren't displayed. There is so much out there being talked about that doesn't seem to 'exist' in the eyes of a search algo. Weird times.
bluenose69 5y ago
google.com/maps is also a pain nowadays, with almost half the space of my (smallish laptop) screen being ads and controls. I'm glad I don't own stock in this company, because they are on the wrong side of the advertising Laffer curve, and moving back will be difficult because customers have choices and are unlikely to come back.
bigyellow 5y ago
freediver 5y ago
For all searches, Kagi search is everything but the ads!
mmind 5y ago
Many people here suggests other services, including services you can pay for to bash Google. The reality is that Google offered Google Contributor and now offers YouTube premium but most people prefer free content with ads. And that is fine. I find very surprising the HN folks complaining about the tech companies making ads-based money for their services when they are not willing to pay for the ad-free version. It is disappointing that they feel using ad blockers is the reasonable thing to do. $9/month yearly subscription) for ad-free YouTube is an absolutely fair price IMHO. Ad blockers are piracy and kill jobs, same as downloading movies or books.
- 202202050025 5y ago
  > Ad blockers are piracy and kill jobs, same as downloading movies or books. Well, maybe I don't want to watch ads so that binary-tree-inverting MIT/Stanford graduates could get their 6-figure compensation packages for participating in a natural monopoly?
  - mmind 5y ago
    Well, the creators of the content you watch do have to eat too. They are the ones that make most of the money from those ads, and the ones that hurt most if you do not support them.
- melenaboija 5y ago
  What are you basing tour thoughts on? Also, what do you find fair about ad free youtube (which BTW I pay)? I am paying the same for youtube, which is a platform that takes content created from others, adds ads to it and the make me pay to remove them than for Netflix, which partially produces its own content. I sometimes think that youtube premium is the best idea to make money without doing anything else than make you think that they are helping you to clean the crap they have created.
  - mmind 5y ago
    Well, I assume creators think that Google brings value or they would simply host their videos in a CDN themselves, at least when they already have an audience. I think YouTube provides creators a reach that others can't. Probably because of the hundreds of video clients they support or the quality of the stream even in the most hostile network conditions.
jdrc 5y ago
it s really a mess. Searching for 'viper' brings up 'Viber' as the first result, the rest is cars except for a link to 'viperidae'. It's a goddamn snake, google
- alberto7 5y ago
  Eugh yes. This is getting worse and worse so rapidly. If your search term happens to also be a currently popular song or artist then you may as well skip ahead a couple of pages.
  - lolinder 5y ago
    Same thing if there's a movie adaptation of the book you're looking for.
- svnpenn 5y ago
  Looks fine to me http://0x0.st/oXzN.png http://0x0.st/oXzN.png
- gtirloni 5y ago
  Just add another word "viper snake" and the problem is solved. I don't see the problem. You wouldn't shout "viper" at a random person and expect them to correctly guess you're talking about a snake at first guess.
  - ViViDboarder 5y ago
    I mean, I’d assume it was a snake. Not sure what else I’d assume they were talking about. Also, Google isn’t a person. I wouldn’t expect someone to understand what I’m trying to say if I yelled “site Colin stackoverflow.com fizz buzz” at them either. The bigger issue is that Google didn’t even interpret “viper” as any form of “viper” at all and instead corrected it to a nonsense word that’s a company name.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      > I mean, I’d assume it was a snake. Not sure what else I’d assume they were talking about. Shout it at me and I'd be fifty-fifty whether it's a snake or a car (the Dodge V-10) you mean. But I'm a car nut; I'd assume for normal (English-speaking) people the snake would be the obvious default meaning.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Y'all still see ads??? -Gorhill
northernexposur 5y ago
This has been the case for me for a long time.
northernexposur 5y ago
This is been the case for a long time.
bostonsre 5y ago
I don't think the person that posted the picture understands what literally means.
Havoc 5y ago
Busy testing searx - selfhosted front end for search engines. Results seem decent enough. And set up protonmail today. I've just about had it with google's bullshit.
nopeNopeNooope 5y ago
tomatofrank 5y ago
Last night I watched a YouTube video that had a song in the background that I hadn't heard but really liked. I pulled up Shazam but it didn't recognize the song, so I took to Google. I entered the lyric and added the search terms "lyrics" and "r&b" at the end. Google returned 4 YouTube videos to songs that didn't contain the lyric, a link to a Boyz II Men song on Genius that didn't contain the lyric (good job Google, you know an R&B band), a link to peterbe.com to find a song by lyrics, and a bunch of other useless links. I clicked on to page 2, which hilariously presented 3 of the 4 YouTube videos that were on page 1. I was immediately turned off, so I pulled up DuckDuckGo and Bing, entered the same exact query, and both engines returned the song I was looking for in the first result. I laughed out loud. I then thought to myself, "I wonder how many pages I would have had to flip through in Google to find this result." Eventually, I found it. It was the 68th result on page 7.
- gundmc 5y ago
  What was the lyric?
  - tomatofrank 5y ago
    "like you didn't care I don't know why lyrics r&b" was my query
    - gundmc 5y ago
      Wow, same results here. That's pretty poor.
    - nkurz 5y ago
      It would be nice if this worked, but in Google's defense, this is an odd combination of an exact search phrase of common words and then a couple categorical terms that don't have to actually appear on the page. If you help it by searching for just the quoted phrase you want without the additional terms it puts the result you want both as the top result and in a pullout at the top of the page: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22like+you+didn%27t+care+I+don%27t+know+why%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22like+you+didn%27t+care+I+...
daviddisco 5y ago
I can't speak for Google but I think the theory they work under is that for some queries the ads are the best results. In other words, the user is more likely to find what they are looking for if those ads are there. There are many signals used for ranking results and the ad auction price is one signal.
- johnnyo 5y ago
  Interesting, I’ve been burned so many times, I always skip any result tagged as an ad. I can’t be the only one.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  That used to be the case, I remember searching for desktop software and the adverts would be the most relevant results. For whatever reason that stopped working a long time ago.
hartem_ 5y ago
The not so happy thing about this is that at this point the entire web is somewhat flawed. Too many sites have produced too much junk content just to game Google. A fundamentally new approach is needed to identify and surface “organic” (whatever that may mean) results. So I suspect (albeit with no data to show for it) that even if we just switched all ads off we still wouldn't be happy with the results that we see. Google’s revenue model has been at odds for far too long with identifying and weeding out SEO spam. I don't mean 'spam' here in a derogatory way, but rather everyone who has a legitimate and interesting product and has had their back against the wall and was forced to play the SEO game and become a 'search spammer' As a result 'spammers' (again, pretty much every site these days) 'won' because it was and still is the only way to survive.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Millionshort is an attempt at fixing this. https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/
  - lolinder 5y ago
    The problem is that even the small sites are playing the same SEO game. If you remove the top X, you might just end up cutting out what you're looking for and still end up with a bunch of SEO'd results.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Ok, let's make an SEO detector and ban every site that plays that game.
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        Like Google used to have and do, back in the day when they were still not evil, AFAICR.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > The not so happy thing about this is that at this point the entire web is somewhat flawed. Too many sites have produced too much junk content just to game Google. A fundamentally new approach is needed to identify and surface “organic” (whatever that may mean) results. So I suspect (albeit with no data to show for it) that even if we just switched all ads off we still wouldn't be happy with the results that we see. Honestly, I suspect that if you deprioritize pages with ads, referral links and sponsored content in search results, this problem will mostly solve itself. The glut of garbage on the web comes from people trying to make a quick buck online, and I suspect Google is happy to show that content because the garbage is laden with Google or their partners' ads. Even content that doesn't have ads, but encourages visitors to buy products, is valuable to Google because they can use that information to show users more ads or funnel them into buying products via Google Shopping.
