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Google is so unbearable because they are no longer interested in you finding the answer to your query; they're interested in selling your query and its context

Google is so unbearable because they are no longer interested in you finding the answer to your query; they're interested in selling your query and its context to the highest bidder. That conflict of interest manifests in what Google has become.

mateo1 4y ago
If this picks up, google will just start ignoring the modifiers. It's like tv again, but with a lot more channels.
- pilsetnieks 4y ago
  Not TV. It's almost exactly like Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, Excite and other "search portals" of yore. The thing they swore they would never become, yet here we are now.
blackhaz 4y ago
Got me thinking - Google has became what it is - this colorful commercial ooze - by parasiting on the pre-Google web. Is there a search engine that searches sites without any Google code in them?
Beltiras 4y ago
I agree. What the search space needs is a different business model. I have no idea what it could be. I'm quite sure a subscription model would fail. Micropayments have not taken off. How can we fund meaningful search divorced from an ad business?
- baggachipz 4y ago
  I've been using Kagi[1] in private beta; they plan to launch a subscription model very soon. I hope it works out. [1] https://kagi.com/faq https://kagi.com/faq
  - Beltiras 4y ago
    While I might be a target audience for them and willing to pay a nominal fee monthly for good search I'm quite sure there isn't a market for it.
    - verve_rat 4y ago
      I wouldn't be so sure. I bet there is a viable business in selling a quality search engine. Maybe not dominate the market, take over the world, but not every thing has to be that.
      - prox 4y ago
        Every month I see my user experience decline with Google, in so much a paid search solution would be a blessing. Imagine a search engine that truly is private, containerized search and does not need to sell you anything. It only wants to serve you true relevance and accuracy. That engine also skips over all monetized sites that serve more than 5-10% ads. Prefers cookieless sites. That search engine would be bliss.
        darinf 4y ago
        Working on much of this at Neeva. We have a free tier, no ads cluttering the results. Just focused on the user experience. We also offer a premium tier for those who are keen to support us.
        prox 4y ago
        Unfortunately the app is not available in my region it says. Will there be an in browser solution?
      - bkobren 4y ago
        We have been working on exactly that at Neeva and the response has been very positive in terms of growth and adoption. Neeva offers a freemium model (free basic and premium for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN and a password manager), you can connect third party apps like dropbox and email putting all your personal docs in one search along with websearch, both versions are ad-free and private, it's available to anyone in U.S. and we are building our own independent stack to make the search experience unique and better.
- amelius 4y ago
  Just ban their old businessmodel, and they will come up with a new one. Or let Musk buy them.
  - Beltiras 4y ago
    How do you propose to bring about such a ban?
    - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
      There are many ways laws could be written to would effectively ban the current online advertising business model. One could be to require written permission each and every time a company wants to transfer user data of any kind to anyone else. Google could try keeping all Google site collected data internally but all analytics data collected from non-Google sites would be forbidden without written permission for each and every instance. Every site would have to run their own data analysis and sell their own ads. Advertisers would be unlikely to take Google or anyone else's word, so audits would be necessary but difficult to conduct. It wouldn't completely end online advertising but would turn it back into something closer to the old traditional model where those selling ad space had a handful of semi-generic personality models for their readers/users and advertisers would select one that best matches the profile of their target customer. It destroys the economics of centralized data collection. There are many other laws that could accomplish a similar end but through different means. The biggest barrier would be getting politicians to not care about the demands of huge tech companies that dump endless amounts of money into lobbying and campaign funding.
- pbz 4y ago
  It doesn't matter what new model you come up with. As long as capitalism is around and pushing for ever increasing profits this kind of behavior will always be on the menu.
  - baremetal 4y ago
    do you have a solution or are you just upset about capitalism?
    - mcosta 4y ago
      The solution is a system that doesn't have internet to begin with.
      - baremetal 4y ago
        radical. im inclined to agree.
    - pbz 4y ago
      I'm not upset nor do I have a solution; I'm just pointing out the model/problem.
- chii 4y ago
  > How can we fund meaningful search divorced from an ad business? The only way you have not listed is gov't funding. And i dont think i would trust a gov't run search engine either. May be a well meaning librarian institution could make it work. > I'm quite sure a subscription model would fail. this hasn't really been tried yet - it could work, who knows?
  - Beltiras 4y ago
    An alternative is academic institutions. I'd trust a university-backed government-funded search engine.
    - InCityDreams 4y ago
      University of Moscow?
      - Beltiras 4y ago
        That's a good one! I guess no.
  - bkobren 4y ago
    Hi there, you should give Neeva a try. Disclosure, I work for them, but we were the first to introduce a subscription, interest/growth has been really strong so far. Neeva offers a freemium model (free basic and premium for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN and a password manager), you can connect third party apps like dropbox and email putting all your personal docs in one search along with websearch, both versions are ad-free and private, it's available to anyone in U.S. and we are building our own independent stack to make the search experience unique and better.
    - InCityDreams 4y ago
      Missing commas? "...offers a freemium model (free basic and premium for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN....." Or as it reads?
- lolpython 4y ago
  AndiSearch[0] is going for a freemium model: > How we make money > We plan to fund Andi through a freemium business model, with free anonymous search for everyone for ever, and paid plans for professionals and businesses, including APIs and using Andi for corporate information, with supplemental revenue from anonymous referral link attribution. We're focused on building the product right now, and will figure out the details once we're further along. > We are committed to staying 100% advertising free. Commercial considerations or partnerships will have zero impact on our search results or recommendations. Our recommendations are always made based on the best results we can find for our customers, and are never subject to commercial influence. > By sharing search revenue with content producers and media companies that join our network, our mission is to provide funding to great content and reduce media's reliance on invasive ad-tech. Contact us at info@andisearch.com to get involved! There are only 2 employees[1] of the company so there is a low amount of revenue they need to be self-sufficient [0]: https://andisearch.com/about/ https://andisearch.com/about/ [1]: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/andi https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/andi
