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Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image
- sidcool 1y agoWait till you see ads in ChatGPT.
- Hobadee 1y agoOr even worse; you don't see explicit ads, but rather ads are used to influence the results.
- geuis 1y agoI'm going to grumble about the title. If you say "in one image" the you should just link to an image. If it isn't that self evident, then should title it as such.
- wk_end 1y agoI'm not using an ad blocker; when I search for Midjourney on Google the real thing is my first result; I don't even see any sponsored content. Not sure what's happening for OP. (Please don't read this as a defense of Google on the whole.)
- drusepth 1y agoPiggybacking on to provide a screenshot since I also see no sponsored content and Midjourney is my #1 result, well above the fold. [1] https://i.imgur.com/Oxo4FJl.png https://i.imgur.com/Oxo4FJl.png
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agoSame here, though for me the second result is the Midjourney Discord rather than Reddit. But I'm in Europe. Perhaps that affects results? I wouldn't be surprised if the Google experience were more ad-heavy in low-consumer-protection nations.
- barbazoo 1y agoThis is exactly what I see with adblock turned on. When turned off, the first two results are ads.
- drusepth 1y agoI don't use any adblockers. The results are also the same for me whether I'm logged in or not.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- codazoda 1y agoI get the same results as Op, but on mobile, where there are 4 sponsors above the link. It’s about two screen scrolls to the real result.
- miltonlost 1y agoodd, I also don't see any sponsored content any longer for any search whereas I definitely remember seeing what OP has for other searches. But I also now see a tab for AI mode next to ALL which is new... but I also switched to DDG a while ago
- SchemaLoad 1y agoMine has one sponsored link which is just a course for midjourney. But I don't doubt at all that the OP post is real. This stuff is all dynamically generated. There is probably even some AI deciding how many ads you'll put up with. Ideally Google would offer some kind of ad free option, perhaps on a higher tier of the Google One plans.
- stordoff 1y agoWith uBlock off, I get two sponsored ads, and the real site is nearly pushed below the fold: https://i.imgur.com/AkVbvSI.png https://i.imgur.com/AkVbvSI.png
- perks_12 1y agoGeo targeting or other targeting signals play a role in this
- driverdan 1y ago> I'm not using an ad blocker How do you tolerate the web without an ad blocker?
- chaseadam17 1y agoWhen I search it I see the same thing as OP. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/hlF6OoU https://imgur.com/a/hlF6OoU
- freediver 1y agoThey still get away with it as ‘only’ 1% complain and Google thinks they don’t matter. We built our entire company for that 1%.
- frakt0x90 1y agoAnd we are very grateful
- adammenges 1y agoKagi is so good
- paradox460 1y agoHey freediver, I bought a kagi shirt in the initial batch, got it, and then after one wash it unraveled. Your support team was great and gave me a coupon for a replacement shirt, which I ordered, yet it never shipped. Could I get that shirt :D
- riskable 1y agoWe're finally going to find out if he gives a shirt!
- stinkbeetle 1y agoToday is the day you find out whether you're the 1% of the 1%!
- freediver 1y agoI give a shirt! Contact support@kagi.com until you get it.
- Mistletoe 1y agoHow will you fight the inevitable slide that happens if you ever got on top? I’m convinced Google started with the absolute best of intentions before the money and greed turned them into a horror movie villain.
- 1y ago
- jensenbox 1y agoToo bad I cannot zoom into the image in my phone. Even tapping on it does not enable me to really see it much larger.
- mystraline 1y agoYep. Its a shit website, talking about a shittier website.
- gdulli 1y agoAndroid Firefox and its various forks (I use Waterfox) have a setting that allows zoom on all sites.
- romanows 1y agoI "open image in a new tab" and can then pinch to zoom in the new tab, too.
- homebrewer 1y agoYou can usually force enable zoom in browser accessibility settings.
- ranger207 1y agoMy dad stopped using Google like 20 years ago for exactly this reason. He was not happy when his relevant local small business was pushed off the first page by out-of-state providers of tenuously related services
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sebgr 1y agothe sponsored results looks like you are in an ads experiment since this really isn't how it typically displays
- kelvinjps 1y agoI have been using an ad blocker for a long time and K didn't even know there was the sponsored ads feature
- jsheard 1y agoThey do the same thing on the Play Store, for example I just searched for Firefox and the first result is a sponsored spot for Opera. Does Apple do that on the App Store? A funnier example: searching for Amazon gives Temu as the first result. Searching for Temu gives Shein as the first result. Searching for Shein gives Shein as the first result! ...but only because they outbid everyone else for the ad spot on their own name, resulting in Double Shein: https://i.imgur.com/0buR8Hq.png https://i.imgur.com/0buR8Hq.png
- RealStickman_ 1y agoTesting this with Aurora Store and the search terms actually give me the correct results. Another reason to use that over Google Play Store
- irrational 1y agoI just searched "Firefox" in the app store. The top result is Google Chrome with an Ad indicator (Google paid for higher placement). Second is Firefox.
- homebrewer 1y agoSometimes it's good to live in a region that no one cares about. I just searched for Firefox in the Android Play Store application, there were no ads, and the first result was Firefox. I also don't get any ads in American and UK podcasts for the same reason (except for those read by the host, but there are few of those and they're easy to ignore).
- xp84 1y agoThat's interesting. I wish it were more practical to use a dedicated VPN for some less-developed country just for my podcast client.
- pitched 1y agoPodcasts are normally plain mp3 (or similar) files that get downloaded as-is off an rss feed, as far as I understand. I don’t think anyone gets extra ads outside the sponsored/host-read ones.
- lowdownbutter 1y agoThat's not everything that's wrong.
- libraryofbabel 1y agoRelevant (800 comment!) 2024 HN discussion on how we got here with Google Search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
- CSMastermind 1y agoI'm old enough to remember when a big selling point of Google was that it didn't do this.
- barapa 1y agoYes, things change. In fact, change is basically the only thing you can confidently predict.
- amatecha 1y agoHad to dig up this link, 1999 review[0]: "Google (www.google.com) is a pure search engine - no weather, no news feed, no links to sponsors, no ads, no distractions, no portal litter. Nothing but a fast-loading search site. Reward them with a visit." [0] https://i.redd.it/uea6u7c4oje31.jpg https://i.redd.it/uea6u7c4oje31.jpg
- hwc 1y agoHow did they make any money at all without ads?
- peab 1y agothey didn't - hence the ads
- doublerabbit 1y agoI remember being clever at school and showing off that if you typed "nukes" it would display an advert for ebay down the right-side. "Buy Nukes on EBay".
- smcin 1y ago...and what did those eBay hits look like, back then? Real (books/films/tshirts/sings about nukes?), scam or unrelated?
- justapassenger 1y ago
- beckthompson 1y agoIts sad but I think at this point its kind of a safety issue not to use an ad blocker. Those results are not clearly ads and I've clicked on fake links in the past when they were.
- LorenDB 1y agoYou also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid, or if you don't want to use search results from Bing's index, I've been very happy with Brave Search.
- behnamoh 1y agopeople say that but they often come back to Google ;) I've just learnt to use ad blockers. the only time I disable it is when I look up the definition of something or the location of a place and the entire page goes blank because of some rules I've added to uBlock.