jacquesm 5y ago
How about a search engine for pages that are non-commercial only in nature?
beloch 5y ago
Most people are fairly resistant to changing their behaviour because of annoyances. Take broadcast TV for example. From the 50's to the early aughts, TV's only competition was theatres, and its in-home convenience let it win that competition handily in terms of the hours people spent watching TV versus going to the theatre. Television providers took full advantage and the percentage of ads by airtime steadily increased. Shows that were designed around commercial breaks in one era had to be cut down in length and have additional breaks added when rerun in later eras. There was no meaningful competition, either from alternative media distributors or between broadcasters to see who could offer more actual content per hour. It wasn't until streaming came along that cable TV finally started dying. This isn't a huge issue for cable companies, since most have pivoted into operating as ISP's and streaming itself. It's only a matter of time before cable TV is no longer offered as a service by the companies created to offer it. Google's search engine has few competitors. Even the search function on many websites is inferior to a google search restricted to that site. The ads in google search results can be scrolled through in seconds, although Google constantly plays games to make it harder to tell where the ads stop. Their search algorithm is now suspicious in how it sorts the non-ad results of many searches. All of this is annoying to users, but is it annoying enough to force users onto other search engines? Google appears to be determined to find out just how much spam is too much. Will DuckDuckGo or other alternatives to google gain traction as a result of this? Probably some, but probably not much. They likely won't make much of a dent in Google's bottom line until they offer something compellingly superior to Google, just as streaming is superior to broadcast TV.
ChuckMcM 5y ago
Here was Dave Rosenthal's take two years ago: https://blog.dshr.org/2020/02/more-on-ad-bubble.html https://blog.dshr.org/2020/02/more-on-ad-bubble.html Disclosure he and I agree on what is going on here :-)
xpressvideoz 5y ago
We've been suffering from this literally for decades by the dominant Korean search engine, Naver. Now it is time for you to suffer too, westerners!
ljm 5y ago
Sometimes lately I can't tell the difference between google or an alternative like DDG. It's all crap.
halestock 5y ago
How much is pagerank involved in google searches these days? I wonder, if they were to revert to an early version of it, would searches improve? Or did they move away / update / augment it to prevent seo abuse?
- adaptbrian 5y ago
  Not much for head terms and even at the longtail, today. I've long thought rolling out googs algo from 2010 and getting away from all the prediction/neural network rewriting would be a good move for a new search engine.
rhizome 5y ago
For some searches the results don't include my search terms. They just go silently straight to the "did you mean?" results.
- n42 5y ago
  this is such an infuriating user experience. no, I did not mean, that’s why I typed it, damn it! I think they’ve even started ignoring my quoted search terms!
  - rhizome 5y ago
    They are getting to be so terrible, what kind of bureaucracy motivates them to throw away their crown jewel? Is Adwords the only self-made product they have that actually works anymore? Maybe their business model is only Adwords and selling surveillance data, and our understanding simply hasn't caught up to that fact yet.
    - n42 5y ago
      it's not that. it's the marriage of top down OKRs, politics driven performance reviews, and a seemingly unbounded pay scale
      - rhizome 5y ago
        Sounds like a reasonable definition of "bureaucracy" to me!
longcommonname 5y ago
Youtube has gotten terrible with up to five minute long ads. Why the hell am I getting targeted?
- pcurve 5y ago
  I can't stand youtube ads, especially the ones one with conversational tones! The worst thing about youtube is, when I do a search, it intentionally throws in videos that have absolutely nothing to do with my search.
jeffparsons 5y ago
Just as I saw this link a notification popped up on my Pixel phone: > Trending: "Turkey inflation rate" > See search results I've already put a lot of effort into purging as many categories of Google spam notifications from my phone as possible, but they just keep adding new categories that I have to track down and opt out of individually. And the only way to silence them from the notification itself is to block all notifications from that app/service. I paid good money for this phone — just stop with the OS-integrated spam! It's a never ending game of spam whackamole with Google these days. I guess various product owners are incentivised to increase "engagement" or whatever, but right now they're just increasing my engagement with Apple's product pages.
- hedora 5y ago
  I like my pixel phone. It runs GrapheneOS, and it only took a few hours of futzing to get the camera to perform like stock. (The wireless charging stand is a different story. It has a fan, and the only way to disable the fan involves running some system extension that requires deep kernel integration with the factory version of Android. Other than that, it's been remarkably trouble free.)
  - 12ian34 5y ago
    I've been considering graphene. I'd love to hear more about any other usability issue or problem you've experienced no matter how small, if you have the time. it's surprisingly difficult to find detailed accounts of this online (even via DDG!) I am aware of graphene's features from the website but can't find a comprehensive list of, for example, which UK banking apps categorically don't work, or which other features or obscure minor setting is missing.
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 5y ago
  I run /e/ OS ( a de-Googled Android clone) on a Fairphone 3+ device as my daily driver and it's been quite liberating being freed from the yolk of Google exploitative practises.
  - 5y ago
mbrodersen 5y ago
The problem with profit optimising companies is that they don’t know when to stop. They will keep squeezing every last drop of blood out of their products, and their employees, until the business fail, or a competitor gets competitive enough. Especially when they hire a “General Manager” who’s only expertise is to force a 10% cost reduction on the business every year. Until the business is a dead corpse. But by then of course the CEO has already skipped ship and started the cycle again with another company.
etempleton 5y ago
Google's only way to seriously grow revenue is to throw more ads in front of their users. This always, eventually, hits a breaking point where the ads become too much and erode the user experience. Any company that relies primarily on ad revenue is built on a house of cards. It can be highly profitable, but it is fragile.
renlo 5y ago
When are we going to get the PBS of search engines? Publicly funded, boring, informational, non-profit and works.
throwaway984393 5y ago
Facebook's tanking, Google's on it's way down, Amazon's getting broken up. Seems like the long-predicted next economic recession is around the corner
sneak 5y ago
As I was reading this thread, scrolling down a bit, my whole browser screen turned into a loginwall ad for a Twitter account. It's amazing to me that people are still donating content to these platforms.
RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
I'm just gonna throw this out there as I'm noticing it more and more at this point since switching languages. What the actual F has happened to google search results for programming issues? I used to be able to google a question and get, more or less, a right answer from a forum or stack overflow. Recently, many coding tutorial websites have clearly figured out how to hack googles pageranks and now instead of one 'right enough answer', its 5 clone 'tutorial' websites, with all the same crappy answer that isn't actually what I was asking. Like I can't use google for coding questions any more. Not like I was able to previously. Also, Stackoverflow with bangs from ddg are broken and it thinks I'm a robot. No answer except to go to SO directly and search.
- benlivengood 5y ago
  Python has been the worst for me; it's almost impossible to find the official documentation for modules/functions. Defining search aliases or custom search engines in the browser with URLs like '''https://www.google.com/search?q=site:docs.python.org+%s https://www.google.com/search?q=site:docs.python.org+%s''' is probably the reasonable thing to do.
  - soraminazuki 5y ago
    https://devdocs.io https://devdocs.io is nice when you're searching for official documentation.
    - macintux 5y ago
      Reminds me of Dash: https://kapeli.com/dash https://kapeli.com/dash
    - kristopolous 5y ago
      Thanks for dropping that link. This thing looks fantastic
  - sk5t 5y ago
    Ditto, moving from Scala to Python and Go for a stint shocked me with the craptacular state of search results for "easy/popular" languages. Next stop was an extension for blocking particular sites in search.
godmode2019 5y ago
Google is a product search engine, if you want to buy something local, or search anything local use google. For any other query use duck/bing. I find duck better for general stuff and bing better for programming stuff. For streaming websites or controversial content use yandex as they bring up random blogs and small unknown websites.
adfm 5y ago
Does anyone remember what happened to AltaVista?
joshxyz 5y ago
Lol on youtube the first few seconds of your every day is ads.
smukherjee19 5y ago
