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I'm old enough to remember when a big selling point of Google was that it didn't do this.
by CSMastermind 1y ago
I'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 agoIt's a very common story in industry. You start nimble, and disrupt bloated platforms. Then, as you grow, pressure grows and you also bloat. Then new company comes that brings nimble product and disrupt you. Search, TV->internet video, newspapers->internet - all of them go through those cycles.
- dvngnt_ 1y agoUsed to be. Now the megacorp just buys the disrupting platform
- lo_zamoyski 1y agoMost revolutions are merely power transfers. But sometimes the incumbent crushes the revolutionary. And sometimes the incumbent hires or bribes the revolutionary. And sometimes the incumbent guts the revolutionary and wears his face as a mask.
- eru 1y agoYou say that like it's a bad thing. Can you imagine a more effective way to incentivise more people to start even more disrupting platforms? Can you image a more effective way to get investors to give money to these upstarts? It's much easier to get your rabble-rousing startup to threaten disruption (and then be bought up as a precaution), than if you had to actually battle it out in the marketplace to the bitter end.
- int_19h 1y agoIt's a bad thing for the rest of us, because it means that all those platforms don't actually disrupt anything at the end of the day, and we have to keep eating the same turds.
- eru 1y agoYou get way more of these new platforms popping up. And some of the might not get bought up in time. (And the wealth of the incumbent ain't infinite, so there's a limit to how many they can buy up.)
- mattigames 1y agoBut like always they didn't stop once they were a bit profitable with a few ads, instead they got greedier and greedier and made their product worse once they captured most of the market, I have wonder if there can exist some variant of capitalism that punishes becoming a bit too greedy, like a soft ceiling (tied to the minimum wage) over which most of the profits go to taxes, and a hard one where all profits over that go to taxes plus mandatory social work by its owners/executives.
- owenthejumper 1y agoThat capitalism technically already exists in the US. We have very strong monopoly laws. It's just...nobody is enforcing them. Unlike the 70's and 80's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
- xp84 1y agoAT&T eventually gave up and agreed to divest of the RBOCs because they didn't like their chances with the regulators. Imagine a Big Tech company having so little faith today in their ability to manipulate the government between lobbying, campaign contributions, and the most modern and economical play, stroking the President's ego.
- nerdponx 1y agoBiden's FTC chair tried her best, but it didn't go anywhere because she had no support and Trump put an end to it. But both sides amirite?
- int_19h 1y agoIt's because the laws were creatively reinterpreted to mean something very different from what the people who wrote them had in mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox
- kelseyfrog 1y ago> instead they got greedier and greedier and made their product worse once they captured most of the market I wouldn't necessarily put it that way because not Google, nor any company, has moral capacity. They don't have souls. What they do have are incentive structures, and those flip when the stock goes public. Pre-IPO: the board is mostly founders and VCs holding paper wealth. Their shares aren't liquid, so the only way they get paid is by making the pie way bigger for some future exit. That means "grow, grow, grow." and that means playing nice with customers. Post-IPO: the board is legally stuffed with "independent" directors, whose pay comes in RSUs tied to the stock price. Now the shares are instantly tradable, and shareholders who can bail in a quarter want to see results in a quarter. Directors translate that into exec comp, and suddenly management's job is "make the stock go up right now." Some theorists point out the obvious hack: take away the hot potato. Slow the game down. Make shares harder to flip, make earnings less frequent. If you could only trade stock once a year, you'd actually care what the company looks like in a year. If they only reported results annually, you'd be forced to think in years, not quarters. Upside: management can focus on products and customers instead of quarterly guidance theater. Downside: investors hate being locked up, and capital gets more expensive because people price in that illiquidity. Transparency drops, execs get more room to bullshit. It's a tradeoff: you can have maximum liquidity and hyper-efficient capital markets, but then you get short-term brain damage. Or you can slow the game down, but then you're basically asking people to trust managers more and accept worse capital efficiency. Nobody;s found the perfect middle yet. LTSE[1] tried, dual-class shares are a kludge, and otherwise we just live with the cycle: grow like crazy private, IPO, then spend the rest of your corporate life addicted to quarterly earnings. 1. https://ltse.com/ https://ltse.com/
- marcosdumay 1y agoThey had plenty of success with the ads that didn't disrupt the main results until they decided that search results didn't matter and selling their users to malware was more profitable. For many years they were very profitable, with great search results and good quality ads.
- zugi 1y agoVolume.
- stevage 1y agoThey didn't. That was the whole "Step 2 ???? Step 3 Profit" era.
- smt88 1y agoThey licensed the engine for a while. Yahoo Search was powered by Google, for example.
- joenot443 1y agoSomeone once asked Facebook the same thing. It seems the only things certain in this industry are death, tax, ads, and graphics cards.
- geuis 1y agoBecause I was alive back then: This was the venture funding "we're a startup era". And Google succeeded eventually. But in that era making money didn't matter. It was just about grabbing market space. And oh boy did they succeed. But all bills become due eventually. Stock holders start demanding continuing increasing profit and that eventually leads to the downfall of any good product.