- arkh 1y ago> people say that but they often come back to Google ;) It used to be the case. One of my laptop is setup with default DDG and the rare times I switch back to google I'm disappointed by even worse results.
- array_key_first 1y ago> people say that but they often come back to Google ;) The thing is that Google is actively becoming more hostile and difficult to use. Not just Google Search, but really all their products. They're becoming Facebook, slowly but surely. Something we might be forced to use now and again, but nobody actually likes. The reality is that Google is such a poorly run company that they will destroy their own products, given enough time. Their competitors need to do nothing. Literally nothing.
- LorenDB 1y agoI haven't used Google (apart from their as-of-yet undefeated image search, the occasional hard link from a web page, and the two times I tried the Circle to Search feature) for at least five years now and I have zero interest in going back.
- mberning 1y agoIf we could get circa 2010 Google back people would not waste nearly as much time with “AI”.
- njharman 1y agoSeems perfectly tailored to the product being sold and the customers paying for it Product being search users. Customers being advertisers.
- rockskon 1y agoGoogle frequently ignores entire words in a search query or gives thematically similar but utterly irrelevant results.
- crazygringo 1y agoWhen I search for "midjourney" without an adblocker a bunch of times, I'm getting: - No ads, with correct midjourney.com as the top result, about half the time - A legit ad for midjourney.com with the title "Your Imagination, Unlocked", the other half the time. It's the only ad, and the correct midjourney.com is also still directly below it as the first organic result So both seem fine for me. I've never seen ads on Google with the kind of formatting shown by OP either. Obviously everybody's search experience is different, based on geography, profile, who else is running ads for those keywords, Google runs different formatting experiences as A/B testing, etc.
- tayo42 1y agoFirefox on my phone I got midjourney.com as the first result Weird
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoI am highly suspicious tech markets do not see realistic average Google behavior for whatever reason. The pervasive belief in tech that Google Search is even passable suggests people in the Valley or even Austin aren't getting the experience most people do. I recall a Googler once suggesting to me that Googlers seeing ads might look like ad fraud to advertisers, so I'm not positive Googlers dogfood how bad this is either.
- mc3301 1y agoI'd go as far to guess that the tech-literate people (who would be both less susceptible to clicking on enshitified links and more likely to report or discuss them) have, somewhere in their tracked-data-portfolio, a "don't serve too much garbage to this person, they aren't gullible and they'll tell people we're serving garbage" setting. Apologies for the weird grammar.
- ocdtrekkie 1y agoIt's certainly possible, and maybe not even maliciously: Advertisers are refining their targeting to get clicks, the best advertisers will only annoy people likely to click an ad. The problem with giant algorithmic platforms is often things go off the rails simply due to nobody at the helm understanding what the platform is doing anymore.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- clueless 1y agoublock origin
- svat 1y agoFor what it's worth, when you view a Google search results page, part of the page is populated by ads (results come from the Google Ads teams) and part of it by search results (results come from the Google Search team, and unaffected by anything to do with ads). The post points out a problem with the fraction that is allocated to Ads, but pretty sure that's not "everything that's wrong with Google Search" (if true, it would actually be an endorsement of the quality of the organic search results, which I doubt is the intent).
- hobs 1y agoNot really, its just a condemnation of the amalgamation which is unable to be perceived as different from the user - it shits on the organic search in their mind and anyone saying "well our search is still good!" is completely missing the point.
- tinyhouse 1y agoI don't have a problem with this in general, I do have a problem when they deceive users, which happens often. If I search for Amazon and get Temu ad - that's OK. But often when I search for X they will show sponsored results that pretend to be that X. This is esp true with apps on their play store, which is something fairly new. I barely use Google Search these days so don't know how bad it is with search. This is a pattern you see often. A product gets to a point where it's hard to grow revenue as the market expects, so the company does everything they can to squeeze more revenue.
- chairmansteve 1y agoI just tried the same search on DuckDuckGo. Midjourney.com is second on the list. Not good. But better.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- socalgal2 1y agoAt least it was on the first page. I just searched for Midjourney on the iPhone App Store. It put 2 other results first. Each result is about 2/3rds the height of the screen meaning the actual "midjourney" result was a screen and a half down, so off the screen.
- omnicognate 1y agoThere's no AI preview in that screenshot, so it's not everything that's wrong with Google Search.
- jrootabega 1y agosearch: "coffee is mostly water" "No, coffee is not mostly water. That appears to be a misconception based on a popular television show. Coffee is actually about 98% water."
- romanows 1y ago"Yes, coffee is mostly water, with standard black coffee consisting of about 98% to 99% water..."
- pinkmuffinere 1y agoMy favorite one thus far has been: > was there a US president named Bob, Robert, or who went by either? > No U.S. president has ever gone by Bob or Robert as their common or official name. The closest case is James A. Garfield (20th president), whose full name was James Abram Garfield — no Robert in there Why is James A. Garfield the closest???? What metric are we using for this comparison, lol
- Dylan16807 1y ago> the pool of the Titanic is still full No, the swimming pool on the Titanic is not full of water. The pool is empty due to the ship's sinking and the immense pressure at the depth where the Titanic lies. The pressure would crush any voids within the ship, and the base of the pool cracked as the ship sank, letting out the water. Here's a more detailed explanation: Pressure and Depth: The Titanic lies at a depth of 12,500 feet (3,800 meters). At this depth, the water pressure is immense, exerting thousands of pounds per square inch. This pressure would crush any enclosed spaces, including the swimming pool. Sinking and Damage: The Titanic began to sink, the base of the pool cracked, and all the water escaped. No Time to Refill: The crew was focused on evacuating passengers and didn't have time to refill the pool before the ship sank. Deterioration: The ship has also deteriorated over time, further contributing to the loss of any remaining water in the pool. - on the other hand - > is the pool of the titanic still filled with water? why? Yes, the swimming pool on the Titanic is still filled with water. It's thought that the pool was filled with water when the ship was contracted to be built, and that the contract to fill it didn't expire just because the ship sank. The pool is located far away from the main damage caused by the iceberg impact and is also separated by watertight doors from other areas of the ship. While the exact reason for the pool remaining full is not definitively known, it's believed to be a combination of the ship's structural integrity in that area and the fact that the pool was designed to be watertight. While the pool remains filled, it's worth noting that the Titanic's hull is deteriorating due to underwater bacteria, and the ship is predicted to collapse within the next few decades, potentially releasing the water from the pool.
- yunohn 1y agoEvery time this comes up, I don’t understand what the alternative is supposed to be. X (Midjourney in this case) may/not be trademarked in the user’s country - so what makes X so special that Google/others should rank this one over others? Does this mean X owns the keyword and other related searches on Google forever? That sounds worse than domain squatting! Speaking of, quite often, X.com is already registered, so companies buy getX.com or just non-.com TLDs. Now which one is the right result for searches for X? The pre existing one or the new company? What if they’re in different industries? Almost all SaaS companies have multiple comparison pages or blogs/articles/etc that mention and compare themselves with competitors - specifically for SEO to show up in those searches. Should this also be banned? I could go on, but I just don’t see a situation where Google can solve this satisfactorily for everyone, without becoming opinionated and picking/choosing/preferring one competitor over the other. As such, they’ve gone for the easiest model we have in modern day capitalism - put it up for auction and let the market figure it out!