I had a very similar experience. Only two days ago, I tried looking for something related to a friend's phone not recognizing the correct lock pattern on Android (Asus Zenfone 7), the term was "zenfone 7 does not recognize lock pattern even when correct and it's locked", and the first two pages were, with the exception of an official Asus support page, ALL the results were crap ones going to generic tutorials... Searching for the same phrase in DuckDuckGo, the 2nd result pointed to a Samsung forum thread [1] which, while pointing to doing things with a Samsung account, said it started working by itself in 1-2 days, which it did. Setting aside the fact why Android would behave like that, the search results in Google were so low quality and awful... While this is just an anecdote, it seems for quite a few types of search results, their quality has dropped hugely. Is it due to people hijacking the results by using clever tricks? Or has Google's algorithm starting to hit some sort of limit in terms of the amount of content that needs to be indexed and ranked? I don't know. But something definitely seems off to me. [1]: https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/other-smartphones/my-pattern-lock-is-not-working-anymore/td-p/1357021 https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/other-smartphones/my-pat...
aldebran 5y ago
This is also the case for me on Instacart. Search for 1 item first screen is just ads.
throwawaysea 5y ago
This is also basically true for Amazon’s search results.
WalterBright 5y ago
It'd be nice if there was a search modifier that specified "only text and jpgs and some html markup". In C++ there's a notion of POD (Plain Old Data) for simple structs. Maybe the web should have POT (Plain Old Text).
wallscratch 5y ago
What’s up with wikipedia results being deprioritized?
LoveMortuus 5y ago
“The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates.” -Gabe Newell When the pain of watching ads becomes greater then the pain of setting up a way to block ads. Blocking ads will become the norm. They're doing this to themselves.
- dazc 5y ago
  We have a group of local newspaper sites in the UK which cover just about every area and they have clearly adopted a business model of squeezing every last drop of ad revenue they can before the inevitable happens. There is virtually no actual news on these sites anymore unless it is click bait that elicits a lot of comment. I'm beginning to think that google are doing the same.
  - LoveMortuus 5y ago
    The more Google becomes user unfriendly or annoying the more people will shift to different search engines. I've legit seen people that aren't tech savvy use DuckDuckGo, which for me personally was quite surprising. Even my father (58y) switched to DDG without me even noticing it!
omot 5y ago
I call this the squeeze. Google, even after all its attempts, is still a one trick pony. They have to grow at least 20% year over year to justify the market cap. They weren’t able to create a two pillar company like Amazon (AWS + Retail) so what do uncreative master executives naturally turn to? Of course their only cash cow. “ Rabban! I place you in charge of Arrakis. It's yours to squeeze, as I promised. I want you to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze!” - Dune
- globular-toast 5y ago
  I've been thinking of that Harkonnen line more and more lately. The film reminded me of it. The unfortunate thing is, as in Dune, the squeeze can last for many years. This is why they warned us about monopolies.
- octoberfranklin 5y ago
  I can totally see Sundar Pichai riding a sandworm.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  This year they’ll make the screen 20% bigger! Everyone gets a folding phone!
- majani 5y ago
  Surely GDN and Play Store are generating billions in profit?
baash05 5y ago
I was searching for skateboard decks on amazon and sorted by price.. The first 5 pages were all sponsored products.
hestefisk 5y ago
There has got to be white space for a new player in search.
redbell 5y ago
Another search term where you usually got four ads as the top results is "web hosting" https://www.google.com/search?q=web+hosting https://www.google.com/search?q=web+hosting And, surprisingly, the [ADS] search results when I'm logged-in versus when searching anonymously are different!
joelbondurant0 5y ago
flowtheorist 5y ago
Google will eat itself: https://googlewilleatitself.com/ https://googlewilleatitself.com/.
tradesurplus 5y ago
I would pay $10 a month for an ad free search engine that serves objective (not "personalised") query results related to what I'm looking for that doesn't sell my data, with similar features to Google Scholar and ideally even greater granularity, but for the whole web.
- trieloff 5y ago
  Try to get into the kagi.com beta, which could be exactly what you need. The results are fast and accurate, the hardest problem for me was finding the right browser extensions that would make it the default in Safari.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
I've been looking into alternative search workflows. Google (and near equivalents) feel a bit like Windows GUI when I want Linux cli for a) quickly going to a site I already know, b) answering a question when I have a bias about where good answers will be found, c) picking one thing from a long list I feel there's already an equivalent with a few rough edges but a power tool I can be productive with. Any product that aims at Google's entire market is only going to turn into Google, I need an ecosystem of tools so there will always be one that is aimed at my use case. It feels like there's a common sentiment around this so there may be room for a new business model or open source approach. One thing is bang searches, like duckduckgo has. So if you already know the site you want to search, and they have decent search then you can use their search directly. There's an open standard for advertising your local search but it feels a bit forgotten like RSS Vs twitter. You can find lists of sites that advertise this search in the Mycroft project on mozdev. I think Firefox has a non standard extension for search suggestions too. If the sites don't have decent search, you can get a site specific search via Google or whatever, but it feels like site specific search for code related things would be a good niche. Like Google, you don't need to own the content, just index it better by adding intelligence from context. You can even aggregate across a few different sites, like official docs plus official discussion, email archives, a Reddit sub and so on as appropriate. Yes you'll miss the long tail, but you'll have limited the scope so much that there would be a lot for value in exact searches for errors and other similar things. Possibly language communities could build their own index? The same for discussion sites seems possible and other general groups of search tasks. Wikipedia is a good target too. If you built a good one you could then offer it to the sites to use as their internal search too, in a virtuous cycle. On that note I'm going to go look up what Algolia does in this space.
shaky-carrousel 5y ago
Hah, you don't even need to do a search now. In my iPhone, as soon as go to google, two thirds of the screen are covered by obnoxious google ads about their crapware "google app". Guess nobody wants it on iOS and they are going with the "spam the user until they comply", like they do with YouTube Pro. They are the digital equivalent of an abusive partner that doesn't accept "no" as an answer.
randomsilence 5y ago
Could it be that google is relying too much on the input from the address bar? Unlike new search engines, google doesn't have to scrape and analyze the web because Chrome shows them what people want when they are searching for a set of words. Since Bing/DuckDuckGo doesn't have the same level of manipulation, I would assume that SEO spammers have managed to influence Google by faking browser feedback. I would assume that there are thousands of artificial Chrome instances that fake active users and flood Google with wrong user feedback.
- usrusr 5y ago
  Oh, that could very well be the "secret new SEO sauce". I could well imagine Google having an entire division focused on the quest of dealing with backlink spam SEO that is targeting OG pagerank, perpetually kept occupied by SEOs that don't know better, while a new generation of SEOs simply avoids that battlefield and aims directly at ranking inputs beyond pagerank. Thousands of artificial Chrome instances, or maybe just hundreds of Chrome extensions running on millions of instances engaging in a DSEO attack each individually well below the background noise floor. If that browser feedback is easy enough to fake then the visit pretender SEO wouldn't even need to poison an extension, they could just run it from any site they can get to run some JS on.
jhoechtl 5y ago
I am not so much concerned about a search engine, which is superficially free to the end user, displaying adds. I am totally concerned though that the non-adds results are those where the interests of the company behind the search results and my interest are deeply leaning towards the interest of the company instead of mines. In clear text: Content of sites disguised as original content yet serving no other purpose but linking to Amazon or sites which display a ton of adds served by Google.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Ads. It's short for advertisement, not addition.
windex 5y ago
I increasingly find my answers searching through reddit or using the site: operator on google for reddit. Google has gone to trash.
danielrpa 5y ago
I've abandoned SEOogle for DuckDuckGo 3 years ago... Couldn't be happier.

