We built our entire company for that 1%.
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
Kagi is great though, for now! :D
Don't get too greedy. There must be examples... 37Signals?
This is, of course, an exaggeration. Not all shareholders value profits above all else, but many big ones do. Ignoring what incentives (and disincentives) are put on a business drive it's behavior. If you want something contrary to those incentives, you need to change those pressures or you're doomed to be disappointed.
Yet, their ANZ branch is certified since 2022: https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/find-a-b-corp/company/uni...
B Corp enshitified itself, trying to get bigger, instead of staying true to its (supposed) mission
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unilever#Trade_in_Russia_amid_...
Google followed/trailblazed the "enshitification" arc of providing a free service that sees widespread adoption by the public, and then financially exploiting the widespread adoption by leveraging usage of the service to serve ads like in the screenshot.
Kagi is a subscription service you pay for and they generate their best effort at an ideal service for you using the money you gave them.
The Google model of providing a free service sort of requires that it be enshitified in order to close the circle on the business case. Reliance on VC money in this model is likely a further aggravating factor to aggressively exploit usage of the service once widespread adoption is achieved.
The Kagi model has an opposite pressure, where if it tries to exploit adoption of the service in a way that users don't appreciate, users will simply abandon their subscription, putting a core revenue stream the business has built itself around at risk.
Is it possible for Kagi or a business like that to become shitty? Sure, a new manager that misunderstands core realities can show up anywhere and ruin the business, or sagging business financials could require VC injection which then pressures further financial extractions from uses. But the structural pressures on a Kagi-style model certainly seem to steer it in the right direction when Google's structural model invariably steered it into something that becomes less pleasant than we all initially knew.
It's even worse for niches where there's some way to lock people in. E.g. look at streaming providers - everyone has either rolled out ads on paid plans or is planning to do so. Why? Because if you happen to have X as an exclusive in your catalog, then people who want to see X either have to suck it up or else figure out how to pirate it without getting caught.
We have to not get attached to companies, and not get the idea that they care or have feelings of good or evil. They are tools, like a hammer, or a stapler. A stapler isn't evil if it mashes up all the staples into a tangled mess. It's just broken. You don't mourn a broken stapler, eventually tools just wear out. You throw it out and get a new one. Corporations are the same, McKinsification / enshitification / etc are a part of their natural lifecycle, you should expect that and just switch to a different tool that actually works.
Does Kagi have a better localized experience?
It's not as good as google at knowing where you are (gee I wonder why) but if I search Bahn Mi <my town> the results as good as google. Results for something niche like "Keycaps" are showing lots of local results too (or as local as you can get living outside a capital city in Australia).
There's also a handy country dropdown if you ever want to localize to somewhere else, although I rarely need this, since it's smart enough to eg. show "tokyo hotels" even if your country is somewhere else.
You'll still need Google Maps though.
I upgraded my phone a few days back and when search defaulted back to Google I realised how worthwhile my subscription is.
It's not all perfect, for instance I would love to figure out how to stop all map searches sticking with them: sorry Google is just lightyears ahead there so I'd always prefer that. But generally they're about the right amount of customisability.
The killer feature for me is being able to bury sites so you never ever get results from them ever again and to slightly bump up/down results for particular reasons (your own, not due to someone else paying an ad placement fee!)
I also find Kagi good in the UK - it wasn’t amazing when I first subscribed but got a lot better quite fast. I do occasionally add “uk” to a search when shopping but I did that on Google too.
I'm in India and it works well. I can even search in Hindi and get good results.
The only thing that doesn't work are local points of interests (restaurants, hotels, local businesses, etc). I still have to use Google Maps to look these up. Then again, even Apple doesn't have good local results for PoIs in India, so I don't expect Kagi to get this right either.
That said, I often turn off localized results completely and just use the international results. Those tend to be more diverse and more useful, at least for the sort of searches I tend to do.
I agree that for very localized results (not at country level but city level), I still use Google instead.
I just did a quick test: local search for a specific law term. Kagi, Google and DDG all found the roughly same relevant sites in the top five. Each has a different top result. Google's and DDG's are a private law company. Kagi's first is an official government site. (With a suspicious non-government domain, so I had to check, but yes it's prominently linked from the main government site.)
You can easily change the country in the results page, which is useful for people who speak multiple languages. With DuckDuckGo, I sometimes had to resort to !g to use Google, but I haven't done that in Kagi for ages.