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    Unfortunately there's little that stops them from just taking your money and then forwarding your query to Google and their response back to you.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  Why not make micropayments take off? Do I have to build the startup myself?
- chongli 4y ago
  Why stop there? Social media suffers from the same conflict of interest as search. Heck, even mainstream media online has this problem: the public's confidence in journalism has plummeted due to the rise of clickbait, fake news, and sensationalism. What I really want is a decentralized, non-commercial, open source web. As part of this I would like to see search and communications moved to the client, rather than the cloud. This seems like it would take a huge effort to build, however, and even more monumental effort to bring people into the network. So it feels like a pipe dream at this point. I do think there are a lot of other people out there craving for something similar, based on nostalgia for the old days (90's and earlier).
  - technothrasher 4y ago
    > based on nostalgia for the old days (90's and earlier). Indeed. The internet in general and the beginnings of the web were a very different place back then. I remember about 1996 or so seeing a URL on a Pepsi can and thinking, "oh crap, it's over."
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    I've been sort of thinking there really ought to be a sort of open source manhattan project to disrupt the search ecosystem and offer real competition to big tech. There's a lot more to search than just search in the traditional sense, and I think multiple cooperating services offering small complimentary functionality slices could probably offer reasonably similar capabilities (save for like image search, maps and translation) with a significantly smaller hardware footprint. My own search engine is fairly janky, but a lot of its problems are understood and could probably if not be fixed, at least mitigated. That's one functionality slice, searching documents. You could have a slice for forums, one for reviews, one for high value sites like stackoverflow and wikipedia, one for facts, one for popular links in social media and news, one for source code, one for mailing lists, and so on. As a whole, I think you might actually be able to put together an actually useful information gateway this way. Would be a lot of work, but I think the amount of work probably exceeds its difficulty.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Do we really need it to be a business? Does it need to make money? Torrent communities and DHT don't make any money and yet they're pretty good. Would it be possible to build a decentralized solution around finding things on the internet? Something with trustworthiness ratings and user controlled blacklists perhaps?
- scroot 4y ago
  Why does web search need to have a business model at all? Why can't we just provide the Library of Congress funding to run something like it? Google got its start as a library project, after all, and it's the natural place for such a service.
nikanj 4y ago
Corollary: Web page creators are no longer interested in answering your query; they're interested in getting you to 1) view their page for ads 2) click on their affiliate links 3) buy the product they're selling. Google has an impossible task in trying to answer a query like "Portable air mattress reviews", because 99.99999% of the results are SEO-optimized crap
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  We don't know if the task is impossible because Google has no incentive to do it at all, so we can't assume they are really doing their best. They created this situation and they profit from it just the way it is.
  - nikanj 4y ago
    Build a better mouse trap etc, if the task was possible, DDG / Bing / Whoever could absolutely dominate the search market by providing a ”no crap results” option
    - machiaweliczny 4y ago
      I wonder how hard would it be to create ML algorithms that can classify something as crappy content. I am pretty sure it should be quite doable.
    - jeremyjh 4y ago
      They would only bother to try if they could monetize it, and the only model for that which won't create the same incentives is paid user subscriptions. The market for that may just be way to small for the big guys to consider.
    - metabagel 4y ago
      Kagi is trying to build a better mouse trap. I quite like it. Open beta is coming along with subscription model. I will be a subscriber.
    - darinf 4y ago
dstroot 4y ago
I still use Google every day. I was really hoping this advice was for real. Like maybe how to filter your Web results by size since they started off with example of a 9 MB website maybe you could filter your queries down to websites that are 2 MB or less? Since I use pi.hole and the first results are ads my top links are always dead. It is time to switch - Is DDG the best alternative?
- wfleming 4y ago
  DDG has been my default search engine for probably ~7-8 years. In the early days it wasn't that unusual for me to still do some searches on Google for better results, but nowadays that's extremely rare (probably partially because DDG has gotten better and partially because Google has gotten worse). But I still hear people complain about DDG's search results quality, so I think it really depends & YMMV, but it's a pretty low-effort thing to try for a while, so maybe give it a shot? My loosely held theory on the wide variance in people's judgement of DDG is that some people really like/have come to rely on how much Google personalizes results based on all the other data they have on you, even if they are in the "Google has gotten bad" camp. DDG doesn't do any of that: it's much more like going back 20 years where you have to put all the context you care about into a query, you're not searching "in a bubble". For me, that's a very positive feature, but others may find it frustrating and not even be able to articulate why they're not happy with the results. DDG does do a lot of the nice "enhancement" stuff Google pioneered long ago, like embedding the intro of the Wikipedia page in the sidebar for a query with a strong match, e.g. a person's name. So for me DDG is just the right level of "smart": it understands common queries well enough to immediately highlight useful details, but it doesn't try to be so smart that you as a user stop being able to understand what it's doing under the hood.
dec0dedab0de 4y ago
I think a subscription model could succeed for a niche group of people if the price was right, and the quality was good enough. Also, I think Google could make a ton of money if they sold one ad per language at a time. As in, for the next 5 minutes the ad for all English speaking users will be for coca-cola, and then it will be for boscovs. Just like TV ads. That is to say, a search engine could sell advertising without betraying it's users or compromising its own quality. It is possible, but would need constant vigilance against the temptations of greed.