734 points by steelstraw 5y ago

Using DDG for years and reading this thread I wanted to try Google but apparently I sent it to zero in the hosts file years ago when it was still good.

ssss11 5y ago

Yeah I’ve noticed this too. But also the rest of the front page is often either seo spam (like those Pinterest links which catch whatever search term you’ve used) or shopping sites. I’ve found google search to be increasingly hostile to its customers. I guess we’re not the customers. Use duckduckgo or something else.

yostrovs 5y ago
It's fraud, effectively. I've seen a bunch of people that are not tech savvy do Google searches, and they have no idea they're clicking on ads. I pointed this out a few times and they seem to not care anyways. Google knows this very well and they pretend like they're giving search results, but the majority of users are getting ad search results instead.
- verve_rat 5y ago
  It is basically the yellow pages on the internet model that a few people tried and Google killed. I'm not sure what we can learn from the fact that Google is regressing into the model they killed in the first place.
- ForOldHack 5y ago
  "the majority of users are getting ad search results instead." The Majority.
- dazc 5y ago
  What's worse is that it's particularly acute with financial services where most ads are scams.
- zbuf 5y ago
  Yup. Our competitor advertises against our company name, and Google helpfully optimises the text of their ad -- some ML algorithm finds text most likely to be confused with the search results. Optimising for "clicks" is just optimising garbage.
omnicognate 5y ago
You're not duckduckgo's customer either (their primary revenue source is keyword based advertising), or the customer of anything else you don't pay for. The only one I know of that at least plans to have a simple two-way relationship with search users as their customers is Kagi. Currently it's in free beta with a waitlist (took a week for me). When they go live they intend it to be a paid, subscription service with no advertising. So far I've found it good, and I'll gladly pay when the time comes.
- echelon 5y ago
  I hope they penalize websites with heavy tracking or advertising. We might get back to a sane web if this takes off. They can grow their market by offering 10 free searches a day, and I think that would be enough to entice a lot of folks to switch. Offer a paid API, and I'd bet they'd have a real growth story.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    "I hope they penalize websites with heavy tracking or advertising." I hope they give me a easy way, to set my own priorities (but I would choose that option).
    - Closi 5y ago
      I'm on the beta and it has both of these things. You can choose to boost particular sites, or to down-rank sites with trackers.
      - echelon 5y ago
        That's amazing. I can't wait!
        Closi 5y ago
        I've personally gone back to using Google from being on the Beta, but i'm sure other people will have more success.
systemvoltage 5y ago
I'd pay $10/month for a nerd-only, developer-friendly, pro-small-biz, precision search that works like 2008 version of Google. Something that I use dozens of times a day, is totally worth paying for. It is inevitable. It's coming. Algolia? Please?
- yabones 5y ago
  I've seen some people mention Kagi[1], but it's a closed beta. Hope they're successful, because I would also gladly pay $10/month to get a search engine that actively resists spam. [1] https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/
- rtsil 5y ago
  I'd pay probably more, particularly if it has no ads and no tracking (sorry, I meant "personalized results").
- ddalex 5y ago
  But would you pay $120 / month ? Because AFAIK that's what Google makes using the current version. Disclaimer: I work for Google but in no way related to search, business models, or product decisions. My words are my own.
twofornone 5y ago
Kind of an aside but it seems like there are SEO pages which dynamically adjust their displayed text in the search results to your search query...how does that work? Isn't search result text indexed in advance? Or is this some sort of paid feature from google, where your search terms are injected into a template? Whatever it is it's really annoying because usually these results link to another search on a shopping site and more often than not those results come up empty anyway.
- altdataseller 5y ago
  They are usually search result pages with the keyword in the url parameter, and they link to those search results elsewhere on their site for Google to find
  - l33tman 5y ago
    But they show up in the cached google search preview as well. I search for something that doesn't exist, and you get 5 "shopping" sites that have faked URLs and faked product entries for the non-existant product. Like you see in the cached textlines: "Buy reptilecandy here, low prices!!" or something, and the URL to the site seems legit, trustedstore.com/reptilecandy/ but if you click on it you just get to the shop top page with no reptile candy in sight.
    - imwillofficial 5y ago
      Have you found a site that sells reptile candy? I’ve been searching forever. Failing to find it had been my greatest regret.
      - l33tman 5y ago
        This actually turned out to be an example of what was discussed... if you google "reptilecandy" (as one word) you get some of these weird search results that do look like they have a category on the shop that has Reptile Candy, with the appropriate Title and search excerpt. Clicking on one of the sites linked in the search results gives: https://www.zazzle.com/reptile+candy+favors https://www.zazzle.com/reptile+candy+favors And on their shop page it seems they have a section called "Reptile Candy & Favors". But if you click on the category above, Candy & Favors, there is no sub-section list so the sub-section is probably entirely dynamically generated. So there's something weird going on, I wonder how those dynamic categories end up in googles search excerpts. Can they pay google to inject non-existant pages and sections into the results? (the search result in question was not marked as an Ad though)
onphonenow 5y ago
How is pinterest not just banned unless you do site:pintrest or whatever. If you are not logged into some of these sites you can't actually get to stuff either. Annoying.
- dazc 5y ago
  I'm beginning to realise that Google are happy for Pinterest to monopolise all image search since it requires a lot of resource and is difficult to monetize. Not sure why they are allowing them to take over the rest of search though?
XorNot 5y ago
I don't get how Pinterest hasn't been removed from existence by Google. There is literally no one who is ever searching for things that wants a Pinterest link, but the incredible persistence of Google in showing me Pinterest is amazing. Though this kind of goes to the related question: why Google don't allow you to setup your profile to nuke domains from consideration when you search, I do not know - it would completely divorce them from any responsibility for search result manipulation and make everyone happier.
- bane 5y ago
  There's a great chrome extension called "unpinterested" that automatically adds -site:pinterest.* to all google queries. It's improved my use of google by an east 20%. It's so bad you'd almost think google has a stake in pinterest at this point.
- wiml 5y ago
  They did have exactly that feature for a while, unless I'm dreaming. But they got rid of it.
  - dazc 5y ago
    IIRC, it was canned because it was linked to search performance and was abused on an industrial scale for negative seo. Such a blacklist could be limited to one's personal account though but, I guess, since there is no monetisation benefit for google they don't care to offer it?
squarefoot 5y ago
Pinterest links can be removed from Google searches using the "Unpinterested" browser extension for Firefox and Chrome, but it breaks Google Maps searches and it was never patched to correct the issue.
function_seven 5y ago
My biggest feature request: A check box that says, "[ ] I'm not buying anything" I don't know how technically hard this would be to implement. Or what business model will resist adding it. I just know that most of my web searches are NOT me trying to buy stuff. They're usually looking up information. Like, how does the load sensing algorithm work on my LG washer? No chance I'll ever find out by searching the web. Only 200 links to different places I can buy a new one. Or maybe some videos explaining that the feature exists, and "oh and would you like to buy one?" Maybe I want to know if my GadgetMaster 3000 will work with my WidgetWanker Mark II. Nope, but here's 100 places you can buy those, or maybe the THINGDOODLE brand of knockoffs. Ok, I'm ranting. Point is: give me a way to restrict my search to only those pages that aren't selling anything. Maybe the heuristic is that the page hasn't changed in 6 months, or uses outdated tags like <marquee>, or some fancy semantic analysis of the page copy. I don't know. I just wish search results weren't so utterly dominated by e-commerce sites or affiliate spam.
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
  Google is incentivised by you relying on them instead of a competitor, shortly followed by page loads. Giving you what you want immediately, particularly when they know that you know what your searching for is a niche interest, isn’t in their best interests.
- jordigh 5y ago
  > My biggest feature request: A check box that says, "[ ] I'm not buying anything" The primary purpose of ads isn't to get you to buy something. It's to plant a brand in your brain so that next time you do want to buy something, you'll think of the brand. Ads are very good psychological manipulation.
  - function_seven 5y ago
    I’m not talking about ads. I’m talking about the “natural” search results. Of course those are also really ads in a sense, but somehow there’s got to be a way to provide a real search engine that doesn’t show only e-commerce sites. I’ll pay for it!
lolinder 5y ago
> Use duckduckgo or something else. Duckduckgo hasn't been any better for me lately. It seems like search as a whole is failing to respond to the latest round of SEO tricks. It takes a lot more work to find what I'm actually looking for, regardless of which engine I use.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  DDG uses Bing as its search provider, and Bing isn't any better than Google right now when it comes to prioritizing ads and dark patterns[1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28517187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28517187
  - sp332 5y ago
    Bing is one source among many. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
- dazc 5y ago
  You don't get the first page of ads on DDG though, a simple change of settings equals none at all.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> But also the rest of the front page is often either seo spam (like those Pinterest links which catch whatever search term you’ve used) or shopping sites. Hey now, SEO spam is often packed to the brim with high revenue ads.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Maybe Google should start a portrait mode monitor business; consumers could get even more ad results on their screen.

riversflow 5y ago
I think they've already done that–only since they are a software company they decided that it would be better to write an OS for portrait mode monitors, and make it free, off-loading those pesky manufacturing steps. Ideally the OS would be attached to a device that the consumer would bring with them everywhere and have fancy geo-locating tools that tell Google where they go, you know for better ad attr-err search relevance! (perhaps that's what you were going for?)
heartbeats 5y ago
If I recall correctly, some of the Chromebook models had 3:2 screens so you could get "more web on the screen".

ejb999 5y ago

thats why I don't use google anymore (well one of the many reasons actually)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

tenpoundhammer 5y ago

Try neeva . com it's really similar to google but with none of the garbage experience from ads and SEO Spam. I switched from duckduckgo to neeva recently and have enjoyed it wayyy more.

voisin 5y ago
What do you like about Neeva vs DDG
- foobarding 5y ago
  Unlike DDG, Neeva is ad free. It also has a bunch of additional features.

dmitriid 5y ago

"We sell advertisement, not search results" https://twitter.com/krebs_adrian/status/1488173888068542466 https://twitter.com/krebs_adrian/status/1488173888068542466 https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/ https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/ (Note: the url of this page is /honestresults/)

post_break 5y ago
I love that line. It's like coke saying we sell sugar water, not soda.

endisneigh 5y ago

Did anyone replicate this? I couldn’t on desktop and mobile. Seems like flame bait

albertopv 5y ago
There are many factors that could change your results. Since I disabled web & app activity I have seen a lot more ads.
AlexanderTheGr8 5y ago
Do you think he created that web-page by modifying HTML?
- endisneigh 5y ago
  It’s literally a cropped image that no one has said they can reproduce
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    So what if it is cropped, is the amount of ads shown in the screenshot with no actual search results acceptable to you? Does the fact OP has a smaller or larger resolution than you change your mind?
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      Literally the fifth result is what they were looking for. they crop that out and complain on twitter. so yes, it's acceptable. use ad-block if it's not to you.
      - imwillofficial 5y ago
        So we disagree. Showing me 4 ads before seeing something that is also a thinly veiled ad is not acceptable. Running other software to make search usable is also not acceptable. Combined with your misinformation spread in other threads of this topic, your actions appear to be shilling.