Well, except for local shops and pois in Taiwan. Which is reasonable. Google map also sucks for less-populated Taiwanese areas. I kind of have to rely on my good old legs for that.
If Kagi ever starts showing ads to me, a paying customer, I'll ditch it too. If I get the feeling that Kagi is selling my search history, I'll ditch it too.
Keep being awesome, Kagi CEO
I pay for Kagi so that I'm not being peddled ads or junk when I'm trying to be productive, as my ADHD-riddled brain can get easily distracted. It gets quite upsetting when I've wasted non-trivial amounts of time on those distractions that I subconsciously fall into.
I absolutely cannot use Google because of their seemingly endless attempts to distract me from what I'm searching for.
The final nail in the coffin was their actions to get rid of uBlock and other effective ad-blockers. It's a serious anti-pattern, and (I strongly argue) is effectively discrimination for those who struggle with ADHD.
I hope that Kagi can one day effectively filter out GenAI slop websites that look like legitimate content, but I can understand the significant technical challenges in such a feature.
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
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).
If the same podcast is uploaded to Youtube through the uploader's official channel, it won't contain those ads and you're better off downloading that.
Does anyone publish a scorecard of search results vs Google region settings?
At this point I thought that the app didn't exist for newer versions of Android.
It turned out that it was the second result, just above the "sponsored" one. It looked so much like a part of the first result that I just skipped over it.
It’s why ads in gmail look increasingly like normal messages.
The average person searching for Microsoft Word, which is on the App Store, gets screens of templates and junky overpriced apps.
I think they just (A) have no idea what they're doing when it comes to search and (B) the scamware that fills all their App Stores makes Apple a ton of extra money compared to people finding the real apps which usually are monetized outside the app store due to Apple's absurd revshare.
A lack of oversight is what I see as the problem, and the solution would require a significant human element.
Expecting a retailer to know/inspect the product they collect margins on shouldn't be a big ask.
The retailer has to know what they're selling, but Apple seems to turn a blind eye to shady listings because of the way Mac App Store results are shown and the lack of useful filtering available to the user.
But they don’t protect their cash cow from massive daily influxes of scam apps. It’s better one million scam apps generating 50k per month and drowning my two or three apps for which I spent months of work than a few thousand quality apps from which everybody would profit.
Let’s be real it takes a special kind of mad developer to try to make a business that relies on the AppStore. First if you are unlucky you get rejected on day one or two. And if you aren’t and are wildly popular you risk Apple copying your business model.
Because deep down some people at Apple despise the App Store developers and think they can do much better. This has been at the core of Apple culture for ages.
Anyway we legit indie developers who care about our products get drowned in irrelevance. Who cares.
Well, that's what you expect as a user and as a technology person, but as the TFA demonstrates, this doesn't apply to Google without an ad-blocker.
Don't give them ideas
Have you seen the Microsoft app store?
In fact, I just tried searching for "Microsoft Word" in the Mac App Store, and it was the first hit (with other Office apps coming next).
I did a search for "Instapaper" and again, first hit.
On my iPhone I did the same thing, there was a single sponsored app as the first item (and oddly completely unrelated), and the first app after that was the one I typed.
It just happens to also have a few software people actually need. But those apps are like a single tiny oasis in the middle of the Sahara desert.
Yes they do. Their search already sucks in normal circumstances—I remember searching for “Pinboard” (the bookmarking service) and had to scroll by thirteen pinball (the game) apps before starting to see Pinboard apps—but you can type in the exact name of the app you want had have an ad for a competitor above it. Not only is it allowed, it’s encouraged.
With the ads it really feels like Apple is playing all sides, they almost always show the competitor first. When you search the competitor it's a different competitor at the top. You can keep going until you terminate at some app that presumably pays top dollar to appear as an ad for themselves right above their app in the search results. The only thing I'm surprised by is that they even allow people to put ads over their own first party apps
That's why Apple is now doing everything in their power to make app development easier, but that will more likely increase quantity and not necessarily quality, as it only deepens the ecosystem's problems by inviting more noise. The practical reality is, if you are not VC-backed and if you are not playing the heavy ad spend game, the App Store is more of a barrier than anything else.