- darinf 4y ago
  $5 / mo for a premium Neeva subscription or just use the free tier to experience ad-free search focused on the user. I left Google to join Neeva so I could be part of building a better search experience for people. Check us out. Would love feedback.
mrweasel 4y ago
There are only two choices. Either Google are no longer interested in finding the best answers to your queries. Or as you point out: They don't care, that is no longer what they do. I cannot imagine it being easy, but I find it hard to believe that Google aren't able to weed out the worst offenders. For a large number of queries the results are all SEO spam. Try searching for anything related to health and get a useful result. It's no longer possible.
- zo1 4y ago
  Google has SO much money, they could probably afford to curate the web and white-list websites one at a time and still make money. Personally, I think Google should get out of the search-indexing market entirely and rely on website submissions only. At this point, it's no different than an appstore in terms of volume. Ironically that's where we're heading with most websites being "3.0" and just SPAs and now PWAs even.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    I should have just read your comment before replying. You and I are thinking alike.
- eimrine 4y ago
  > Try searching for anything related to health and get a useful result. It's no longer possible. Medicine researching on the internets always was among the hardest topics. And anyone who really understands Medicine has to write on any advice not to consider it as a real medical advice... I agree that google has degraded down to unusable in comparison to non-global searchable websites (like SO) but Medicine is very bad example to your point.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    At the same time, it would be the easiest to solve with something like a "white list" (I know, not a good term to use these days). With one stroke you shut out all the bad actors. In fact, I wonder how far a search engine could go with a curated list of "good actors" you exclusively serve up results from. Add a "search everywhere" link for people that prefer SEO hell.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
Some years ago there were some serious Warnings issued from Google: Make your website fast and small! Popups will be PUNISHED! as will mobile-unfriendliness! But in hindsight, this was a ploy from them to try and upsell AMP, which was in a lot of cases heavier than non-AMP websites, and it was a means to keep people inside of their ecosystem - and inside of their advertising network, because not all websites Google linked to had Google adverts on it. They've given up on AMP. They've given up on improving search results quality. Dare I say they've given up on improving the web? I mean they're still putting some money into Chrome and HTTP/3 and the like.
- orangeoxidation 4y ago
  > I mean they're still putting some money into Chrome and HTTP/3 and the like Looking at the misnamed "Privacy Sandbox", Chrome is not just there to improve the Web (and therefore google usage), but also to control it (and steer advertisers to Google even if it undermines the Web as a whole).
- marricks 4y ago
  They own the web through Chrome, it’s one of their best investments. They’re killing Firefox with it (RIP) and successfully killed IE with it (rest in piss). We’re getting to a desktop browser hegemony again but I doubt a scrappy upstart will be able to save us.
  - satao 4y ago
    For sure, and it’s only Safari that gets a bad reputation
    - marricks 4y ago
      Yep, and folks will keep complaining until it’s just a fork of Chrome.
  - davedx 4y ago
    I use Safari for everything except front-end web development on MacOS now. I started because it's more energy efficient but I got quite used to the UX and now I'm glad I switched. I'm hopeful there are a lot of Mac users like me out there.
scarface74 4y ago
That’s what it always was.
bstar77 4y ago
I'm using Google less and less in favor of Youtube. It's not always convenient to get answers in video form, but I'm finding it's better for more involved answers. Also, google is just littered with Answers/Quora/StackOverflow/etc dodgy clones that make searching questions a nightmare.
- coverslide 4y ago
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  - schleck8 4y ago
    Casino Legends, the #1 gambling simulator for kids
  - bstar77 4y ago
    I've been paying for Youtube for a few years now, so I have no idea what the ad situation is.
- thrusong 4y ago
  While I overall agree, I ironically find the search engine on YouTube to be somewhat limiting when I'm looking for specific and/or fresh things... For example, I wanted to watch a bunch of videos of Mark Zuckerberg speaking from before 2010 and the YouTube search engine only showed me a limited amount of things I had already watched— it even had unrelated suggestions below those results based on my viewing habits. So I went to Google and searched for videos and interviews of Zuck and found a bunch which were not easily surfaced on YouTube itself. Same thing with Ina Garten/Barefoot Contessa cooking videos. Now that I've found some fresh videos, the homepage recommendation algorithm has gotten better at surfacing new content related to these topics.
  - bstar77 4y ago
    I've had good luck on this front, but I pay for Youtube, so the experience might be a little better.
b112 4y ago
They also have no focus, as you and a reply essentially say. For example, all the stupid aliasing of search terms, and dropping of search terms. This is helpful if you want to optimize for "sorta close, sell things!" such as "maytag A4453 fix timer", but you want advertisers to latch on to maytag=washing machine, and ignore the rest. And it also helps when websites with google ads on them them get higher SEO, because suggesting that site might get a click, and profit! EG, suggest a blog/spam site, because google ads are on it. And it also helps with google voice search! Did the speaker mean here/hear? Did they mean Danny/Daniel/Danson when they said Dan? Google has too much genericization in its search, and it is for profit naturally, but I think it is lazy profit, and it is becoming worse yearly. And it is all their fault, no one else's.
titzer 4y ago
It is sad because I spent nearly 10 years at Google and nearly all the people I met were well-meaning, seemingly harmless, engineering-oriented, and data-driven. But the configuration of people that makes up the superorganism that is Google nowadays is driven by both local incentives and a broad top incentive to grow. Scale to more computation, more storage, more bandwidth, and with lower overhead--morally, those are neutral to positive, IMHO, but they are put in service of the real goal at the end of the day: swallow more money. More revenue, more markets, more ads, more engagement, more watch time...muscle out the competition, dominate. 20% YoY growth for nearly 25 years running, and suddenly you get huge, scary numbers. And you have to do insane things to keep that exponential curve from regressing to an S-curve like the laws of physics dictate it must.
- aporetics 4y ago