gamerDude 5y ago

I wonder if there would be a good way to monetize a search engine such that returning great results gets them paid. Like a check in if you found what you were looking for, give a penny. Or potentially not what you were looking for, but something that you are happy you found. Thus giving back good info to the search engine and only pay a nominal amount when you get what you want.

iqanq 5y ago

no ublock origin = pebcak

colinmhayes 5y ago
how do you get adblock on mobile?
- iqanq 5y ago
  I use adguard with safari. On android you can use brave.
  - MerelyMortal 5y ago
    On Android you can use Firefox with uBlock Origin.
- Taywee 5y ago
  Firefox on Android has uBlock Origin. I think Kiwi and other browsers allow it too. No idea about Chrome or anything.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  Just install ublock origin? It works fine on Firefox on my phone.
recursive 5y ago
So you blame the user for not filtering the ads? And you don't blame Google for serving them?
- iqanq 5y ago
  Google does what they think it's better for them and the user should do what it's better for him.

AviationAtom 5y ago

Google has become the very thing people ran from. Try Bing, as it's been well regarded.

kehrin 5y ago

A little bit ironic that you can see an actual result at the bottom of the already cropped screenshot.

imwillofficial 5y ago

That screenshot was shocking. It truly has been a slippery slope to get here. So subtle I barely noticed the group shifting beneath my feet.

dvngnt_ 5y ago

been using ublock origin for years I have no idea what you're talking about. good luck though

enumjorge 5y ago

The Facebook stock debacle from yesterday makes me think that maybe there is a limit to how user-hostile a tech giant can be before it really starts to hurt their bottom line. For a while it seemed like companies like FB had captured enough of the market that they seemed impervious to backlash from their many controversies, too big to fail in a way. It’s too early to tell if this is the beginning of FB’s demise, but it looks like letting resentment towards your product build among your user base can come bite you in a very real way after all. FB used outrage as a way to increase engagement and it worked for a while, but now FB is increasingly a non-desirable place to hang out. Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content. When Apple added restrictions that cut off oxygen to FB, FB started a PR campaign to paint it as one grave injustice. It seems like that was met with a collective shrug. Who cheers for the bad guy? All that is to say, it seems like Google has been in this value extraction mode for a while and I don’t see what the long term plan is. They don’t seem to be innovating much, but are instead intent on squeezing as much money as they can from their existing assets. And while that may work in the short term, FB has shown tech giants are not invincible. I’ve seen a lot of talk online lately about how bad the quality of search results have gotten. If a credible competitor emerges, I think a lot of users would gladly switch. If/when that happens, Google better hope they don’t find themselves in FB’s position where they can’t acquire their way out of their rut.

el-salvador 5y ago
> FB used outrage as a way to increase engagement with their product and it worked for a while, but now FB is increasingly a non-desirable place to hang out. > Instead you can go to TikTok where you will find mostly amusing and at times informative content. Tiktok does this very well. I usually end up feeling good after using TikTok. On the other hand Twitter makes me stressed, FB is not much used by my friends age group or only used for memes, and Instagram is now showing me two ads every three stories that is really a pain to use.
- eftychis 5y ago
  Should we be concerned if the goal of a social network is to just make people feel well? (This is a serious question to ponder as a society perhaps (or just for me).) The goal of these products of course is to keep people around.

bell-cot 5y ago

I often prepend my searches with strings such as "wikipedia " - typically there's a big improvement on the SRP end...but the borG will fix that if it catches on. Coming soon - "Ad Infinitum(tm)" Google search results pages, which start to slowly scroll 5 seconds after being displayed...

pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
Better yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search

aparsons 5y ago

This has been the case for a long time on mobile. 1.5 vertical screens of ads is not uncommon.

jart 5y ago

I feel like using search engines has become a "jargon arms race" where you have to be smart enough to figure out the right combination of synonyms for what you want, that advertisers, seo spammers, and regulators haven't figured out how to stimey yet. Jargon is almost like a different language at this point, where if you know how to speak in esoteric jargon you have unfettered access to information, and if you don't, then information rapidly approaches unobtainable.

sjcoles 5y ago
Even that doesn't help in cases as Google will interpret your jargon filled query to something that's a lower common denominator and return irrelevant results regardless.
- danuker 5y ago
  Absolutely. It will either ignore the terms, or claim that no results are found. Perhaps it no longer indexes as much as it used to, at least for noncommercial content.

only4here 5y ago

I've noticed that this happens a lot more when SafeSearch is turned on, not sure why this happens though.

cmckn 5y ago

To be fair, it depends on the screen. The submission makes it sound like the whole first page is ads, but there’s 4 ads at the top instead of the usual 2-3. It happens to extend to the fold in this Twitter user’s browser. I scroll past all ads out of habit[0], so honestly this doesn’t impact my Google usage. Wish I didn’t have to train that muscle, but here we are. :( [0] my pihole breaks the links anyway

endisneigh 5y ago
UBlock Origin - available on all major browsers, including iOS (er, this has adblock, but not uBlock in particular) and Android, my friend.
- fignews 5y ago
  uBlock Origin available on iOS? Please explain!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    Ah, my bad - though you can use many of the same block lists, iOS only has a concept of content blockers, so you have to use DNS Cloak with a content blocker. Or you can use Brave on iOS which has adblock.
    - cmckn 5y ago
      Or you can run pihole and get DNS-level blocking for your entire network with no extensions/config on individual devices. Also with pihole, you almost never run into the dreaded “it looks like you’re using ad block!”.
      - koolba 5y ago
        Can you also setup iOS to tunnel home so as to leverage your pihole DNS on mobile?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

blhack 5y ago

Now that I think about it, I don't use search engines very much anymore, at least not in the traditional way. My searches are almost all site:$foo. Actually, a good majority of my searches are site:reddit.com {product I am looking for}, or site:news.ycombinator.com {some tech thing I want to find again}. I think there is a comparison here to how inbound telephone calls, or to some extent email, have been made useless by marketers. Google searches for "Phoenix {thing}" tend to be almost all yelp/yelp clone spam. edit: this made me actually look in my history. It seems that by far the thing I am using google for the most is image search. Second from that is spelling/grammar sanity checks.

ViViDboarder 5y ago
I just try to do as close to first party searches as I can instead. Like, use the Reddit search to search Reddit, or use Yelp to search for businesses, and when I don’t know what site to search from, I just use DuckDuckGo. I find it easier than typing out “site:” especially since my browser allows me to just start the URL and then tab into a search on that site.
- foxrider 5y ago
  I've been using shorthands for websites for a while now, "aw pipewire" looks for "pipewire" on Arch Wiki, "c cassandra" looks through my confluence, "re hotas" is for reddit and so on. It's very easy an intuitive. I'm using Vivaldi, but I'm pretty sure it's a feature in many other browsers that let you add a custom search engine.

soheil 5y ago

That’s above the fold, not the whole screen.

alangibson 5y ago

In principle making a some-of-the-web search engine is a tractable problem. Start by indexing known high quality, preferably moderated sites. Allow trusted users to upload their bookmarks for indexing. And so on... My guess is the reason there are so few competitors is economics. You can't get investment as long as Google stock is a sure bet. Few will pay for your service as long as Google is answering their questions. Advertisers aren't interested as their money is more effectively spent on Google. Therefore you can't build an audience sure to lack of revenue/capital.

vlark 5y ago

Firefox + Ublock & Privacy Badger, on desktop and mobile. I also use Blokada on Android. This combination stops most ads, and if a few sneak through it is easy to create a custom rule. While I still find Google useful, especially Google Scholar, I've primarily moved to DuckDuckGo for most casual searches.

lukestateson 5y ago
It’s a band-aid. Just let Google slowly die, it’s already time when you should pull the plug – the patient is brain-dead for several years and there is no hope. Use DuckDuckGo it’s a lot better with relevant search results and privacy friendly.
collsni 5y ago
Do you find a advantage of privacy badger vs blocking all third party cookies? I just dump my full cache everytime I close Firefox.

t8e56vd4ih 5y ago

today i bought another batch of Yandex stocks after they tanked 30% since a few weeks ago. I believe Yandex is able to fill a niche left empty by Google - good ole useful search results without censoring and ad infestation. I'm bullish on Yandex. they also have amazing image search (much more useful than googles) and they are planning to expand focus beyond Russia and neighboring countries.