I believe so - and it seems the devs know it happens, bevause I often see a paid ad for "Chrome" if I search "Chrome"
You would be surprised to know Apple started this in AppStore before Google on PlayStore. I assume it is because Google wanted to be safe from Antitrust lawsuits (Follow Apple rather than going there first).
However, it is also faith based. In e-commerce the guys buying the ads are not the brightest on the team. Same goes for their organic SEO counterparts. Their metrics rarely include the metric that matters to the board, namely profit. Their metrics are in sales at best, but most likely just clicks.
I have never worked anywhere where it has been joined up. You wouldn't believe how much gets sold at a loss with customer acquisition costing more than the product. Imagine paying lots for the ad, some more for the hosting, some more for the affiliate marketing, then discounting the product and then free shipping, all with an outsourced warehouse that costs a fortune.
In regular retail you just don't have this level of waste since there is a different cost structure and growth is unlikely to be double digit.
Meanwhile, money is sucked out of the world and funnelled into ad tech. In the olden days adverts might support the local paper so the money stayed in the community.
Right, I think this is easier to quantify. The hard case is advertising on _your own_ name, defensively (to stop others from doing so). I think it is hard to make a truly data driven decision in this case, since you don’t see the clicks you lose. I think you’d have to do a careful A/B test if you want to tease this apart.
> the guys buying the ads are not the brightest on the team
lol, surprise! I run marketing for a small business, I am the guy buying the ads haha. I’m not offended at all, but am a bit surprised the engineer-vs-sales feud is still alive. Fwiw I also do product design! Can’t we all get along?
The friction comes primarily due to different goals, or rather different timespans, since there is only one goal, to make money. The marketing guys need results now because the sales guys need results now. Meanwhile, I only care about the long term plan. To me there is a lot more involved in that, for example the customer service.
You can discount everything and get the numbers up, to clear stock, get cash flow and more sales for the month. However, these are 'bottom feeders' that only shop on price. They are not brand loyal and, for the following month you need even more discounting, with it becoming a race to the bottom.
If you want repeat customers then there is more to it than price. You need customer service, efficient delivery, a speedy website and much else assuming the products are not that innovative.
As a developer you have tested the shopping cart and checkout a thousand times so you have some idea how to make it slick. However, too often there is a designer that does not know HTML that just does drawings in Photoshop that are non functional mockups, however, due to the process, these designs get signed off by the client and cast in stone. The better way would be to get it all working first then have someone that uses CSS and SVG rather than Photoshop to get it pretty.
So why the beef with the guys that by the ads? Too often I have found that they struggle with spelling, lack product knowledge and assume programmers are to be kept in a dimly lit basement to be whipped into cranking out the code.
Maybe it is just bad luck. If I upped my developer game I could get on better teams where the web development wasn't managed by a marketing guy that is clueless about the core capability that is code.
What really surprised me was that when instructed to install Google Authenticator, a significant portion of people (I'd estimate close to 50%) would search the exact name and then proceed to reach to install the sponsored top result with a completely different name until I stopped them.
And a mistake that might hurt them with security and certainly cost and functionality.
And in a core, security-sensitive function like "what third party apps should I have on my personal device?" This is not searching for fun memes on Reddit!
Imaging if PepsiCo paid grocers to shelve cans of Pepsi right beside cans of Coke, sharing the same inventory tag that just says “Coca Cola”. Coke would definitely be able to sue for something about that, right? Well, isn’t this the same?
I think that part is true? Inventory tag doesn’t matter too much here.
Better analogy would be putting Pepsi syrup into a Coke-branded fountain, maybe?
Pardon? I’ve never heard a human call a browser “firefox” (as a generic term), or “chrome” for that matter (though people do assume you use Chrome by default now).
It basically intercepted said search and gave me an ad saying to keep using edge.
Thinking back it seems unbeleivable so I searched.
https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-wind...
Speaking of amazon... By god amazon search is horrid for this.
If you search for HP laptop you get a whole bunch of sponsored Lenovo's at the top of the page.
In fact, the results are so bad that most of the time I go through Google.
If you copy & save the whole URL it works as expected when you paste it into a browser next time, unless that page is gone for good.
But if you just read the ID number to somebody and they type it into the search box, the product will appear as a tile surrounded by a few related product tiles and the rest unrelated. Completely outnumbered, and intentionally crafted to make it easier to buy some other product besides the exact one desired.