  > well-meaning, seemingly harmless, engineering-oriented, and data-driven At some point I really hope that we can all recognize that “seemingly harmless”, “engineering-oriented”, and “data-driven” are not virtues.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    If you believe they are neither vices as well, then I can see your point — they just are. Perhaps this is the point you are making: if one is data-driven and engineering-oriented without regard to the consequences, that could be seen as a vice. Despite the amazing engineering/science, it is hard to come to peace with von Braun or Teller (just to pick two examples).
    - aporetics 4y ago
      Yes exactly. But until this is clear and accepted, these terms are apt to be misdirections—for example here, in a discussion trying to understand how things went so wrong at a leading tech company. Hopefully we can get to the point of putting purpose (I think “mission” is a bit too hackneyed and neat to work here) first in discussions of culture, whether corporate or engineering culture.
fzf 4y ago
This is why I switched to Neeva, I want my search engine to make products for me that help me find the best results for what I am looking for. When an advertiser is the customer instead of the end user the entire product road map is just trying to take you back to that search results page as many times as possible. Neeva also lets me index my personal documents and includes those in search results as well. They are an early startup but I am excited about what they can build when they are not beholden to advertisers.
- fils 4y ago
  Another Neeva user here... yeah, the personal document indexing was far cooler than I expected. I held off doing it for it a while but glad I gave it go. Just the GitHub indexing alone is cool. Can do some fun hacks with that too. I think they need to surface these personal results even better in the web results than they do (and I hear that is in the works?? hope it is).
neuronic 4y ago
That's the free market for you. Delivering ever less value in exchange for ever increased cost.
- timbit42 4y ago
  It's not a free market when it is monopolized by one corporation.
dreamcompiler 4y ago
OT, but Amazon is in the same boat. Their problems with counterfeit merchandise and fly-by-night Chinese junk manufacturers have been going on so long that it's become clear they don't want to fix the problem because it's now a major revenue source for them. Apparently someone at Amazon decided the Aliexpress marketplace was more lucrative than selling good products.
- baggachipz 4y ago
  Totally agree. Also, Prime used to be a premium service where any item taking longer than two days got you a service credit. Those days are long gone.
- EricE 4y ago
  They don't care about fixing it because people still flock to them. And who can blame us? Other sites still suck worse. I can't believe how bad walmart.com still is - the user experience is night and day. Walmart - the retailer embracing computerized tracking of spending by credit card number and other advanced data analytics a full decade before Amazon was even a glimmer in Bezo's eye took forever to realize the power of using their stores as local fulfillment centers? Provides a 3rd party marketplace that's less reliable than craigslist? Who the hell is in charge of online operations at these big companies and how do they still have jobs? Then again just look at Sears - the company that literally invented mail order *in the 1800's* and how they completely missed the Internet - the ultimate mail order environment. Ugh.
stickfigure 4y ago
This makes no sense. You make it sound like Google has no financial incentive to fix this problem, which is patently false. Google isn't selling the organic search results, which is what this article talks about. The problem is that Google is engaged in a war with SEO optimizers, and losing (or at least, barely breaking even). No business model will fix that. It's a hard problem that any successful search engine will struggle with.
- blagie 4y ago
  "Google" is 100+k people. "Google" doesn't respond to incentives; individuals do. A typical employee at any large company is incentivized to: - Maximize their salary - Maximize their future earnings potential (e.g. CV) - Have fun - Have work-life balance ... and so on. That goes all the way up to the CEO. Pretending a corporation thinks and responds to incentives is folly. Running a corporation like Google is like herding cats. If everyone marched in the same direction, Google would cut through SEO optimizers like a chainsaw through butter. There is no wayh to do that with 100+k people. Google fundamentally has no financial incentive to fix any problem, since organizations aren't intelligent, sentient beings which act on incentives. They have dynamics from the interactions of 100k+ individual agents. There is no magical fairy which makes large organizations act in their own best interests or even try to survive. The only reason they do survive is that's as true of their competitors as themselves.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    Did you write that, or did your 85 billion (approx.) neurons? Corporations are intelligent, sentient entities which act on incentives. They don't have a conscious sense of self, but then neither do many natural organisms. That doesn't keep them from responding to their environment as if they're aware of it, and acting in incentive-driven ways. Corporations seeking to maximise profits are exactly like humans attempting to maximise income. The problem is that corporations - like humans - have the wrong incentives, further diminished by limited predictive ability and poor heuristics. So maladaptive behaviours emerge and stick. Both humans and corporations find a nice local minimum and don't move from it. More intelligent behaviour would be able to predict and avoid existential threats without having to experience them first. But it's a question of predictive ability, not a binary absence of all intelligence. So it's not that Google can't do better because it has too many employees. It can't do better because its cultural heuristics - which include it internal culture and the external culture it operates in - don't allow it to.
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DrewADesign 4y ago
While obviously not universally true, this bothers me about a large swath of current UX culture and it’s pushing me towards other types of design. Anyone who’s heard a UX conference keynote in the past ten years would think UX folks go into work every day making unbiased data, using it to identify users’ genuine needs, and championing those needs at every stage of product development. Sure, the suits call the shots, but does our software landscape indicate anybody really does that? Many product folks just don’t seem honest, even with themselves, about what benefits users. Do you really think your users benefit from ”more relevant” advertisements? Because your users don’t. Are new services and content so beneficial to users that they’d forfeit their privacy to fund it? If so, why obfuscate your having made that choice for them? Why not make it opt-in? Does that dialog box popping up just at the right time really give that overstimulated and frustrated user a choice? Either answer those kinds of questions honestly or admit that you’re just finding the smoothest path to maximize revenue. The hypocrisy is infuriating. Give me a break.