GeorgeWBasic 5y ago
It's possible that they tanked because of this news: https://www.aroged.com/2021/12/13/sites-with-pirated-content-will-be-removed-from-yandex-and-other-domestic-search-engines/ https://www.aroged.com/2021/12/13/sites-with-pirated-content... thus removing one of the major reasons to use Yandex.

PaulHoule 5y ago

... been that way for a long time.

ForOldHack 5y ago

It has been that way for a while, Printer cartridge, Memory, and drivers. No useful content what so ever.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

It's just another argument for (1) using ublock origin or equivalent (2) refusing to use browsers that do not allow ublock origin or equivalent to function.

flenserboy 5y ago

Imagine how fast the Web would be if it were user-oriented.

ForOldHack 5y ago
Like say... Altavista?

varispeed 5y ago

Now that Google has killed their G suite accounts I am looking to move everything somewhere else and planning to completely stop using any of their services. What would you recommend to jump to (paid service)? What tools I could use to move my emails? (I have my own domains etc.)

ForOldHack 5y ago
This sounds like a grand top level question. I am in the same boat.

scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago

I work in medical education related tech and I make content. I spend a lot of time searching for information related to medicine online - knowledge aimed more at the actual medical practitioners. One of the big irritants in this research is how much the ad model has warped everything to be centered on the patient. I'm not totally blocked but I do feel hindered. For example if I'm looking for a procedure it's far more likely for the results to be from sources which dilute and simplify because they're intended on selling patients on something. If I were presented with an information search product capable of being aware of my specific needs and adapting itself for these needs, I could probably convince my higher-ups to actually pay for something like this. I really wish I could get the same experience doing medical research as the one I get when searching programming related questions, which often return detailed explanations on stackoverflow, actual documentation and other valuable content. On another and somewhat different note I'm from a specific European country and I've noticed searching in my language in topics related to my country is even worse. If I'm searching for important information regarding something specific for my country, like taxes/institutional affairs, the google search is basically unusable because the results are infested with obnoxious endless clickbait/GDPRconsent/cookies/garbage/websites. I vividly remember how search results in my country used to return forums and conversations, but from what I understand everyone is on FB groups which aren't displayed. There is so much out there being talked about that doesn't seem to 'exist' in the eyes of a search algo. Weird times.

bluenose69 5y ago

google.com/maps is also a pain nowadays, with almost half the space of my (smallish laptop) screen being ads and controls. I'm glad I don't own stock in this company, because they are on the wrong side of the advertising Laffer curve, and moving back will be difficult because customers have choices and are unlikely to come back.

bigyellow 5y ago

freediver 5y ago

For all searches, Kagi search is everything but the ads!

mmind 5y ago

Many people here suggests other services, including services you can pay for to bash Google. The reality is that Google offered Google Contributor and now offers YouTube premium but most people prefer free content with ads. And that is fine. I find very surprising the HN folks complaining about the tech companies making ads-based money for their services when they are not willing to pay for the ad-free version. It is disappointing that they feel using ad blockers is the reasonable thing to do. $9/month yearly subscription) for ad-free YouTube is an absolutely fair price IMHO. Ad blockers are piracy and kill jobs, same as downloading movies or books.

202202050025 5y ago
> Ad blockers are piracy and kill jobs, same as downloading movies or books. Well, maybe I don't want to watch ads so that binary-tree-inverting MIT/Stanford graduates could get their 6-figure compensation packages for participating in a natural monopoly?
- mmind 5y ago
  Well, the creators of the content you watch do have to eat too. They are the ones that make most of the money from those ads, and the ones that hurt most if you do not support them.
melenaboija 5y ago
What are you basing tour thoughts on? Also, what do you find fair about ad free youtube (which BTW I pay)? I am paying the same for youtube, which is a platform that takes content created from others, adds ads to it and the make me pay to remove them than for Netflix, which partially produces its own content. I sometimes think that youtube premium is the best idea to make money without doing anything else than make you think that they are helping you to clean the crap they have created.
- mmind 5y ago
  Well, I assume creators think that Google brings value or they would simply host their videos in a CDN themselves, at least when they already have an audience. I think YouTube provides creators a reach that others can't. Probably because of the hundreds of video clients they support or the quality of the stream even in the most hostile network conditions.

jdrc 5y ago

it s really a mess. Searching for 'viper' brings up 'Viber' as the first result, the rest is cars except for a link to 'viperidae'. It's a goddamn snake, google

alberto7 5y ago
Eugh yes. This is getting worse and worse so rapidly. If your search term happens to also be a currently popular song or artist then you may as well skip ahead a couple of pages.
- lolinder 5y ago
  Same thing if there's a movie adaptation of the book you're looking for.
svnpenn 5y ago
Looks fine to me http://0x0.st/oXzN.png http://0x0.st/oXzN.png
gtirloni 5y ago
Just add another word "viper snake" and the problem is solved. I don't see the problem. You wouldn't shout "viper" at a random person and expect them to correctly guess you're talking about a snake at first guess.
- ViViDboarder 5y ago
  I mean, I’d assume it was a snake. Not sure what else I’d assume they were talking about. Also, Google isn’t a person. I wouldn’t expect someone to understand what I’m trying to say if I yelled “site Colin stackoverflow.com fizz buzz” at them either. The bigger issue is that Google didn’t even interpret “viper” as any form of “viper” at all and instead corrected it to a nonsense word that’s a company name.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > I mean, I’d assume it was a snake. Not sure what else I’d assume they were talking about. Shout it at me and I'd be fifty-fifty whether it's a snake or a car (the Dodge V-10) you mean. But I'm a car nut; I'd assume for normal (English-speaking) people the snake would be the obvious default meaning.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Y'all still see ads??? -Gorhill

northernexposur 5y ago

This has been the case for me for a long time.

northernexposur 5y ago

This is been the case for a long time.

bostonsre 5y ago

I don't think the person that posted the picture understands what literally means.

Havoc 5y ago

Busy testing searx - selfhosted front end for search engines. Results seem decent enough. And set up protonmail today. I've just about had it with google's bullshit.

nopeNopeNooope 5y ago

tomatofrank 5y ago

Last night I watched a YouTube video that had a song in the background that I hadn't heard but really liked. I pulled up Shazam but it didn't recognize the song, so I took to Google. I entered the lyric and added the search terms "lyrics" and "r&b" at the end. Google returned 4 YouTube videos to songs that didn't contain the lyric, a link to a Boyz II Men song on Genius that didn't contain the lyric (good job Google, you know an R&B band), a link to peterbe.com to find a song by lyrics, and a bunch of other useless links. I clicked on to page 2, which hilariously presented 3 of the 4 YouTube videos that were on page 1. I was immediately turned off, so I pulled up DuckDuckGo and Bing, entered the same exact query, and both engines returned the song I was looking for in the first result. I laughed out loud. I then thought to myself, "I wonder how many pages I would have had to flip through in Google to find this result." Eventually, I found it. It was the 68th result on page 7.

gundmc 5y ago
What was the lyric?
- tomatofrank 5y ago
  "like you didn't care I don't know why lyrics r&b" was my query
  - gundmc 5y ago
    Wow, same results here. That's pretty poor.
  - nkurz 5y ago
    It would be nice if this worked, but in Google's defense, this is an odd combination of an exact search phrase of common words and then a couple categorical terms that don't have to actually appear on the page. If you help it by searching for just the quoted phrase you want without the additional terms it puts the result you want both as the top result and in a pullout at the top of the page: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22like+you+didn%27t+care+I+don%27t+know+why%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22like+you+didn%27t+care+I+...

daviddisco 5y ago

I can't speak for Google but I think the theory they work under is that for some queries the ads are the best results. In other words, the user is more likely to find what they are looking for if those ads are there. There are many signals used for ranking results and the ad auction price is one signal.

johnnyo 5y ago
Interesting, I’ve been burned so many times, I always skip any result tagged as an ad. I can’t be the only one.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
That used to be the case, I remember searching for desktop software and the adverts would be the most relevant results. For whatever reason that stopped working a long time ago.