- miladyincontrol 1y agoThe issue you're describing is ranking results or ranking between promoted/ad content. The problem more at hand is unless you're paying big bucks, they can and will place content that at best is another competitor, or at worst is genuinely trying to harm your users. Ads being inline and as close in appearance to regular results as google can legally get away with is the problem. There are heavily misaligned incentives at play, ones that enable a lot of malware and phishing attempts.
- yunohn 1y agoNo, I’m definitely not talking about ranking - that’s downstream of my point. I’m talking about the “simple” solution that everyone alludes to but can’t seem to explain how it would feasibly work.
- makeitdouble 1y agoYou're describing the exact (complex) problem that Google Search was born to solve. And at some point they successfully did. If we agree it's something they can't solve anymore, letting them pay to stay is a disservice to the users.
- pluc 1y agoIt's not wrong, it's how Google evolved based on demand and literally on the industries it created and that everyone was happy to join. SEO + AdWords = this It apparently took everyone decades to notice this is where we were always headed.
- hungryhobbit 1y agoCan we be honest here? This isn't (really) Google's fault, because ANY company in the same position would do the same. It's our fault, for letting them. We could pass a law preventing this nonsense tomorrow, and Google would have no choice in the matter. However, "we the people" don't have strong advocates fighting for us, while Google has both (very strong) legal and political contributions (ie. bribery) teams ensuring that never happens. The real problem here is that we've ceded our democracy to corporations: blaming Google (or any individual corporation) is missing the real issue. P.S. But, the good news is ... we can always take our democracy back.
- otterley 1y agoThis is a completely valid (if perhaps fanciful) perspective; I’m not sure why it’s being downvoted.
- int_19h 1y agoIt is still their fault because at the end of the day they choose to do this. Yes, the incentives encourage them to make that choice, but if I offer you a million dollars to murder someone and you do that, you're still responsible for what you did. Now the definition of "their" needs clarification here. Google as a whole cannot be meaningfully morally responsible because it is not an actual person, and as such, not entity that possesses the ability to be moral or immoral in the first place. It's an organization. But all organizations are run by people, and people at the top do have a lot of capacity to make meaningful choices. When they make choices that they do, we can and should hold them morally accountable for them. Meaningful regulation is also good, but, well, consider two societies: one has low rates of property crime because of draconian enforcement, the other because people just choose not to do it despite very little enforcement. Which society is more pleasant to live in?
- graycat 1y agoThat's not "everything"! Just wasted ~3 hours trying to set up an account, supervised by me, for my 8 year old daughter. (1) There are some old rules for a user interface. (2) Billions of people know these rules, implicitly, and right away and easily use sites that follow the rules. (3) Google, and others, want a new, different, original, snappy, creative, user interface but in this effort set aside the old rules so that at most only the programmer understands the user interface and in a month he (she) won't be able to use it either. Analogy: They are really good at making pancakes but now are trying to make Bouillabaisse and are getting only rotten sea food. Uh, the user interface has a lot of cartoons in a popular, new style but one of their cartoons shows little girl and some of the underside of her skirt -- dumb de dumb-dumb. If they make a mistake like that, then they are sloppy or worse workers and, thus, no wonder the rest is awful. Time to short the stock?
- ropable 1y agoGoogle Search jumped the shark years ago. It's the modern-day Yahoo at this point. Even Bing is a better experience, which is not a sentence I ever thought I would type a decade ago.
- neehao 1y agofrom a new customer perspective who just heard about midjourney, search may be a good spot to find alternate products. what google needs to know is if it is a navigational search and unless it keeps a long history, it may not know that. the simpler answer may be that companies who know you use a product like the one they make may just be willing to spend a bunch and google may be willing to add friction for the $.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- calibas 1y agoGoogle's ad engine, also featuring search results somewhere on the page.
- aydyn 1y agoUh, midjourney is the first result on my google. Thanks to the magic of adblock. Seriously is this the level of HN discussion nowadays?
- dotancohen 1y ago> I typed in Midjourney to search for Midjourney because I wanted to use Midjourney. For one thing, the author could have just gone right to midjourney.com instead of going through an intermediate. Additionally, when I tried typing midjourney into google, midjourney.com was the first result. This is on mobile Firefox, with no extensions installed.
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoImpossible to know beforehand if it’s midjourney.com , midjourney.ai, getmidjourney.io or some such other idiocy - search engines exist for a reason. Also - well-known that ad, sorry, search engines might well give two people different results for the same query.
- nonfamous 1y agoThanks for the anecdote, but everyone’s advertising experience is different — that’s the whole point of targeted advertising. It doesn’t invalidate the OP’s point, though. FWIW, I just used the Google app on iOS and got one ad (for artlist.io) before the midjourney.com link. A lot of people use Google this way to get to a named website, btw.
- asadotzler 1y agoThere was a time when Google disallowed this. Google even asked us (Firefox team) to report ads squatting on our trademarks. Eventually they stopped caring and now it's in their ad sales pitchdeck just how effective trademark squatting can be.
- thrtythreeforty 1y agoCan you in principle sue people buying these ads for trademark infringement? (I realize in practice the answer is that it's not worth the game of whack-a-mole.)
- remus 1y agoWhere is the trademark infringement? It's like honda buying an advert outside a VW dealership.
- _superlevure_ 1y agoNo, it's like searching for the location of a VW dealership on your phone and Google Maps taking you to an Honda one instead.
- thehappypm 1y agoNo, it’s more like a billboard saying, “looking for a Honda? ᶠᵒʳᵈˢ ᵃʳᵉ ᵇᵉᵗᵗᵉʳ ᵃⁿᵈ ʸᵒᵘ ᶜᵃⁿ ᵍᵉᵗ ᵗʰᵉᵐ here!
- stetrain 1y agoThe trademark infringement is when their ad includes someone else's trademark. Look at the screenshot in this post. All four of the ads at the top of the search results include the trademarked name "Midjourney" in the title of the ad. This is more like putting up a giant sign outside of your Honda dealership saying "Best deals on new VWs!" but when you pull in they don't sell VWs, they sell their own competing products.
- piskov 1y agoFor the love of god please use (and pay for) Kagi. I cannot possibly fathom how they stay afloat with just 50k+ users.
- doug_durham 1y agoThere have been ads above the fold for about 20 years. I just did the search and the official Midjourney site is the first non-sponsored hit. You'll find this for most searches.
- rchaud 1y ago20 years ago the ads appeared in a clearly marked and differently marked sidebar, away from the main content.
- adamkochanowicz 1y agoKagi is worth every penny.
- xnx 1y agoCould not reproduce. You might be part of an experiment or have a rogue extension installed that is hijacking the results (it's happened to me).
- diogenescynic 1y agoTry searching for "FedEx phone number" and it's not even in the top 10 search results. Not sure if FedEx is using SEO or paying to suppress results, but I was shocked Google couldn't even return this basic search successfully. I remember when Google Search used to actually work and have useful results and something like "FedEx phone number" would have the 1-800 number in bold text for you to click and immediately use. Now I use ChatGPT for those type of questions--and get the results I expect.
- typon 1y agoCan't wait till ChatGPT responses look like this
- ge96 1y agosmiles in UBO
- BizarroLand 1y agoUBO works on startpage and ecosia as well and increases traffic counts for less invasive search engines
- tonymet 1y agoI find the Ads to be annoying, but the "ML Fairness" (re-calibrating demographic distributions of photos) to be more disturbing.