And that's when you already know exactly what you want.
Only if you then click on the correct one will it take you back to the exact same product page.
I can't think of a single online store that's good at search and it seems like it's because the thought is "don't miss anything that might come close to the search terms".
Whether it's Amazon, IKEA, the supermarkets where I live, etc, any search I make comes back with what looks like spray and pray SEO.
Maybe it's actually a hard problem to solve, or maybe the goal is "sell anything!" (including better placement the seller pays for) rather than "give the user what they want".
Fortunately we still have Geizhals in AT[0]/DE[1]/PL[2]/UK[3] to work around that.
[0]: https://geizhals.at/
[1]: https://geizhals.de/
I just felt a little tangy/pontificaty.
At the same time, I know it's a hard problem to solve. Users also aren't good at finding what they want either.
Searches for Amazon, Temu, Shein - result in each being listed in the promotional panel and then as the first result.
For Firefox: Chrome is listed in the promotional panel and Firefox as the first result (below it).
The promotional panel has a different background colour and “Ad” badge, but is otherwise identical to other listings.
Two results fit on the screen: the promotional panel and the first listing. Diverging from Google is that the ad result is obvious and doesn’t push the search result out of view.
Occasionally, I help people with their Mac's, and it can easily take half an hour to get something installed (finding their password etc), and on iOS, there are ads that buries the real results.
Then I am reminded how spoiled I am in the Linux world! No ads and quick access to a large selection of open source and commercial programs, no accounts or logins!
The other 10 times, it's because I want to install some specific app that I already know and I just want to get to the page of that exact app - either through a direct link or through the store's search.
There were exactly zero times where I opened the store with the motivation "gee, I really feel like installing a new app, but I have no idea what it should be... Let's check out the recommendations!"
Yet this seems to be what the entire UI is optimized for.
~10 years ago I would do this all the time. It's fun, kind of like surfin' the net was back in the old days, but in a walled garden of applications.
Just how supermarkets are designed, IKEA is the most egregious, they try to force you to look at and tempt you with a whole load of other products on your way to getting what you came for.
It's similar but not quite the same. Even the parallel with the physical world fails us here, IKEA can't put everyone's desired product at the entrance. Google can.
That's what I was trying to say earlier with the limitations of the physical world. IKEA implements a lot of psychological tricks to get your eyeballs on as many products as they can but at the end of the day they can have only so many corridors and entrances to the store. You want a chair, I want a pillow, someone else wants a flower pot. Sooner or later someone will need to walk a bit to get to what they want, IKEA can't put everything right at the entrance.
But Google can put my desired result right at the top, at the entrance. It's the advantage of digital, it can be changed to suit each individual user. As it turns out, Google made it only their advantage.
This is the sort of thing that makes people on HN start screaming "ZOMG! Walled garden!!!!11!!eleventy!1"
Why do you go to the play store to view and manage installed apps? If you swipe up from home screen you should get to the app drawer. Or Settings > Apps.
That way I can skip the store garbage and directly go click update all apps button.
I just tried on apple device s few weeks ago and it took me many minutes to find the listing where I can update installed apps and it was missing the update all button...
Analytics driven development.
They realized that doing it this way leads to greater ad clicks and time spent on the app.
It never works. The apps it suggests are all ad farming garbage. I have found maybe one fun game doing this over the years, but mostly its been repeated frustration. I keep doing it occasionally in hopes that I find another diamond in the rough but I think Google has just trashed this whole thing up.
There is probably a set of users who download tons of apps and throw money after them like crazy, and that's probably what Google has optimized for.
Wouldn't dream of doing it on Play Store, it's all trash, and even the stuff I go there to download specifically, I wish I didn't have to most of the time.
Companies love algorithmic content because because it's the ultimate shield from criticism. "Don't blame us for bad content! It's just the algorithm and we can't control it! Maybe if you interact with it more it will give you better results." Or course in practice it means they have plausible deniability when they shove a stream of ads in your feed.
The one that kills me is on YouTube: "show fewer shorts". fewer than what? Why isn't zero an option? It just means they will shove them in your face again and again. Don't want them at all? Too bad! We need to increase metrics so the PM of shorts can get their promotion!
Ads will always be around, I guess. Doesn't Google offer a pay search version too, without ads? Like youtube...