hartem_ 5y ago

The not so happy thing about this is that at this point the entire web is somewhat flawed. Too many sites have produced too much junk content just to game Google. A fundamentally new approach is needed to identify and surface “organic” (whatever that may mean) results. So I suspect (albeit with no data to show for it) that even if we just switched all ads off we still wouldn't be happy with the results that we see. Google’s revenue model has been at odds for far too long with identifying and weeding out SEO spam. I don't mean 'spam' here in a derogatory way, but rather everyone who has a legitimate and interesting product and has had their back against the wall and was forced to play the SEO game and become a 'search spammer' As a result 'spammers' (again, pretty much every site these days) 'won' because it was and still is the only way to survive.

jacquesm 5y ago
Millionshort is an attempt at fixing this. https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/
- lolinder 5y ago
  The problem is that even the small sites are playing the same SEO game. If you remove the top X, you might just end up cutting out what you're looking for and still end up with a bunch of SEO'd results.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Ok, let's make an SEO detector and ban every site that plays that game.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Like Google used to have and do, back in the day when they were still not evil, AFAICR.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> The not so happy thing about this is that at this point the entire web is somewhat flawed. Too many sites have produced too much junk content just to game Google. A fundamentally new approach is needed to identify and surface “organic” (whatever that may mean) results. So I suspect (albeit with no data to show for it) that even if we just switched all ads off we still wouldn't be happy with the results that we see. Honestly, I suspect that if you deprioritize pages with ads, referral links and sponsored content in search results, this problem will mostly solve itself. The glut of garbage on the web comes from people trying to make a quick buck online, and I suspect Google is happy to show that content because the garbage is laden with Google or their partners' ads. Even content that doesn't have ads, but encourages visitors to buy products, is valuable to Google because they can use that information to show users more ads or funnel them into buying products via Google Shopping.

jacquesm 5y ago

How about a search engine for pages that are non-commercial only in nature?

beloch 5y ago

Most people are fairly resistant to changing their behaviour because of annoyances. Take broadcast TV for example. From the 50's to the early aughts, TV's only competition was theatres, and its in-home convenience let it win that competition handily in terms of the hours people spent watching TV versus going to the theatre. Television providers took full advantage and the percentage of ads by airtime steadily increased. Shows that were designed around commercial breaks in one era had to be cut down in length and have additional breaks added when rerun in later eras. There was no meaningful competition, either from alternative media distributors or between broadcasters to see who could offer more actual content per hour. It wasn't until streaming came along that cable TV finally started dying. This isn't a huge issue for cable companies, since most have pivoted into operating as ISP's and streaming itself. It's only a matter of time before cable TV is no longer offered as a service by the companies created to offer it. Google's search engine has few competitors. Even the search function on many websites is inferior to a google search restricted to that site. The ads in google search results can be scrolled through in seconds, although Google constantly plays games to make it harder to tell where the ads stop. Their search algorithm is now suspicious in how it sorts the non-ad results of many searches. All of this is annoying to users, but is it annoying enough to force users onto other search engines? Google appears to be determined to find out just how much spam is too much. Will DuckDuckGo or other alternatives to google gain traction as a result of this? Probably some, but probably not much. They likely won't make much of a dent in Google's bottom line until they offer something compellingly superior to Google, just as streaming is superior to broadcast TV.

ChuckMcM 5y ago

Here was Dave Rosenthal's take two years ago: https://blog.dshr.org/2020/02/more-on-ad-bubble.html https://blog.dshr.org/2020/02/more-on-ad-bubble.html Disclosure he and I agree on what is going on here :-)

xpressvideoz 5y ago

We've been suffering from this literally for decades by the dominant Korean search engine, Naver. Now it is time for you to suffer too, westerners!

ljm 5y ago

Sometimes lately I can't tell the difference between google or an alternative like DDG. It's all crap.

halestock 5y ago

How much is pagerank involved in google searches these days? I wonder, if they were to revert to an early version of it, would searches improve? Or did they move away / update / augment it to prevent seo abuse?

adaptbrian 5y ago
Not much for head terms and even at the longtail, today. I've long thought rolling out googs algo from 2010 and getting away from all the prediction/neural network rewriting would be a good move for a new search engine.

rhizome 5y ago

For some searches the results don't include my search terms. They just go silently straight to the "did you mean?" results.

n42 5y ago
this is such an infuriating user experience. no, I did not mean, that’s why I typed it, damn it! I think they’ve even started ignoring my quoted search terms!
- rhizome 5y ago
  They are getting to be so terrible, what kind of bureaucracy motivates them to throw away their crown jewel? Is Adwords the only self-made product they have that actually works anymore? Maybe their business model is only Adwords and selling surveillance data, and our understanding simply hasn't caught up to that fact yet.
  - n42 5y ago
    it's not that. it's the marriage of top down OKRs, politics driven performance reviews, and a seemingly unbounded pay scale
    - rhizome 5y ago
      Sounds like a reasonable definition of "bureaucracy" to me!

longcommonname 5y ago

Youtube has gotten terrible with up to five minute long ads. Why the hell am I getting targeted?

pcurve 5y ago
I can't stand youtube ads, especially the ones one with conversational tones! The worst thing about youtube is, when I do a search, it intentionally throws in videos that have absolutely nothing to do with my search.

jeffparsons 5y ago

Just as I saw this link a notification popped up on my Pixel phone: > Trending: "Turkey inflation rate" > See search results I've already put a lot of effort into purging as many categories of Google spam notifications from my phone as possible, but they just keep adding new categories that I have to track down and opt out of individually. And the only way to silence them from the notification itself is to block all notifications from that app/service. I paid good money for this phone — just stop with the OS-integrated spam! It's a never ending game of spam whackamole with Google these days. I guess various product owners are incentivised to increase "engagement" or whatever, but right now they're just increasing my engagement with Apple's product pages.

hedora 5y ago
I like my pixel phone. It runs GrapheneOS, and it only took a few hours of futzing to get the camera to perform like stock. (The wireless charging stand is a different story. It has a fan, and the only way to disable the fan involves running some system extension that requires deep kernel integration with the factory version of Android. Other than that, it's been remarkably trouble free.)
- 12ian34 5y ago
  I've been considering graphene. I'd love to hear more about any other usability issue or problem you've experienced no matter how small, if you have the time. it's surprisingly difficult to find detailed accounts of this online (even via DDG!) I am aware of graphene's features from the website but can't find a comprehensive list of, for example, which UK banking apps categorically don't work, or which other features or obscure minor setting is missing.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 5y ago
I run /e/ OS ( a de-Googled Android clone) on a Fairphone 3+ device as my daily driver and it's been quite liberating being freed from the yolk of Google exploitative practises.
- 5y ago

mbrodersen 5y ago

The problem with profit optimising companies is that they don’t know when to stop. They will keep squeezing every last drop of blood out of their products, and their employees, until the business fail, or a competitor gets competitive enough. Especially when they hire a “General Manager” who’s only expertise is to force a 10% cost reduction on the business every year. Until the business is a dead corpse. But by then of course the CEO has already skipped ship and started the cycle again with another company.

etempleton 5y ago

Google's only way to seriously grow revenue is to throw more ads in front of their users. This always, eventually, hits a breaking point where the ads become too much and erode the user experience. Any company that relies primarily on ad revenue is built on a house of cards. It can be highly profitable, but it is fragile.

renlo 5y ago

When are we going to get the PBS of search engines? Publicly funded, boring, informational, non-profit and works.

throwaway984393 5y ago

Facebook's tanking, Google's on it's way down, Amazon's getting broken up. Seems like the long-predicted next economic recession is around the corner

sneak 5y ago

As I was reading this thread, scrolling down a bit, my whole browser screen turned into a loginwall ad for a Twitter account. It's amazing to me that people are still donating content to these platforms.