mateo1 4y ago

If this picks up, google will just start ignoring the modifiers. It's like tv again, but with a lot more channels.

pilsetnieks 4y ago
Not TV. It's almost exactly like Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, Excite and other "search portals" of yore. The thing they swore they would never become, yet here we are now.

blackhaz 4y ago

Got me thinking - Google has became what it is - this colorful commercial ooze - by parasiting on the pre-Google web. Is there a search engine that searches sites without any Google code in them?

Beltiras 4y ago

I agree. What the search space needs is a different business model. I have no idea what it could be. I'm quite sure a subscription model would fail. Micropayments have not taken off. How can we fund meaningful search divorced from an ad business?

baggachipz 4y ago
I've been using Kagi[1] in private beta; they plan to launch a subscription model very soon. I hope it works out. [1] https://kagi.com/faq https://kagi.com/faq
- Beltiras 4y ago
  While I might be a target audience for them and willing to pay a nominal fee monthly for good search I'm quite sure there isn't a market for it.
  - verve_rat 4y ago
    I wouldn't be so sure. I bet there is a viable business in selling a quality search engine. Maybe not dominate the market, take over the world, but not every thing has to be that.
    - prox 4y ago
      Every month I see my user experience decline with Google, in so much a paid search solution would be a blessing. Imagine a search engine that truly is private, containerized search and does not need to sell you anything. It only wants to serve you true relevance and accuracy. That engine also skips over all monetized sites that serve more than 5-10% ads. Prefers cookieless sites. That search engine would be bliss.
      - darinf 4y ago
        Working on much of this at Neeva. We have a free tier, no ads cluttering the results. Just focused on the user experience. We also offer a premium tier for those who are keen to support us.
        prox 4y ago
        Unfortunately the app is not available in my region it says. Will there be an in browser solution?
    - bkobren 4y ago
      We have been working on exactly that at Neeva and the response has been very positive in terms of growth and adoption. Neeva offers a freemium model (free basic and premium for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN and a password manager), you can connect third party apps like dropbox and email putting all your personal docs in one search along with websearch, both versions are ad-free and private, it's available to anyone in U.S. and we are building our own independent stack to make the search experience unique and better.
amelius 4y ago
Just ban their old businessmodel, and they will come up with a new one. Or let Musk buy them.
- Beltiras 4y ago
  How do you propose to bring about such a ban?
  - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
    There are many ways laws could be written to would effectively ban the current online advertising business model. One could be to require written permission each and every time a company wants to transfer user data of any kind to anyone else. Google could try keeping all Google site collected data internally but all analytics data collected from non-Google sites would be forbidden without written permission for each and every instance. Every site would have to run their own data analysis and sell their own ads. Advertisers would be unlikely to take Google or anyone else's word, so audits would be necessary but difficult to conduct. It wouldn't completely end online advertising but would turn it back into something closer to the old traditional model where those selling ad space had a handful of semi-generic personality models for their readers/users and advertisers would select one that best matches the profile of their target customer. It destroys the economics of centralized data collection. There are many other laws that could accomplish a similar end but through different means. The biggest barrier would be getting politicians to not care about the demands of huge tech companies that dump endless amounts of money into lobbying and campaign funding.
pbz 4y ago
It doesn't matter what new model you come up with. As long as capitalism is around and pushing for ever increasing profits this kind of behavior will always be on the menu.
- baremetal 4y ago
  do you have a solution or are you just upset about capitalism?
  - mcosta 4y ago
    The solution is a system that doesn't have internet to begin with.
    - baremetal 4y ago
      radical. im inclined to agree.
  - pbz 4y ago
    I'm not upset nor do I have a solution; I'm just pointing out the model/problem.
chii 4y ago
> How can we fund meaningful search divorced from an ad business? The only way you have not listed is gov't funding. And i dont think i would trust a gov't run search engine either. May be a well meaning librarian institution could make it work. > I'm quite sure a subscription model would fail. this hasn't really been tried yet - it could work, who knows?
- Beltiras 4y ago
  An alternative is academic institutions. I'd trust a university-backed government-funded search engine.
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    University of Moscow?
    - Beltiras 4y ago
      That's a good one! I guess no.
- bkobren 4y ago
  Hi there, you should give Neeva a try. Disclosure, I work for them, but we were the first to introduce a subscription, interest/growth has been really strong so far. Neeva offers a freemium model (free basic and premium for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN and a password manager), you can connect third party apps like dropbox and email putting all your personal docs in one search along with websearch, both versions are ad-free and private, it's available to anyone in U.S. and we are building our own independent stack to make the search experience unique and better.
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    Missing commas? "...offers a freemium model (free basic and premium for $5/Month which includes paid versions of VPN....." Or as it reads?
lolpython 4y ago
AndiSearch[0] is going for a freemium model: > How we make money > We plan to fund Andi through a freemium business model, with free anonymous search for everyone for ever, and paid plans for professionals and businesses, including APIs and using Andi for corporate information, with supplemental revenue from anonymous referral link attribution. We're focused on building the product right now, and will figure out the details once we're further along. > We are committed to staying 100% advertising free. Commercial considerations or partnerships will have zero impact on our search results or recommendations. Our recommendations are always made based on the best results we can find for our customers, and are never subject to commercial influence. > By sharing search revenue with content producers and media companies that join our network, our mission is to provide funding to great content and reduce media's reliance on invasive ad-tech. Contact us at info@andisearch.com to get involved! There are only 2 employees[1] of the company so there is a low amount of revenue they need to be self-sufficient [0]: https://andisearch.com/about/ https://andisearch.com/about/ [1]: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/andi https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/andi
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Unfortunately there's little that stops them from just taking your money and then forwarding your query to Google and their response back to you.
BurningFrog 4y ago
Why not make micropayments take off? Do I have to build the startup myself?
chongli 4y ago
Why stop there? Social media suffers from the same conflict of interest as search. Heck, even mainstream media online has this problem: the public's confidence in journalism has plummeted due to the rise of clickbait, fake news, and sensationalism. What I really want is a decentralized, non-commercial, open source web. As part of this I would like to see search and communications moved to the client, rather than the cloud. This seems like it would take a huge effort to build, however, and even more monumental effort to bring people into the network. So it feels like a pipe dream at this point. I do think there are a lot of other people out there craving for something similar, based on nostalgia for the old days (90's and earlier).
- technothrasher 4y ago
  > based on nostalgia for the old days (90's and earlier). Indeed. The internet in general and the beginnings of the web were a very different place back then. I remember about 1996 or so seeing a URL on a Pepsi can and thinking, "oh crap, it's over."
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I've been sort of thinking there really ought to be a sort of open source manhattan project to disrupt the search ecosystem and offer real competition to big tech. There's a lot more to search than just search in the traditional sense, and I think multiple cooperating services offering small complimentary functionality slices could probably offer reasonably similar capabilities (save for like image search, maps and translation) with a significantly smaller hardware footprint. My own search engine is fairly janky, but a lot of its problems are understood and could probably if not be fixed, at least mitigated. That's one functionality slice, searching documents. You could have a slice for forums, one for reviews, one for high value sites like stackoverflow and wikipedia, one for facts, one for popular links in social media and news, one for source code, one for mailing lists, and so on. As a whole, I think you might actually be able to put together an actually useful information gateway this way. Would be a lot of work, but I think the amount of work probably exceeds its difficulty.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Do we really need it to be a business? Does it need to make money? Torrent communities and DHT don't make any money and yet they're pretty good. Would it be possible to build a decentralized solution around finding things on the internet? Something with trustworthiness ratings and user controlled blacklists perhaps?
scroot 4y ago
Why does web search need to have a business model at all? Why can't we just provide the Library of Congress funding to run something like it? Google got its start as a library project, after all, and it's the natural place for such a service.