- eru 1y ago> Stock holders start demanding continuing increasing profit and that eventually leads to the downfall of any good product. Don't blame ordinary shareholders here! The original founders still hold a majority of decision making power (I think via super voting shares).
- input_sh 1y agoThe same way any tech company works now: use investor money to offer things for free or unrealistically cheap until you corner the market, and once your competitors are no longer relevant you start milking every buck you can.
- DougBTX 1y ago1999, $25 million investment: https://googlepress.blogspot.com/1999/06/google-receives-25-million-in-equity.html?m=1 https://googlepress.blogspot.com/1999/06/google-receives-25-... 2000, launched ads: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ads https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ads 2001, profitable: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2001/aug/08/internetnews.searchengines https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2001/aug/08/internetn...
- orblivion 1y agoThe problem is, some of us do have a habit of asking our search engine for the weather. And we ruin it for the rest of you.
- mc32 1y agoThat didn't last long till they added paid results but at least they highlighted the paid results from the organic results... Those were they days when they used to have the motto of not being Evil. Accordingly, now, they are.
- xp84 1y agoYeah, I remember the long slow fade-out of the colored boxes the ads occupied. They went from like, pastel orange and green boxes, to lighter boxes, to even lighter boxes, to no boxes at all with the word Ad in a little symbol, to the way it is today where you have "Sponsored" on a different line than the ad, and you have to scroll below the fold to even see the first organic result, if there even is one, and only 2-5 organic results are even shown by default. And also of course in the mix, the AI Overview made up from I assume a handful of the spammy results being thrown through the cheapest, smallest model possible and summarized.
- charcircuit 1y ago>they used to have the motto of not being Evil They still do have it.
- stevage 1y ago...at the very end of Google's Code of Conduct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil
- jameson 1y agoi feel sometimes it's best for the company to stay private
- MountDoom 1y agoThe founders of the company still have a controlling stake in the business. External shareholders have little leverage. Going public gave Google a lot of nearly-free money to grow, and it's how you've gotten both Gmail and Google+. But more importantly, it allowed them to offer much higher total comp packages by issuing more stock on the go. I think they're prisoners of the stock market only insofar that if the stock stops going up, they're gonna have a harder time hiring and retaining talent. In a way, it's the employees holding the company hostage. They're simultaneously complaining about innocence lost and stating their implicit preference for this outcome by demanding top-of-the-line comp. If you want to be paid the same as at Microsoft or Facebook, you become Microsoft or Facebook.
- stevage 1y ago>Going public gave Google a lot of nearly-free money to grow, and it's how you've gotten both Gmail Gmail launched in April 2004, and the company went public in August 2004, so what you said is not literally true. > and Google+ Thanks for the chuckle.
- eru 1y agoIf they only had successful products, that would be a sign that they didn't innovate enough. If you innovate manically, you get Google Wave and Google+ amongst good products. (However, this doesn't work in the other direction: having a few duds doesn't prove that you are innovative.)
- int_19h 1y ago> Going public gave Google a lot of nearly-free money to grow, and it's how you've gotten ... Gmail And in retrospect, was that really a good thing? Short-term, yes - I remember how much better it was than the alternatives. Long-term, we ended up in a situation where email = GMail for most users, and this in turn gives Google undue leverage and strangles competition.
- MarsIronPI 1y agoI thought Google always had ads, but at first they were clearly marked and always relevant? Edit: I stand corrected. Ads were added later, but when first introduced they were clearly marked. I got my history wrong.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y agoNot at the very beginning. But when they first added ads, they were clearly marked in the top with a yellow background (and they didn't take over the whole page), and on the righthand column (and they were clearly marked as sponsored links). I'd have to dredge it up but someone put up a site that showed the visual changes to ads over the past 15 years, and they've become more and more indistinguishable from organic search results, and they've taken over more of the page. A great visual history of enshittification, and also how "growth at all costs" capitalism leads to that enshittification. Google was still taking in money hand over fist in the mid 00s when they had a few, clearly marked ads, but capitalism demands the line arcs upwards no matter what.
- Icathian 1y agoNope. The slope has been slippery, but way back at the top of it there were zero ads on the page.
- bruckie 1y agoNope, there were no ads at the beginning. It was a big deal when they announced AdWords. And the ads were unobtrusive and often quite useful at the beginning. Google was quite vocal about clearly marking ads, in contrast to Overture, Yahoo, and others who mixed ads into search results in the late 90s / early 2000s. I think the period when Google lightened, then entirely removed the colored background that made it easy to identify ads was an inflection point in their fall from being a company that genuinely focused on users towards becoming just another megacorp run by profit-maximizing MBAs.