Yes. In fact, I often get sponsored stuff before Apple’s own apps, when I’m searching for the Apple app. I’ll also get things like games, when I’m looking for development or productivity apps. It’s crazy.
One of the things that I do, each morning, is take a long walk, listening to music.
I’m an Apple One subscriber, so there’s no limit to the music from the catalog. I don’t buy individual songs. It’s already been paid, so they aren’t selling me anything.
I use the “Discovery Station” playlist, which gives you random songs, based on your preferences.
It used to be quite good, but lately, it’s been stuffing weird pop songs into the playlist. These are ones that I’d never listen to, otherwise. I will tell Siri that I don’t like the songs, but they keep coming, anyway. I often dislike up to five songs in a row; at which time, the phone gives up on the station, and starts feeding me random songs from my library.
This renders the “Discovery Station” pretty much worthless.
It’s fairly obvious that the playlist has been corrupted by paid results.
Pandora has always done the best job of selecting relevant unknown music for me, but the limit on skips (even for paid accounts), makes it worthless. Undiscovered music is frequently obscure for a reason, so I can sometimes skip a majority of the selections. I’ve always been puzzled about why Pandora never got borged by Apple or Microsoft. They were excellent, a decade before the AI hype bubble was even a broken rubber on the drug store shelf.
Yes, this has been my experience, at least on mobile. Is this different for others?
Paying for ad slots to raise brand awareness is one thing, but a search for a trademark should resolve first to a valid holder of that trademark.
The iOS AppStore is just as bad. Even if your search term is the exact app name, they’ll show you random stuff first (maybe they’re hoping you buy before realizing it wasn’t what you were looking for). And since App Store contents are like 98% crap, the chances of randomly finding something worthwhile are miniscule.
Letting users do what they want to is just not a business model for these megacorps.
> You wouldn't want someone looking for your website to find your competitor instead. For a small fee, I can make sure that doesn't happen.
"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."
Search, TV->internet video, newspapers->internet - all of them go through those cycles.
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.
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.
In Soviet Russia government protects harmful contents from us!
Because I agree, the forced obsession with "growth" at all costs, which seems necessary to operate a public company (at least in this century[1]), is imho the #1 reason why enshittification is unavoidable.
[1] I'd describe nearly all present-day corporations as fixated on quarterly results even at the expense of business viability. Something I truly don't understand is why big companies say, 75 years ago seem to have been so much less that way. If anyone has any theories I'd love to hear them.
Just running Google as-is without ads would have produced less value in the long run. Plus the SEO tide (which relied on DoubleClick ads that weren't yet owned by Google) began to rise and would've drowned Google Search much earlier if they hadn't grown.
Where I think Google took the bad (for consumers) turn was when they purchased DoubleClick and began to consolidate the entire ad business. Instead of losing money to SEO spammers, they began to make money. This put Google into a conflict of interest against their own users. Ever since then they've been piling onto that conflict of interest, draining more and more value from their products.
People overwhelmingly prefer ad-supported to subscription supported. Google would be a dramatically better service if everyone who used it paid. I really, really, cannot overstate that.
The internet sucks because users feel entitled to everything on it for free. They don't want ads and they don't want to pay subscriptions. uBlock origin, archive.is, and constant complaining about how the content sucks.
The internet is full of children with a naive understanding of how things work. The are so deluded that they even call on companies to simply provide them everything for free if they want to be "successful".
The notion that Internet sucks because megacorps have to scrounge for cash doesn't pass the most basic smell test.
Google's promotion guidelines used to include that if you want to get a promotion on a technical track, you have to demonstrate a mastery of complexity. Cue the unnecessary complexity in some projects meant to get the author promoted.
(They might still include that requirement. I don't know. I haven't worked at Google in nearly a decade.)
Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
Hence a page full of ads, and no reason to think things will ever change.
> Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
Amazon's history shows that public shareholders can be very patient with cash being returned to them, or the company ever showing a profit at all. Tesla used to be in the same boat.
Shareholders are very forward looking. They just don't necessarily trust 'visionary managers' not be full of bullshit. Probably rightly so.
I see this constantly repeated in anti-capitalist/anti-corporate rhetoric, but on the other side, shareholder meetings, finance conferences, financial service talks, no one ever wants this. Maybe the 20 year old stock bros on discord pumping penny stocks, but no serious shareholder of any company with a name you might recognize.