- tonymet 1y agothough I've noticed that they've dialed down the knobs a bit. It's still there, but far less blatant (probably due to the attention-grabbing BARD debacle)
- sbrkYourMmap 1y agoOn one hand, google forces users to surrender more and more person information for "advance security features" on other hand google allows malicious links to be the top 10 (sponsored) search results. .
- xvrqt 1y agoYahoo! did this as it died too
- gus_massa 1y agoYou can try with https://www.google.com/search?q=midjurny https://www.google.com/search?q=midjurny My superpower is mispealing even trivial words, Google autocorrect them, but most of the time there are no ads :) The problem in the post is even worst with YouTube, because Google adds allow to show http://example.com/sale?utm=123456789&crap=987654321 http://example.com/sale?utm=123456789&crap=987654321 as http://example.com http://example.com This is not a problem in most business sites, but in YouTube it allows any user to impersonate the main page.
- asah 1y agosounds like a transient issue. I just tried [midjourney] and midjourney.com was the top ad and also the #1 result, dominating the page.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- root_axis 1y agoOfftopic, but I hate websites that restrict zoom on mobile. I'm sure the image is very convincing, too bad I can barely read the text.
- indymike 1y agoGoogle has turned into altavista
- jameslk 1y agoHmm I just tried that search and Midjourney's site was at the top. Regardless, at this point, I consider Google Search "legacy software." I rarely use it anymore. Google's AI mode or ChatGPT Thinking perform much more nuanced searches for me and surface the results I'm looking for much faster. I used to consider my Google-fu top notch, but even without Google Search "Classic" getting destroyed by SEO spam, it's still more work at the end of the day than AI models. I'm sure spam and irrelevance will be the eventual fate of these AI models too, but for now they're the new Google
- Spunkie 1y agoThe fact that people continue to willingly subject themselves to the internet without using an adblocker is insane to me.
- agnishom 1y agoI wouldn't characterize that as "everything" that's wrong. It is at least one thing.
- bergheim 1y agoEverything that is wrong about bullshit webpages that are SoMe optimized: I could not zoom because eyeballs so I couldn't see what was in the image. But daaaaamn. I could see that footer all the time. Lucky I was not able to zoom.
- Liwink 1y agoI remember a company saying its most effective ads were search ads for their own name.. like what midjourney does https://postimg.cc/8JwL9WFx https://postimg.cc/8JwL9WFx
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago> I remember a company saying its most effective ads were search ads for their own name I don't have the full context, but this is almost a tautology. Of course you get the highest click-through-rate and highest conversion for searches that are your own name. You usually also get a relatively cheap bid, because most search engines prefer to prioritize relevant results, and you will be very relevant for your own name. But you would have gotten most of those clicks and conversion _for free_ even if you didn't advertise on your name, because the searcher would see your organic result. Advertising on your own name is defensive, not offensive -- you protect customers that are already yours, you don't get new ones. source: I run marketing for a small business, we advertise on our own name too, and of course it is also the most effective if you calculate it naively.
- gangtao 1y agoBaidu did this in the past and quickly lost his credit and market in China.
- shirro 1y agoWith udm14 and ublock origin on Firefox my first link is the official midjourney.com, then the subreddit, then the official discord, then wikipedia, then the offical Facebook page. That is just about perfect and covers what most people would want. No ads. No LLM BS. While the experience google is pushing is terrible, the underlying tech still works in cases like this.
- kelvinjps 1y agoRegular google + unlock origin gives me the same results
- AndrewStephens 1y agoPeople are really starting to notice the sharp decline of Google search. I blogged[0] of a very similar experience a few months ago. I don't even mind the AI Overview (too much) but the search results themselves are noticeably worse. In my example, the best search result and the one that the AI summary is clearly based on is the 6th ranked result. Is Google doing this deliberately to make the AI Overview seem better? In an ideal world, Google would use AI to provide better search results. Something like: "Here are the results for your search term A, which was slightly ambiguous. I suggest added term B or C depending on what you meant". It seems like that is not going to happen. [0] https://sheep.horse/2025/4/yo_google%2C_thanks_for_the_ai_overview_but_your_sea.html https://sheep.horse/2025/4/yo_google%2C_thanks_for_the_ai_ov...
- neilv 1y agoI just got good first page hits and ranking for a search for "midjourney", but it looks like Midjourney is paying for 2 Sponsored spots on the first page, even though the user searched exactly for Midjourney's well-known brand name. https://i.imgur.com/u025ZaU.png https://i.imgur.com/u025ZaU.png On a search for exactly this particular well-known and fairly unique brand name, I think probably midjourney.com should've been the first hit, as a freebie, without needing to buy ads. (Either that, or the second hit, and the Wikipedia entry as the first.) (Incidentally, it felt a bit retro not to get the usual clutter of AI/infoboxes/etc. at the top of the page this time.)
- userbinator 1y agoI stopped using Google when it started discriminating against browsers without JS recently, and it looks like I'm not missing much. Is stuffing ads in your face this "better experience" that sites are always trying to beg you to enable JS for? Incidentally, Bing's first two results for "midjourney" are the official site, followed by the Wikipedia page.
- tsigo 1y agoMeanwhile, over on Kagi: https://cln.sh/LbZ8VBbKzjyzKchNC4hS https://cln.sh/LbZ8VBbKzjyzKchNC4hS
- freediver 1y agoSerenity, thanks.
- tangotaylor 1y agoI’m still amazed that Kagi search results are basically on par with Google’s (and without the ads) in all my comparison tests that I’ve done. And Google has orders of magnitude more resources. What has Google been doing all this time?
- chuckadams 1y ago> What has Google been doing all this time? Making money hand over fist. Not to say that's necessarily related to quality or morality, it's just been their focus.
- int_19h 1y agoIt's even more insane than that. Kagi uses Google as its backing search engine. And some others, to be fair, but a lot of those search results are still coming from Google API. Which is to say, Google could easily be as good as Kagi is, if they wanted to. What they have been "doing all this time" is turning their search results into a mess.
- seanssel 1y agoI love Kagi, been using it for over a year now. Sadly I haven’t been able to get anyone else on board, even with gift subs.
- moduspol 1y agoI tried for a while but found too much friction getting it all working on my phone (iOS). It wasn’t TOO crazy—I just think Apple didn’t take into account that a search engine might require authentication. Though maybe it’s easier now—I should give it another look.
- mathattack 1y agoThey're pushing so hard on Gemini because they know the search days are limited.
- jpmattia 1y agoLike many of you, I serve as IT support for family. Some of those family are beginning to slip cognitively, so I'd like to say: Fk google for doing this. You are confusing my relatives who cannot tell the difference between your ad-spam and actual links, and it is not an exaggeration to say that you are now taking advantage of old people. I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock) and move them over to chatgpt when possible. If anyone has better ideas, I'm all ears.
- cmrdporcupine 1y agoBuy them a Kagi membership and switch them to that.
- daveidol 1y agoA lot of people want to complain but don't want to pay (not saying that is OP, just generally)
- cmrdporcupine 1y agoto be fair, I had a Kagi subscription for a year, but I recently cancelled it (mainly because I'm not working now and need to cut monthly expenses). I'll probably rejoin eventually, but I can understand why people cut these things out or won't do it. Recurring monthly expenses can be hard.
