4 ms·

I'm not going to downvote you (I can't even), but you've made plenty of claims but haven't got anything backing up those claims. So I'd love to ask for some cit

I'm not going to downvote you (I can't even), but you've made plenty of claims but haven't got anything backing up those claims. So I'd love to ask for some citations on these claims. I can get behind "ads keep the internet free" narrative, but it seems rather odd to suggest something that someone who doesn't exactly know you wants you to see is better than relevant result.

shalmanese 3y ago
It's funny to see in this thread simultaneously the sentiment that Google's search results have gotten awful over the years due to widespread gaming of the free channel of delivering results to you and also immense skepticism that any other channel could be better than the free channel. In general, I've found any query that's blogspammed to death, the ads are actually surprisingly useful. eg: I turn off my adblocker for any query that is "Alternatives to X (dropbox/xero/notion/figma etc.)". Every organic search result is some generic comparison website that is scraping from the same public data but the ads are generally actual product companies. I figure the companies paying their way to the top of ads have their LTV to CAC figured out and are generally going to be the ones with the highest predicted retention for me. In this case, I have a specific intent to buy and the bid/ask mechanism for ads is much more predictive of my intent than the SEO algorithms of the organic results.