RosanaAnaDana 5y ago

I'm just gonna throw this out there as I'm noticing it more and more at this point since switching languages. What the actual F has happened to google search results for programming issues? I used to be able to google a question and get, more or less, a right answer from a forum or stack overflow. Recently, many coding tutorial websites have clearly figured out how to hack googles pageranks and now instead of one 'right enough answer', its 5 clone 'tutorial' websites, with all the same crappy answer that isn't actually what I was asking. Like I can't use google for coding questions any more. Not like I was able to previously. Also, Stackoverflow with bangs from ddg are broken and it thinks I'm a robot. No answer except to go to SO directly and search.

benlivengood 5y ago
Python has been the worst for me; it's almost impossible to find the official documentation for modules/functions. Defining search aliases or custom search engines in the browser with URLs like '''https://www.google.com/search?q=site:docs.python.org+%s https://www.google.com/search?q=site:docs.python.org+%s''' is probably the reasonable thing to do.
- soraminazuki 5y ago
  https://devdocs.io https://devdocs.io is nice when you're searching for official documentation.
  - macintux 5y ago
    Reminds me of Dash: https://kapeli.com/dash https://kapeli.com/dash
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    Thanks for dropping that link. This thing looks fantastic
- sk5t 5y ago
  Ditto, moving from Scala to Python and Go for a stint shocked me with the craptacular state of search results for "easy/popular" languages. Next stop was an extension for blocking particular sites in search.

godmode2019 5y ago

Google is a product search engine, if you want to buy something local, or search anything local use google. For any other query use duck/bing. I find duck better for general stuff and bing better for programming stuff. For streaming websites or controversial content use yandex as they bring up random blogs and small unknown websites.

adfm 5y ago

Does anyone remember what happened to AltaVista?

joshxyz 5y ago

Lol on youtube the first few seconds of your every day is ads.

smukherjee19 5y ago

I had a very similar experience. Only two days ago, I tried looking for something related to a friend's phone not recognizing the correct lock pattern on Android (Asus Zenfone 7), the term was "zenfone 7 does not recognize lock pattern even when correct and it's locked", and the first two pages were, with the exception of an official Asus support page, ALL the results were crap ones going to generic tutorials... Searching for the same phrase in DuckDuckGo, the 2nd result pointed to a Samsung forum thread [1] which, while pointing to doing things with a Samsung account, said it started working by itself in 1-2 days, which it did. Setting aside the fact why Android would behave like that, the search results in Google were so low quality and awful... While this is just an anecdote, it seems for quite a few types of search results, their quality has dropped hugely. Is it due to people hijacking the results by using clever tricks? Or has Google's algorithm starting to hit some sort of limit in terms of the amount of content that needs to be indexed and ranked? I don't know. But something definitely seems off to me. [1]: https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/other-smartphones/my-pattern-lock-is-not-working-anymore/td-p/1357021 https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/other-smartphones/my-pat...

aldebran 5y ago

This is also the case for me on Instacart. Search for 1 item first screen is just ads.

throwawaysea 5y ago

This is also basically true for Amazon’s search results.

WalterBright 5y ago

It'd be nice if there was a search modifier that specified "only text and jpgs and some html markup". In C++ there's a notion of POD (Plain Old Data) for simple structs. Maybe the web should have POT (Plain Old Text).

wallscratch 5y ago

What’s up with wikipedia results being deprioritized?

LoveMortuus 5y ago

“The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates.” -Gabe Newell When the pain of watching ads becomes greater then the pain of setting up a way to block ads. Blocking ads will become the norm. They're doing this to themselves.

dazc 5y ago
We have a group of local newspaper sites in the UK which cover just about every area and they have clearly adopted a business model of squeezing every last drop of ad revenue they can before the inevitable happens. There is virtually no actual news on these sites anymore unless it is click bait that elicits a lot of comment. I'm beginning to think that google are doing the same.
- LoveMortuus 5y ago
  The more Google becomes user unfriendly or annoying the more people will shift to different search engines. I've legit seen people that aren't tech savvy use DuckDuckGo, which for me personally was quite surprising. Even my father (58y) switched to DDG without me even noticing it!

omot 5y ago

I call this the squeeze. Google, even after all its attempts, is still a one trick pony. They have to grow at least 20% year over year to justify the market cap. They weren’t able to create a two pillar company like Amazon (AWS + Retail) so what do uncreative master executives naturally turn to? Of course their only cash cow. “ Rabban! I place you in charge of Arrakis. It's yours to squeeze, as I promised. I want you to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze!” - Dune

globular-toast 5y ago
I've been thinking of that Harkonnen line more and more lately. The film reminded me of it. The unfortunate thing is, as in Dune, the squeeze can last for many years. This is why they warned us about monopolies.
octoberfranklin 5y ago
I can totally see Sundar Pichai riding a sandworm.
fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
This year they’ll make the screen 20% bigger! Everyone gets a folding phone!
majani 5y ago
Surely GDN and Play Store are generating billions in profit?

baash05 5y ago

I was searching for skateboard decks on amazon and sorted by price.. The first 5 pages were all sponsored products.

hestefisk 5y ago

There has got to be white space for a new player in search.

redbell 5y ago

Another search term where you usually got four ads as the top results is "web hosting" https://www.google.com/search?q=web+hosting https://www.google.com/search?q=web+hosting And, surprisingly, the [ADS] search results when I'm logged-in versus when searching anonymously are different!

joelbondurant0 5y ago

flowtheorist 5y ago

Google will eat itself: https://googlewilleatitself.com/ https://googlewilleatitself.com/.

tradesurplus 5y ago

I would pay $10 a month for an ad free search engine that serves objective (not "personalised") query results related to what I'm looking for that doesn't sell my data, with similar features to Google Scholar and ideally even greater granularity, but for the whole web.

trieloff 5y ago
Try to get into the kagi.com beta, which could be exactly what you need. The results are fast and accurate, the hardest problem for me was finding the right browser extensions that would make it the default in Safari.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

I've been looking into alternative search workflows. Google (and near equivalents) feel a bit like Windows GUI when I want Linux cli for a) quickly going to a site I already know, b) answering a question when I have a bias about where good answers will be found, c) picking one thing from a long list I feel there's already an equivalent with a few rough edges but a power tool I can be productive with. Any product that aims at Google's entire market is only going to turn into Google, I need an ecosystem of tools so there will always be one that is aimed at my use case. It feels like there's a common sentiment around this so there may be room for a new business model or open source approach. One thing is bang searches, like duckduckgo has. So if you already know the site you want to search, and they have decent search then you can use their search directly. There's an open standard for advertising your local search but it feels a bit forgotten like RSS Vs twitter. You can find lists of sites that advertise this search in the Mycroft project on mozdev. I think Firefox has a non standard extension for search suggestions too. If the sites don't have decent search, you can get a site specific search via Google or whatever, but it feels like site specific search for code related things would be a good niche. Like Google, you don't need to own the content, just index it better by adding intelligence from context. You can even aggregate across a few different sites, like official docs plus official discussion, email archives, a Reddit sub and so on as appropriate. Yes you'll miss the long tail, but you'll have limited the scope so much that there would be a lot for value in exact searches for errors and other similar things. Possibly language communities could build their own index? The same for discussion sites seems possible and other general groups of search tasks. Wikipedia is a good target too. If you built a good one you could then offer it to the sites to use as their internal search too, in a virtuous cycle. On that note I'm going to go look up what Algolia does in this space.

shaky-carrousel 5y ago

Hah, you don't even need to do a search now. In my iPhone, as soon as go to google, two thirds of the screen are covered by obnoxious google ads about their crapware "google app". Guess nobody wants it on iOS and they are going with the "spam the user until they comply", like they do with YouTube Pro. They are the digital equivalent of an abusive partner that doesn't accept "no" as an answer.

randomsilence 5y ago

Could it be that google is relying too much on the input from the address bar? Unlike new search engines, google doesn't have to scrape and analyze the web because Chrome shows them what people want when they are searching for a set of words. Since Bing/DuckDuckGo doesn't have the same level of manipulation, I would assume that SEO spammers have managed to influence Google by faking browser feedback. I would assume that there are thousands of artificial Chrome instances that fake active users and flood Google with wrong user feedback.

usrusr 5y ago
Oh, that could very well be the "secret new SEO sauce". I could well imagine Google having an entire division focused on the quest of dealing with backlink spam SEO that is targeting OG pagerank, perpetually kept occupied by SEOs that don't know better, while a new generation of SEOs simply avoids that battlefield and aims directly at ranking inputs beyond pagerank. Thousands of artificial Chrome instances, or maybe just hundreds of Chrome extensions running on millions of instances engaging in a DSEO attack each individually well below the background noise floor. If that browser feedback is easy enough to fake then the visit pretender SEO wouldn't even need to poison an extension, they could just run it from any site they can get to run some JS on.

jhoechtl 5y ago

I am not so much concerned about a search engine, which is superficially free to the end user, displaying adds. I am totally concerned though that the non-adds results are those where the interests of the company behind the search results and my interest are deeply leaning towards the interest of the company instead of mines. In clear text: Content of sites disguised as original content yet serving no other purpose but linking to Amazon or sites which display a ton of adds served by Google.

CRConrad 5y ago
Ads. It's short for advertisement, not addition.

windex 5y ago

I increasingly find my answers searching through reddit or using the site: operator on google for reddit. Google has gone to trash.

danielrpa 5y ago

I've abandoned SEOogle for DuckDuckGo 3 years ago... Couldn't be happier.