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoMy parents hate technology but they love their little KDE thinkpad.
- TheDong 1y ago> move them over to ChatGPT OpenAI has even more VC money to pay back than Google ever did. Practically all the large tech companies so far have turned to ads and monetizing users rather than charging enough to remain more neutral. I suspect one day, when you ask ChatGPT "Can you give me a link to mid journey", you'll instead probabilistically get a link to whichever competitor paid OpenAI for the best placement.
- DevX101 1y agoEnshittification really should be upgraded to a fourth law of thermodynamics.
- cmrdporcupine 1y agoSo what's crazy about this is that I remember, when I first joined Google in 2011, that they were particularly proud of how people would just stop using URLs and use Google to navigate. So people would type "amazon" to get to Amazon.com instead of actually typing out `amazon.com`, or using a bookmark or directory etc. And they wanted to keep search at a quality that would continue to get people to do that. And later the fear with mobile becoming ascendant was that people would stop using search in this way, etc. But it looks like they just keep giving people more and more reason to... not do that.
- ryukoposting 1y agoSame shit, different screenshot. The most irritating part is that other folks can't reliably reproduce results like those shown in the screenshot. Yet, I can think of countless examples of this happening to me. My guess is that it's highly beneficial to Google to barf out walls of poor-quality ads when it knows nothing about you. I can't be sure why, but there's a pattern. When you look for my (somewhat obscure) company's app on the Play store, the first result is always a sponsored listing for some totally unrelated app. About a year ago, I googled "silverfast" (film scanning program) on a fresh Windows installation not connected to me in any way, and I got several ads for scammy scanner software before the program I was looking for showed up. When I watch youtube videos from obscure creators while logged out, I routinely get AI-generated ads for random stuff. The funniest one was deepfaked Chuck Norris emphatically telling me I should feed my dog carrots. Yet, when I watch a video from a big YouTube channel under the same conditions, I get ads from major household brands. My guess is that there's three things happening. 1) More moneyed advertisers have more refined targeting constraints, that implicitly filter out ill-defined user profiles. 2) Google feels the need to do a better job of targeting for advertisers who pay them more. 3) In the absence of a well-defined user profile, Google shotguns a bunch of low-cost ads at you to try to build a profile. Just guesses.
- chuckadams 1y agoImpressions to logged-in users bid higher than anonymous sessions. There's almost certainly higher tiers of demographics beyond that, not that you're allowed to know.
- michaelteter 1y agoThis is how paid placements work, and it's in the app stores as well. And yes, _most_ people will just click on one of those top 3 links, not realizing that they are not going where they might have hoped to go. What's worse is that many people actually go to google to search for the website name they want. And the search engine will "help" them by popping up suggestions before the user might have completed typing .com. So now instead of searching for therealwebsite.com, they search for "therealwebsite". That of course will NOT show them the real website, it will show all the garbage.
- johnfn 1y agoCan anyone reproduce this? When I search "Midjourney", I get an ad for Midjourney (from Midjourney), followed by Midjourney, the site. After that, I get the Midjourney Discord, the Midjourney subreddit, the Midjourney Wikipedia page, and then (inexplicably), another Midjourney ad. That seems about as good as it could be. Edit: I guess I should say that I do agree that the quality of Google Search is pretty poor these days, so I directionally agree even though I can't reproduce this issue. Still, it's interesting to see how much our searches differ. I can't imagine what algorithm in Google decided to give me great results and you trash.
- coronasaurus 1y agoSame. On an android browser, not signed into any Google accounts. Got the legitimate result at the very top.
- AstroJetson 1y agoIt was number 1 when using the "Web" link, it was also the number 1 when I clicked "all" Not sure why they get very different result.
- verdverm 1y agoSeriously, all I get is Midjourney links and links to midjourney official accounts on a number of other platforms Going incognito, the first link is a sponsored ad for... midjourney
- jeff_carr 1y ago[flagged]
- fortyseven 1y agoIn a "private session" tab I'm getting on the first page: - the official site - their subreddit - their Discord server - Wikipedia - Facebook - LinkedIn
- VladVladikoff 1y agoWondering if OP has malware that’s injecting results into the search.
- gdsdfe 1y agoGoogle is an adtech company and not a search company so this is normal
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y ago> have enough backlinks Doesn't link
- homeonthemtn 1y agoI stopped using Google because I'd quickly search something, click the first link then, like Wiley Coyote, slowly realize I'd run straight off a cliff. I can't believe that's what their standard is now.
- ha-shine 1y agoI made the mistake of agreeing to undertaking that I would not use the trademarked brandname of one of my competitors' keyuwords in our Google ads bidding. Talking with a lawyer after the fact, I learnt that we can freely use the keywords but agreeing to the undertaking is a more serious and legally binding corporate promise. Now they are bidding on my brand names but we can't bid on them. So, I do agree Google search sucks, heh.
- teaearlgraycold 1y agoWhy did you agree to this without it being mutual?
- smt88 1y agoPossibly part of an agreement to avoid a lawsuit. I think Dropbox and Box had a similar arrangement, because their names are so similar and they do exactly the same things.
- sswam 1y ago[dead]
- emmelaich 1y agoWhen I tried, I got the expected midjourney site first up. I'm logged in to Chrome in case that matters. For comparison DDG gave me the site as third link, which only just made the bottom of the screen. DDG often gives me useless Ebay links which remind me of the early days of search. Perhaps these single data points are useless?
- firefax 1y agoTo be fair, DDG sometimes is just as bad. For example, if I search for "anonbib"[1] it shows nothing but revenge porn links[2]. [1] https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/ https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/ [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/anon-ib-revenge-porn-site-seized-by-politie/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/anon-ib-revenge-porn-site-se...
- hamelcubsfan 1y agoChatGPT is next: https://sources.news/p/openai-ads-leader-sam-altman-memo-stargate https://sources.news/p/openai-ads-leader-sam-altman-memo-sta...
- ramigb 1y agoIt becomes even sadder when Google caters to political propaganda of any kind, from any party or country, if the price is right. I wish Google realized how much greater and more beneficial the product and company are to the people who use them than all of that. I am not naïve -I understand they need to profit- but perhaps they are focusing on short term gains while introducing this poor user experience, which will eventually lead to major losses.
- pkilgore 1y agoKagi. Worth every penny. Become the customer and it all gets better.
- peacebeard 1y agoProbably not the first comment to this end, but I have been using Kagi for the last few months and it’s good. Past attempts to use other search engines didn’t last long because of search quality but Kagi is good enough as long as I don’t expect local results, which is a fine tradeoff.
- zahlman 1y agoIt seems to me that there are many other things wrong with Google Search not depicted here.
- tejohnso 1y agoI couldn't remember ever seeing anything this bad. So I tried this in my browser and the real midjourney was the first result. Then I remembered I'm using Brave as my default browser, and most people aren't. In all the years I've been using it I've never once regretted it, and every once in a while I get a little reminder like this about how bad ads are on the web. I don't know why it isn't a more popular browser choice.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoMaybe Midjourney let its brand namespace become too diluted with copycats and also-rans and coasted on their initial work instead of putting in the effort to maintain the space. Maybe a lot of ppl searching for things that are like Midjourney are causing the competitors (who are obviously making efforts to invade the keyword) to be listed alongside. Maybe there's actually way more variables in the mix with OP's search/account/profile (however prolific or not it is). It's just not that clear cut and google is still has massive utility. Another day another weak substack submitted by ....