nikanj 4y ago

Corollary: Web page creators are no longer interested in answering your query; they're interested in getting you to 1) view their page for ads 2) click on their affiliate links 3) buy the product they're selling. Google has an impossible task in trying to answer a query like "Portable air mattress reviews", because 99.99999% of the results are SEO-optimized crap

jeremyjh 4y ago
We don't know if the task is impossible because Google has no incentive to do it at all, so we can't assume they are really doing their best. They created this situation and they profit from it just the way it is.
- nikanj 4y ago
  Build a better mouse trap etc, if the task was possible, DDG / Bing / Whoever could absolutely dominate the search market by providing a ”no crap results” option
  - machiaweliczny 4y ago
    I wonder how hard would it be to create ML algorithms that can classify something as crappy content. I am pretty sure it should be quite doable.
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    They would only bother to try if they could monetize it, and the only model for that which won't create the same incentives is paid user subscriptions. The market for that may just be way to small for the big guys to consider.
  - metabagel 4y ago
    Kagi is trying to build a better mouse trap. I quite like it. Open beta is coming along with subscription model. I will be a subscriber.
  - darinf 4y ago

dstroot 4y ago

I still use Google every day. I was really hoping this advice was for real. Like maybe how to filter your Web results by size since they started off with example of a 9 MB website maybe you could filter your queries down to websites that are 2 MB or less? Since I use pi.hole and the first results are ads my top links are always dead. It is time to switch - Is DDG the best alternative?

wfleming 4y ago
DDG has been my default search engine for probably ~7-8 years. In the early days it wasn't that unusual for me to still do some searches on Google for better results, but nowadays that's extremely rare (probably partially because DDG has gotten better and partially because Google has gotten worse). But I still hear people complain about DDG's search results quality, so I think it really depends & YMMV, but it's a pretty low-effort thing to try for a while, so maybe give it a shot? My loosely held theory on the wide variance in people's judgement of DDG is that some people really like/have come to rely on how much Google personalizes results based on all the other data they have on you, even if they are in the "Google has gotten bad" camp. DDG doesn't do any of that: it's much more like going back 20 years where you have to put all the context you care about into a query, you're not searching "in a bubble". For me, that's a very positive feature, but others may find it frustrating and not even be able to articulate why they're not happy with the results. DDG does do a lot of the nice "enhancement" stuff Google pioneered long ago, like embedding the intro of the Wikipedia page in the sidebar for a query with a strong match, e.g. a person's name. So for me DDG is just the right level of "smart": it understands common queries well enough to immediately highlight useful details, but it doesn't try to be so smart that you as a user stop being able to understand what it's doing under the hood.

dec0dedab0de 4y ago

I think a subscription model could succeed for a niche group of people if the price was right, and the quality was good enough. Also, I think Google could make a ton of money if they sold one ad per language at a time. As in, for the next 5 minutes the ad for all English speaking users will be for coca-cola, and then it will be for boscovs. Just like TV ads. That is to say, a search engine could sell advertising without betraying it's users or compromising its own quality. It is possible, but would need constant vigilance against the temptations of greed.

darinf 4y ago
$5 / mo for a premium Neeva subscription or just use the free tier to experience ad-free search focused on the user. I left Google to join Neeva so I could be part of building a better search experience for people. Check us out. Would love feedback.