- kragen 1y agoNo, they had no ads for several years. AdWords were introduced in 02000, at which point Google had existed (initially as google.stanford.edu) for four years, since 01996, which was 40% of the amount of time the Web had even existed. I started using Google in probably 01998, when people on Slashdot got excited about how much better their search quality was than AltaVista, but it probably wasn't until 01999 that I switched over completely—at first AltaVista still had better coverage.
- stinkbeetle 1y agoMy memory says that wasn't such a big selling point. When Google first came out it blew all other search engines away in terms of result quality. If, back then, Yahoo and Altavista were minimalist and Google was a garish nightmare of ads and flashing gifs and nested banners and affiliate buttons, I would still have happily used it for the results. Google's search interface is still reasonably clean IMO. Nowhere near its minimal best. Yes there are ads and "sponsored results" and shopping frames and all that crap, but they really aren't everything that's wrong with Google Search. Quality of results and inability to specify queries beyond vague suggestions are the worst things.
- rpdillon 1y agoSpeed. Altavista, Dogpile, Metacrawler and the rest were slow, and Google felt instant.
- stinkbeetle 1y agoFor me at least, it wasn't that either. It was the quality of the results. I would have put up with slow bloated adware Google results of early 2000s, compared to fast minimal sleek interface with results of Yahoo/Altavista/anything else I tried.
- rpdillon 1y agoAre you just re-emphasizing your point? I was trying to point out another differentiator that many people commented on at the time.
- stinkbeetle 1y agoI'm not sure what you are unclear about, but yes I was re-emphasizing my point for you. There were lots of "differentiators" that did not really matter, including speed. The differentiator was result quality, not how or when they were presented.
- xp84 1y ago
- bhartzer 1y agoI also am old enough to remember when their motto was "Don't be evil."
- laserlight 1y agoWhich has been doublespeak from day one.
- convolvatron 1y agoI knew larry and sergei socially when they were grad students. I completely believe that when they started that was a genuine sentiment. I wonder at what point they realized personally that that was gone
- titzer 1y agoYou either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
- gerdesj 1y agoI'm old enough to remember when the web didn't exist ... and when I dumped Altavista and Ask Jeeves and co for the cool kids: Google. I'm fucking livid. Well actually: mildly unimpressed. The cool kids rarely last as such and "do no evil" ended up behind a green tent and a single shot was heard. Actually, I am slightly stressed over this whole thing.
- pitched 1y agoInstead of stressing, you could move on to supporting the next cool kids.
- MarsIronPI 1y agoWith what kind of assurance that history won't repeat itself? If anything, the rate at which companies enshittify has increased. Instead of taking 10 years now it takes more like 3 (or less).
- pitched 1y agoLife is change. Sometimes that’s worth fighting for and sometimes it’s worth fighting against. Is the current Google worth that battle for you? I’d rather see what comes next.
- bombcar 1y agoMaybe there’s something else to support instead of enshittifying companies. Google should be fearful for how easy it was to replace them entirely with Kagi, and how little I miss it.
- gerdesj 1y agoGrand daughter is rocking a customer cast off laptop. I was asked for help when the first lock down for covid was announced in the UK. I slapped on Kubuntu and an OpenVPN connection back to my home pfSense router on it, so I could manage it. All a bit slapdash but best I could do at the time. That was 2020. Six months ago, I find out she is still using it and its a "bit slow". I update it from 18.04 to 24.04 via ssh over an OpenVPN connection on the box itself. Its still in use and is still attached to both one of my home OpenVPN servers and my work Mesh Central. I've also recently repurposed another Win10 but can't do Win11 laptop to someone so they can do some courses. I think I'm doing all right with supporting the next cool kids. I'm still stressing though 8)
- mullingitover 1y agoStraight from the horse's mouth: > ..."we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." - "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page[1] They weren't wrong! [1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
- dtgriscom 1y agoI remember when Google Maps allowed you to enter "*" as the only search term, and you'd see every business in the area. Not just a portion of those who had paid for placement. Those were the days...
- penguin_booze 1y agoGoogle's motto used to be 'Don't be evil'. They've since deleted the first two words.
- CheBuzz 1y agoJust the first word.
- yojo 1y agoEven when they first turned on ads, it was arguably a net win. I worked AdWords tech-support 2005-2008, and sat in on the “Ads Quality” core team meeting. They basically had this big money dial, and rather than crank it to 11, they were fiercely protective of the core user experience. They kept ads mostly to the side (unobtrusive), only served them on queries where there was a high probability of commercial intent, and only promoted ads above organic results if the predicted CTR was extremely high. I remember being delighted more than once when the ad system surfaced the product I wanted when organic results did not. Now…? You get all spam above the fold. The Ads Quality PM back then was Nick Fox, who I just learned became SVP for ads and search last year. Which means he is at least indirectly responsible for the OP. Not entirely sure what to make of that.
- SergeAx 1y agoWDYM "selling point"? It was us, users, who have always been sold.
- int_19h 1y agoAnd yet they always knew that ad-supported business is going mean enshittification. Kagi website has this epic quote from the original Google paper to drive the point home: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." — The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998