- guluarte 1y agonot only that, google now has like 10 AI apps, like literally I lost count.
- pruufsocial 1y agoJuicylinks.ai helps rank your apps higher on LLM recommendations like AI SEO
- unsungNovelty 1y agoI remember 37signals paying for an ad saying "We dont want to pay for this ad" or something to combat this for their keywords. I think it was DHH or Jason who shared this somewhere in social media. Edit: Yep! It was Jason - https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016
- abramN 1y agothat is bad, I think the even worse sin is putting sponsored apps above the app you really searched for so you end up clicking on the wrong one.
- avodonosov 1y agoFar from everything
- xyzelement 1y agoIf I may offer a devil's advocate perspective. I just googled Toyota Highlander (my car) and the ad in the search results is "please consider the Honda Pilot." Now it's unlikely that I am shopping for a midsized SUV and am not aware of the major competitors, but squinting that away for a second - if I am searching for a car I think I want and Google informs me of a perfectly viable alternative that might be cheaper or better in some other way that can have a huge positive impact on my life. So in this case I am obviously aware of Honda but an ad for one of the Korean or domestic makers I hadn't considered could be useful. Similarly if I am Google midjourney as in the article because I heard that somewhere and Google positions for me potential cheaper/better alternatives as ads - that's not a terrible thing and you could say hits at the best usecase of an ad - making me aware of an alternative solution to a problem I have that's driving my search to begin with. I obviously don't feel this way about the majority of ads I see but when it "hits right" it's really useful
- BugsJustFindMe 1y ago> If I may offer a devil's advocate perspective. The devil doesn't need advocates. https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3145446/the-devil-doesnt-need-advocates https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3145446/the-devil-doesnt-ne... There are clear and obvious ways to show advertisements without making those advertisements look like top search results. You know this. Google knows this. There's no reason for anyone to pretend otherwise.
- hildolfr 1y agoWell, sure, one tries to live by the board game geeks bushido, but we're not all perfect. Talk about a philosophy! "I'm a neo marxist" , "Oh, I lean more towards @DragonsDream personally."
- zbentley 1y agoOkay, then show those ads to people who google “midsize SUV” or “AI image generator”, not people who google the specific product by brand name. Sending people who google “midjourney” to competitors’ websites makes as much sense as sending people who google “midsize SUV” to bicycle websites: the user already made their preference very clear.
- mikepo 1y agoWe can have the plain old good Google search results page back on by default. It works by making the "Web" tab the default. Tested on Firefox and it works great. No extension needed. Instructions in the topmost comment of this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ctk95k/comment/l4cpwvm/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ctk95k/comment/l4...
- Cyclone_ 1y agoI liked the search results a lot better when the ads were on the side. You could see a competitor if that was of interest to you, but you didn't have to scroll when you wanted to just find what would likely be a top result.
- ztetranz 1y agoThese guys warned us about this sort of thing. http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf Appendix A. Page 18.
- rhetocj23 1y agoLol hilarious to read that now. Damn.
- nnurmanov 1y agoIt is a business model problem, not Google’s problem. When it is easy to stand out by paying money, it will always become trash
- dangus 1y agoImagine seeing ads. Install an ad blocker.
- utopcell 1y agoI searched on my work browser, on my personal browser, on the phone (mobile + desktop page) and in all cases I use the link to midjourney.com first. The spirit of the question I can subscribe to though: too many ads on top of the results these days.
- Suppafly 1y agoWeird, I don't see those sponsored links. Maybe because I use ublock like a normal person.
- brikym 1y agoI searched it on Bing and got the official midjourney site as #1 and a wikipedia article as #2.
- zeroq 1y agoOne of my "sales pitches" is "I can find answers online, I know kung-fu". I've been using internet since '98, and I somehow developed this elusive skill of knowing how to navigate all these ads, seo farms, paid content, murky websites, and getting straight to the answer, no matter what the question was. For a long time I didn't thought of that as a special power. I thought it was natural, like driving a car, or speaking English. And I occasionally got surprised seeing someone trying to find something online and spending minutes, if not hours to get to the right place. Last couple of years I found it to be way, way harder. And it's noticeably getting worse almost on a daily basis right now. Recently I've tried perplexity and it was absolutely amazing. I know this may sound like a sales pitch, but I was really blown away by the user experience. Except it sometimes says "results cannot be found or I am not suppose to show them to you". Well, fair game, I wouldn't be able to find these results on google either. I've seen a lot of change in the industry last 30 years, things we took for granted or thought would stay there forever. I genuinely think Google is finished as a search engine for the web. The only problem is that we don't have a solid contender yet. Perplexity is close tho.
- alanh 1y agoRight? Google is dog caca now. Myself and everyone I know keep getting sent to AI-written garbage nonsense slop websites, or for some reason, to the Hindustan Times
- dmbche 1y agooddly this "caca" felt more visceral to me that most "poop"'s or "shit"'s I've seen in a bit. summoned an image instantly. probably just surprise - good choice!
- zeroq 1y agoreminds me of a blackhat presentation of a web crawler two young gentlemen introduced it as "caca", seemingly an acronym for sth, but they just couldn't help themselves and kept chuckling for next five minutes.
- 1y ago
- southernplaces7 1y agoThis is pretty mild actually. If you do a google search for any remotely "salesworthy" word, like say, "microphone" (because you want a wikipedia article on how they work maybe, or links to organic results for whatever comes up, you get absolutely flooded by a whole pile of sales offers and filters as if Google were fucking Amazon. I've had it happen with all kinds of searches, even some that weren't at all for a product. It didn't used to manifest in this way with Google results, and it's a ridiculous beshitting of the basic idea of just using its search. IMGUR link to an example I quickly pulled up. https://imgur.com/a/EdBLIMg https://imgur.com/a/EdBLIMg
- coolThingsFirst 1y agoGoogle is not the old google. Now it’s the sick man of the tech world languishing towards its death. Out of that carcass, lots of new firms which will improve the open internet will likely emerge.
- saidinesh5 1y agoHow much of this is due to the awful mobile first design paradigms that infest a lot of web development these days? Because 3-4 sponsored ads used to be always there.. but they used to be clearly marked as such and to the right side of the page previously..
- mieses 1y agothey've become a shady, low quality search engine. Even Yandex returns midjourney.com as the first result.
- antibios 1y agoThis discussion is crazy. Google is a business that sells advertising. They build a free browser so that it is easier for the end user to use their product. Chrome does tricky things to help google like, automatically searching if you don't type a URL into the address bar. You as a user, you have typed midjourney instead of midjourney.com using google search as your dns lookup. Google is a business that has correctly identified that users are most likely unable to type the full URL into a browser and uses this opportunity to display some advertising. As my retirement investment holds a small amount of ETFs that would own google shares, yay for me. Thank you for not typing .com
- rhetocj23 1y agoI think people need to keep repeating this until they make sense of it. - Google is in the business of selling online advertising. - Google is in the business of selling online advertising. - Google is in the business of selling online advertising. - Google is in the business of selling online advertising. ... The tech stuff? AH its just stuff they offer so they can do the above more efficiently and effectively. Thats it. It seems many either cant see the truth or dont want it to be so.