mrweasel 4y ago

There are only two choices. Either Google are no longer interested in finding the best answers to your queries. Or as you point out: They don't care, that is no longer what they do. I cannot imagine it being easy, but I find it hard to believe that Google aren't able to weed out the worst offenders. For a large number of queries the results are all SEO spam. Try searching for anything related to health and get a useful result. It's no longer possible.

zo1 4y ago
Google has SO much money, they could probably afford to curate the web and white-list websites one at a time and still make money. Personally, I think Google should get out of the search-indexing market entirely and rely on website submissions only. At this point, it's no different than an appstore in terms of volume. Ironically that's where we're heading with most websites being "3.0" and just SPAs and now PWAs even.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  I should have just read your comment before replying. You and I are thinking alike.
eimrine 4y ago
> Try searching for anything related to health and get a useful result. It's no longer possible. Medicine researching on the internets always was among the hardest topics. And anyone who really understands Medicine has to write on any advice not to consider it as a real medical advice... I agree that google has degraded down to unusable in comparison to non-global searchable websites (like SO) but Medicine is very bad example to your point.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  At the same time, it would be the easiest to solve with something like a "white list" (I know, not a good term to use these days). With one stroke you shut out all the bad actors. In fact, I wonder how far a search engine could go with a curated list of "good actors" you exclusively serve up results from. Add a "search everywhere" link for people that prefer SEO hell.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

Some years ago there were some serious Warnings issued from Google: Make your website fast and small! Popups will be PUNISHED! as will mobile-unfriendliness! But in hindsight, this was a ploy from them to try and upsell AMP, which was in a lot of cases heavier than non-AMP websites, and it was a means to keep people inside of their ecosystem - and inside of their advertising network, because not all websites Google linked to had Google adverts on it. They've given up on AMP. They've given up on improving search results quality. Dare I say they've given up on improving the web? I mean they're still putting some money into Chrome and HTTP/3 and the like.

orangeoxidation 4y ago
> I mean they're still putting some money into Chrome and HTTP/3 and the like Looking at the misnamed "Privacy Sandbox", Chrome is not just there to improve the Web (and therefore google usage), but also to control it (and steer advertisers to Google even if it undermines the Web as a whole).
marricks 4y ago
They own the web through Chrome, it’s one of their best investments. They’re killing Firefox with it (RIP) and successfully killed IE with it (rest in piss). We’re getting to a desktop browser hegemony again but I doubt a scrappy upstart will be able to save us.
- satao 4y ago
  For sure, and it’s only Safari that gets a bad reputation
  - marricks 4y ago
    Yep, and folks will keep complaining until it’s just a fork of Chrome.
- davedx 4y ago
  I use Safari for everything except front-end web development on MacOS now. I started because it's more energy efficient but I got quite used to the UX and now I'm glad I switched. I'm hopeful there are a lot of Mac users like me out there.

scarface74 4y ago

That’s what it always was.

bstar77 4y ago

I'm using Google less and less in favor of Youtube. It's not always convenient to get answers in video form, but I'm finding it's better for more involved answers. Also, google is just littered with Answers/Quora/StackOverflow/etc dodgy clones that make searching questions a nightmare.

coverslide 4y ago
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- schleck8 4y ago
  Casino Legends, the #1 gambling simulator for kids
- bstar77 4y ago
  I've been paying for Youtube for a few years now, so I have no idea what the ad situation is.
thrusong 4y ago
While I overall agree, I ironically find the search engine on YouTube to be somewhat limiting when I'm looking for specific and/or fresh things... For example, I wanted to watch a bunch of videos of Mark Zuckerberg speaking from before 2010 and the YouTube search engine only showed me a limited amount of things I had already watched— it even had unrelated suggestions below those results based on my viewing habits. So I went to Google and searched for videos and interviews of Zuck and found a bunch which were not easily surfaced on YouTube itself. Same thing with Ina Garten/Barefoot Contessa cooking videos. Now that I've found some fresh videos, the homepage recommendation algorithm has gotten better at surfacing new content related to these topics.
- bstar77 4y ago
  I've had good luck on this front, but I pay for Youtube, so the experience might be a little better.

b112 4y ago

They also have no focus, as you and a reply essentially say. For example, all the stupid aliasing of search terms, and dropping of search terms. This is helpful if you want to optimize for "sorta close, sell things!" such as "maytag A4453 fix timer", but you want advertisers to latch on to maytag=washing machine, and ignore the rest. And it also helps when websites with google ads on them them get higher SEO, because suggesting that site might get a click, and profit! EG, suggest a blog/spam site, because google ads are on it. And it also helps with google voice search! Did the speaker mean here/hear? Did they mean Danny/Daniel/Danson when they said Dan? Google has too much genericization in its search, and it is for profit naturally, but I think it is lazy profit, and it is becoming worse yearly. And it is all their fault, no one else's.

titzer 4y ago

It is sad because I spent nearly 10 years at Google and nearly all the people I met were well-meaning, seemingly harmless, engineering-oriented, and data-driven. But the configuration of people that makes up the superorganism that is Google nowadays is driven by both local incentives and a broad top incentive to grow. Scale to more computation, more storage, more bandwidth, and with lower overhead--morally, those are neutral to positive, IMHO, but they are put in service of the real goal at the end of the day: swallow more money. More revenue, more markets, more ads, more engagement, more watch time...muscle out the competition, dominate. 20% YoY growth for nearly 25 years running, and suddenly you get huge, scary numbers. And you have to do insane things to keep that exponential curve from regressing to an S-curve like the laws of physics dictate it must.