- int_19h 1y agoSure, just don't complain when people get fed up enough to burn all this shit down with a vengeance and your retirement investment is all zeroes.
- Hard_Space 1y agoLocale plays a role, I think. Searching from Romania, none of these examples replicate. Amazon is first for Amazon, Midjourney first for Midjourney, etc.
- defgeneric 1y agoIf it's any consolation, these companies paying for ads on a competitor's brand name are probably paying through the nose to get clicks that only bounce. IF it's worth it at all, it's probably temporary. It's an indicator that market share is still up for grabs.
- pjio 1y agoJust to nitpick on the example: When a trusted or frequently used webpage is bookmarked, search can be restricted to those bookmarks with `*` in Firefox and with `@bookmarks` in Chrome.
- renegat0x0 1y agoThat is why I use my own domain index https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
- dostick 1y agoAuthor has never ran startup on the internet. For past 15-20 years, if you have competitors you have to bid-buy top ad slot from Google. That’s hundreds or thousands of dollars monthly. Midjourney don’t do that because they are doing good with new signups without it.
- 0xbadcafebee 1y agoThis is like going into a butcher's shop and being surprised that they're pushing meat on you instead of flowers or textiles. Google is an ad company. They're the ad company. They built a search engine to sell ads. They built a browser to sell ads. They built an e-mail provider to sell ads. They built a video streaming platform to sell ads. They built a worldwide street-level navigation system to sell ads. They built an operating system and computers, just to sell ads. They showed you ads. They gave you what they sell. You don't like meat? Stop going to the butcher shop. Don't sit here complaining that the butchers keep trying to sell you meat.
- bambax 1y agoThat's not my experience at all: https://i.imgur.com/JXAJMNh.png https://i.imgur.com/JXAJMNh.png Searching for Midjourney finds Midjourney with direct links to sections of their website. uBlock Origin blocks ads. All is well.
- DecoPerson 1y agoThey seem to classify users in a way that puts technically-proficient users in a separate class to regular users. One class receives a more traditional experience. The other receives whatever they're currently pushing. For example, my Dad's Gmail has a much higher "ad email" : "real email" ratio than mine. Also, the styling of an "ad email" line is far more subtle than what I receive. I checked with my technical friends. They all receive similar experiences to what I do. But my parents and other people I help with their personal tech receive the ad-heavy version. My conspiracy theory is that they're trying to detect journalists, lawmakers, regulators, and more, in an attempt to avoid being forced to push ads less aggressively.
- Propelloni 1y agoI wonder what this does to all the people that type even known URLs into Google instead of the location bar to go to that URL. You know, people like my parents.
- gethly 1y agoyoutube is worse. it usually gives you three matches, than some completely random sh** that does not match a single keyword you typed in.
- Animats 1y agoLook up "Hacker News". Some days this site isn't even on the front page.
- mattdesl 1y agoA similar thing happens when you search “Canada eTA” — a $7 (required) entry visa the government typically issues instantly. But on Google, several sponsored sites appear above the gov site, and charge $100+ for the same service but slower, and they do god knows what with your passport details and personal data. There are tons of other examples like this. It’s very easy to get tricked by Google ads if you aren’t suspecting a scam.
- delis-thumbs-7e 1y agoIt’s been like that for years. Just stop using it along with other Google-services, their products are unsafe dogshit, their earning model is to sell you and your privacy, not make great products. I use several search engines (Brave, duckduck) to find stuff along with different AI-models (outside the browser, I disable the browser ones). This way I have at least some semblance of control of my information and no one company controls everything. Something like Google or Microsoft shouldn’t even exist.
- voidUpdate 1y agoI found it mildly amusing that when I googled for jlcpcb recently, pcbway showed up before them in the google results. I still don't really know if there is any meaningful difference between the two companies
- Zanfa 1y agoWow, so not only have they lost the war against SEO spammers, they've now decided to completely obscure which results are actually ads. What an embarrassment Google has become, but I guess that sweet-sweet ad money trumps everything else.
- bawana 1y agoI see an opportunity for someone who can code. Make a website that tabulates search results for common terms. Listing the position of the desired search hit could be the ‘veracity score’ and allow users to assess the distortion field of each search engine
- sublimefire 1y agoIt does not fully show the problem as the result is immediately beneath the sponsored content. The problem is when you are searching for something more complex and it does not find it immediately, which means you need to jump through the sponsored content over and over to find something (when tweaking a query or paging). It is easier to use simpler search services like DDG and do quicker search iterations compared to google.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoUse it long enough and you will subconsciously train yourself to ignore the first 2-3 results. I don't think it's wrong, it's just how ads work.
- arnejenssen 1y agoRemember that Goole is not a public service. It is a business. It has two (or more) customers with different needs. For now, google needs to satisfy us (the users), but not delight.
- GJim 1y agoI'll be honest.... I'm puzzled why OP did a web-search (i.e. used a business to find) 'midjourny' rather than simply entering the known URL. How times change.
- crazygringo 1y agoDo you bother to remember known URL's? Is it midjourney.ai or midjourney.com? Is my health plan oscar.com or oscarhealth.com? Repeat ad infinitum. I have better things to spend my brain power on remembering. Fortunately, my browser will autocomplete the URLs for sites I frequently use, but a lot of sites I want to visit for the first time.
- tstrimple 1y agoThrow in the fact that known bad actors will purchase common typos of domains like this and potentially setup websites to fish for credentials or push malware and it's something best avoided.
- INTPenis 1y agoMy first result is midjourney.com. I so often see people criticizing Google search but I never see the negative with my own eyes. Whenever I search I get what I want or need. Google Search must be highly personalized, and I don't know what I'm doing right but clearly my personalization is working. Edit: Oh I realize now it's the sponsored results they're complaining about. Well that's just greedy. I mean, you haven't paid a cent for Google Search since 1998? And you just expect them to do everything for free. I happen to not see the sponsored results right now, maybe because of uBlock, or chance, but even if I do see them I don't mind them at all. Poor Sundar Pichai has to keep the lights on somehow.
- rsolva 1y agoI just started paying for Kagi. I'll use them as long as they stay ad free, which seems part of their core selling point.
- pastapliiats 1y ago>using google lol :^)
- amelius 1y agoLet them advertise themselves into oblivion.
- amelius 1y agoWe need Reader mode, but for search results.
- vim-guru 1y agoI haven't used google in years and didn't realize it was this bad. How are they able to keep their market position?
- sjw987 1y agoMarket momentum probably. People "Google" things. People don't "Kagi" things or "DuckDuckGo" things. I question why Instagram is so popular. I don't use it but my wife does and she constantly runs into errors and bugs. It's a multi billion dollar company and suffers from the sort of issues that beta software does. They got to their position first, got the market share and then enshittifed from there.
- racecar789 1y agoIt’s likely that Google has tested how many ads it can place in search results before users lose patience and turn elsewhere. On paper, the approach makes sense: push profitability as far as possible. But in practice, it can leave customers feeling squeezed and resentful, much like the increasingly nickel‑and‑dimed atmosphere visitors now complain about in Las Vegas, and the proliferation of tip screens.