aporetics 4y ago
> well-meaning, seemingly harmless, engineering-oriented, and data-driven At some point I really hope that we can all recognize that “seemingly harmless”, “engineering-oriented”, and “data-driven” are not virtues.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  If you believe they are neither vices as well, then I can see your point — they just are. Perhaps this is the point you are making: if one is data-driven and engineering-oriented without regard to the consequences, that could be seen as a vice. Despite the amazing engineering/science, it is hard to come to peace with von Braun or Teller (just to pick two examples).
  - aporetics 4y ago
    Yes exactly. But until this is clear and accepted, these terms are apt to be misdirections—for example here, in a discussion trying to understand how things went so wrong at a leading tech company. Hopefully we can get to the point of putting purpose (I think “mission” is a bit too hackneyed and neat to work here) first in discussions of culture, whether corporate or engineering culture.

fzf 4y ago

This is why I switched to Neeva, I want my search engine to make products for me that help me find the best results for what I am looking for. When an advertiser is the customer instead of the end user the entire product road map is just trying to take you back to that search results page as many times as possible. Neeva also lets me index my personal documents and includes those in search results as well. They are an early startup but I am excited about what they can build when they are not beholden to advertisers.

fils 4y ago
Another Neeva user here... yeah, the personal document indexing was far cooler than I expected. I held off doing it for it a while but glad I gave it go. Just the GitHub indexing alone is cool. Can do some fun hacks with that too. I think they need to surface these personal results even better in the web results than they do (and I hear that is in the works?? hope it is).

neuronic 4y ago

That's the free market for you. Delivering ever less value in exchange for ever increased cost.

timbit42 4y ago
It's not a free market when it is monopolized by one corporation.

dreamcompiler 4y ago

OT, but Amazon is in the same boat. Their problems with counterfeit merchandise and fly-by-night Chinese junk manufacturers have been going on so long that it's become clear they don't want to fix the problem because it's now a major revenue source for them. Apparently someone at Amazon decided the Aliexpress marketplace was more lucrative than selling good products.

baggachipz 4y ago
Totally agree. Also, Prime used to be a premium service where any item taking longer than two days got you a service credit. Those days are long gone.
EricE 4y ago
They don't care about fixing it because people still flock to them. And who can blame us? Other sites still suck worse. I can't believe how bad walmart.com still is - the user experience is night and day. Walmart - the retailer embracing computerized tracking of spending by credit card number and other advanced data analytics a full decade before Amazon was even a glimmer in Bezo's eye took forever to realize the power of using their stores as local fulfillment centers? Provides a 3rd party marketplace that's less reliable than craigslist? Who the hell is in charge of online operations at these big companies and how do they still have jobs? Then again just look at Sears - the company that literally invented mail order *in the 1800's* and how they completely missed the Internet - the ultimate mail order environment. Ugh.

stickfigure 4y ago

This makes no sense. You make it sound like Google has no financial incentive to fix this problem, which is patently false. Google isn't selling the organic search results, which is what this article talks about. The problem is that Google is engaged in a war with SEO optimizers, and losing (or at least, barely breaking even). No business model will fix that. It's a hard problem that any successful search engine will struggle with.

blagie 4y ago
"Google" is 100+k people. "Google" doesn't respond to incentives; individuals do. A typical employee at any large company is incentivized to: - Maximize their salary - Maximize their future earnings potential (e.g. CV) - Have fun - Have work-life balance ... and so on. That goes all the way up to the CEO. Pretending a corporation thinks and responds to incentives is folly. Running a corporation like Google is like herding cats. If everyone marched in the same direction, Google would cut through SEO optimizers like a chainsaw through butter. There is no wayh to do that with 100+k people. Google fundamentally has no financial incentive to fix any problem, since organizations aren't intelligent, sentient beings which act on incentives. They have dynamics from the interactions of 100k+ individual agents. There is no magical fairy which makes large organizations act in their own best interests or even try to survive. The only reason they do survive is that's as true of their competitors as themselves.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  Did you write that, or did your 85 billion (approx.) neurons? Corporations are intelligent, sentient entities which act on incentives. They don't have a conscious sense of self, but then neither do many natural organisms. That doesn't keep them from responding to their environment as if they're aware of it, and acting in incentive-driven ways. Corporations seeking to maximise profits are exactly like humans attempting to maximise income. The problem is that corporations - like humans - have the wrong incentives, further diminished by limited predictive ability and poor heuristics. So maladaptive behaviours emerge and stick. Both humans and corporations find a nice local minimum and don't move from it. More intelligent behaviour would be able to predict and avoid existential threats without having to experience them first. But it's a question of predictive ability, not a binary absence of all intelligence. So it's not that Google can't do better because it has too many employees. It can't do better because its cultural heuristics - which include it internal culture and the external culture it operates in - don't allow it to.

deleted 4y ago

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DrewADesign 4y ago

While obviously not universally true, this bothers me about a large swath of current UX culture and it’s pushing me towards other types of design. Anyone who’s heard a UX conference keynote in the past ten years would think UX folks go into work every day making unbiased data, using it to identify users’ genuine needs, and championing those needs at every stage of product development. Sure, the suits call the shots, but does our software landscape indicate anybody really does that? Many product folks just don’t seem honest, even with themselves, about what benefits users. Do you really think your users benefit from ”more relevant” advertisements? Because your users don’t. Are new services and content so beneficial to users that they’d forfeit their privacy to fund it? If so, why obfuscate your having made that choice for them? Why not make it opt-in? Does that dialog box popping up just at the right time really give that overstimulated and frustrated user a choice? Either answer those kinds of questions honestly or admit that you’re just finding the smoothest path to maximize revenue. The hypocrisy is infuriating. Give me a break.