- rhetocj23 1y agoYes its purely economics and profit maximizing behaviour from Google. Marginal benefit vs Marginal cost.
- shark1 1y agoWhile many see it as a problem, kagi.com sees it as an opportunity.
- gcanyon 1y agoMy key complaint (in addition to the one cited in TA) is that, if there is a wikipedia article related to what I'm searching for, I want that at the top of the results. Maybe above, or possibly right below, the link to midjourney.com. Maybe others don't see the value in that, but Google has had literally a quarter of a century to figure out what I want, and hasn't yet learned that.
- eddyg 1y agoThis is why Kagi exists.
- tim333 1y agoTurn on the adblocker if you don't want ads? This is how my google search looks in chrome with ublock lite https://imgur.com/a/GrXP77y https://imgur.com/a/GrXP77y Maybe some percentage of users will select a crap alternative product because they show an ad above your thing but I bet it's a minority.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoI liked it better when these were off to the side, I hope the person who convinced Google to put them as part of the list looking like a search result got a $100 million raise.
- infecto 1y agoThere also has been a drastic change in YouTube search in the past year. It used to be that search would be logical, you search for a specific string and you can go through pages of videos that matchup to that. Now it at least feels like they have completely mixed that original search with a some sort of ranked preference of what they think I want to see. It’s a shame and an actual huge downgrade.
- MrMember 1y agoYouTube search will also only show you maybe 10 videos relevant to your search terms and then just give you random videos it wants you to watch that have little or nothing to do with your original search.
- array_key_first 1y agoIts like tiktok search but way less awful. Whatever you search, doesn't matter, it's just people dancing. You want a recipe for chickpea soup? How about people dancing instead is that good?
- infecto 1y agoYes! This is exactly it and at least for me the change happened sometime in the last year. I often look at real estate online in Vietnam and a year ago I could scroll through pages of houses, now I get a handful of somewhat relevant videos and then it’s cirque videos. It’s wild how bad it is. Reminds me of how they blew up the rabbit hole of next videos long ago. I remember long long ago, my favorite part was the next video queued up after watching a video. You would go down these wild rabbit holes of videos that got ever more specific. Now it’s the same issue with search a bunch of unrelated videos recommended for watching next.
- shayway 1y agoTry searching something and sorting results by most recent. If you then change the upload date filter (e.g. from 'this month' to 'last hour') you'll get completely different results...
- yearesadpeople 1y agoIdeally, searching once for 'midjourney' would mean getting the url to directly access it time and again (and, create a bookmark). Perhaps the issue is more on the business model, rather than the effectivness of search offered by Google. What is search anyway (not being flippant!)? Its quite an odd 'thing' really these days.
- xbar 1y agoGoogle is unusable.
- redbell 1y agoGoogle got misled by the term mid journey so, it put the result mid page :) An interesting search term that, at least for me, always returns the four top results as sponsored is "web hosting": https://www.google.com/search?q=web+hosting https://www.google.com/search?q=web+hosting Also, searching for "netcup", I got two sponsored cloud services before seeing "https://www.netcup.com/ https://www.netcup.com/": https://www.google.com/search?q=netcup https://www.google.com/search?q=netcup
- stetrain 1y agoIt's even worse on mobile. For some searches the first real, normal, webpage link can be two or three full page scrolls down from the top.
- Flatcircle 1y agoGoogle searches days are numbered. But the older generation will probably use it for the rest of their lives.
- a96 1y agoLike broadcast TV.
- ChaoPrayaWave 1y agoI think future app stores should offer users an ad control panel. Let us choose whether to see ads, what kinds we prefer like tools, games, or education, and even which recommendation algorithm we want to use.
- girdi 1y agoEverything? That's not even half of it. I don't see any: * useless faq box * useless slop box * unrelated image gallery * hijacked business listing (with no support for recourse, of course)
- a96 1y agoYoutube videos that aren't related
- rorylaitila 1y agoMidJourney not being the first organic spot is a bad experience. But it's normal practice that you can place ads on users searching for other company names. This seems counter intuitive at first, but I think its reasonable. You don't get to exclude every advertiser from any random search string just because you have a domain name with it. How would that be enforced? There are many reasons to bid on brand names that are not necessarily squatting. Such as if my product is an integration of the tool. Many brand names are just basic words. Many brand names are very similar in SMBs. But you can't use another company's trademark in your headline or adtext. Using another companies name is asking to get your ads taken down and lead to an account ban.
- Ukv 1y ago> You don't get to exclude every advertiser from any random search string just because you have a domain name with it. To my understanding, Google keywords are already semantic. It's not that it shows ads because it can't tell that the string is a specific product name - it's showing ads because it determined that string to be referring to Midjourney (the entity in Google's knowledge graph). > There are many reasons to bid on brand names that are not necessarily squatting. Google is a leader in AI - I feel they could very easily filter out these blatantly misleading ad campaigns, while keeping "legitimate" ones, if they didn't have financial incentive to turn a blind eye and have more people fooled into clicking ads.
- int_19h 1y agoIt would be more acceptable if the ad followed the actual correct top search result. Also, "many brand names are just basic words" doesn't accurately describe the situation where it's blatantly obvious that copycats are picking this same word solely so as to muddy the waters for users trying to find the original.
- hermannj314 1y agoAsk your doctor for a specific drug and he will reply, without disclosing his sponsorship money, about another drug that is just as good. At least Google writes the word sponsored, the real world doesn't do that.
- AraceliHarker 1y agoI use an ad blocker, so I don't worry about sponsored links for fake products appearing above genuine ones. Also, this isn't just a Google problem; Bing has it too. My issue with Google is that it includes YouTube results in the main search results even though there's a separate Videos tab.
- dillonshook 1y agoLate to the party here but I made a browser extension that helps with this called Cat Search. It categorizes the search results and allows you to vote on them so you can ignore/downvote/banish the results you don't want
- news_hacker 1y agoI will never use Gemini for this reason. The enshittification of Search is so treacherously disgraceful and user-hostile, that I have no faith that the same fate won't occur with Gemini as well.
- jinushaun 1y agoThis makes me sad because I’m old enough to remember when I left Altavista/Lycos/Yahoo for Google because of the obnoxious sponsored search results.
- Lumoscore 1y agoI was searching for a specific library for Python the other day, and Google kept pushing me to 'Top 10 Python Courses!' articles or giant comparison boxes for products I didn't need. It has decided that whenever I type a technical query, what I really want is to buy something or sign up for a newsletter. The moment the algorithm switched from trying to understand 'what information does this user need?' to 'how can we make money off this user right now?' is the moment search broke for anyone doing actual development work. We're now filtering through commercial noise just to find the docs.
- the_arun 1y agoHow about some policies to ensure customers have the control to see what they want to see? For example - I don’t support to see ads ahead of actual search results?
- diedyesterday 1y agoGoogle is still far far better than the competition which is crawling with manipulated results and fake sites and phishing scams. The other are so much easier to take advantage of and manipulate (e.g. search ranking). No security based filtering ,etc. I have been personally bitten by results on the likes of Bing or DDG (fake browser addons on top, crypto phishing sites on top, etc.) Also user experience varies somewhat and for me with the same search prompt ("midjourney"), the intended site is the first result.
- XCSme 1y agoI knew what the image was, even before clicking on the article...