It happens, there are cases of it, but overwhelmingly the vibe is "long term stable profit generation".
Look at the recent Microsoft layoffs. They purged the company of so much tech talent, and tanked morale for basically all the remaining workers. From any kind of long term perspective this is madness. Yet they were rewarded for it by the stock market.
I think disrupting large players will be much harder than it was it the past.
Rome used to rule the world; sure it took about a thousand years, but it ultimately didn't last.
They clearly decided to just say "fuck it" though. Sometime after Ruth Porat replaced Patrick Pichette and especially after Sundar took the helm (both happened while I worked there) but most especially in the last 3 years.
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.
Now it's the other way around. The primary source of gains from owing shares is speculation on the share price. Dividends are mostly ignored.
The result of this is that share prices move not on "how well is the company likely to do?" but on "what do we think the share price will do in the next couple of months (at most) [0]?". It all becomes hype and rumour and speculation. Shareholders only care about the price, so boards are incentivised to only care about the price. And so on down. Generating hype about what the company is going to do becomes more important than actually doing it (I exaggerate, but not by much). This then leads to the short-term-ism that we see, and the hot potato effect.
I think the answer would be to tax speculative profits. If you sell something for more than you bought it for, the government takes a cut. Specifically remove this from income tax calculations, because they have way too many loopholes, and make it more like VAT/GST; a tax payable at the point of the transaction. This would reduce the profits from speculation, and hopefully move the emphasis back onto dividends and longer-term thinking.
[0] and obviously, for some privileged traders, the next couple of milliseconds
How would you feel about tax-disadvantaging buybacks?
I like Cory Doctorow's take on this [0], that this is basically defrauding the shareholders. It used to be illegal, it probably should be illegal again.
It's also unsustainable, in that you can only do this for so long before you've bought up all the open shares and there's so few remaining that your company is no longer effectively tradeable.
I don't know where this practice leads, but I don't think it's a place we want to go to. I suspect it'll be further concentration of capital into fewer hands. To the extreme, we end up with all the large companies doing this becoming effectively private, owned by a small group of folks rich enough to keep their holdings while everyone else sells out during the buybacks. That's not good.
They just return money to shareholders. The only material difference with dividends is the tax treatment. Even all the incentives are the same.
> It's also unsustainable, in that you can only do this for so long before you've bought up all the open shares and there's so few remaining that your company is no longer effectively tradeable.
What makes you think so?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_split might blow your mind.
> To the extreme, we end up with all the large companies doing this becoming effectively private, owned by a small group of folks rich enough to keep their holdings while everyone else sells out during the buybacks. That's not good.
You can tell your broker to automatically re-invest dividends for you.
Similarly, if you just don't sell when there's a buyback, you own more of the company afterwards. No one is forced to sell.
Btw, most companies (including Apple and Google) keep issuing shares to employees. Buying back some of them in the open market is just an indirect roundabout way of essentially handing employees cash.
Mr Doctorow's point is that the company is taking money from its operations, which it should be spending on expanding those operations and increasing its value, and spending that money on artificially inflating its share price, by effectively wash trading the shares, creating artificial demand, and artificially reducing supply.
If you bought shares in the company as a long-term position in order to receive dividends then you do not benefit from buybacks, and arguably lose out (because the money used on the buyback could have been distributed as a dividend). It only benefits short-term speculator shareholders. And, of course, the executives who are incentivised on share price, for whom a buyback is a much, much, easier way to get those incentives than actually doing their jobs and using the money to grow the company.
How is any of that fraud? Fraud doesn't just mean you have to disagree with something someone does, but you have to have been lied to.
> And, of course, the executives who are incentivised on share price, for whom a buyback is a much, much, easier way to get those incentives than actually doing their jobs and using the money to grow the company.
Companies can and should adjust the incentives so that the effect of dividends and buybacks are the same for the executive. (They already adjust for share splits for example.)
> If you bought shares in the company as a long-term position in order to receive dividends then you do not benefit from buybacks, and arguably lose out (because the money used on the buyback could have been distributed as a dividend).
Before you buy any shares, you should check what management says about their plans. At least, if you have specific expectations.
Even if buybacks were outlawed, companies aren't guaranteed to pay dividends. It's perfectly legal to never make a profit, or to give all your excess money to charity. You just have to tell your shareholders.
> Mr Doctorow's point is that the company is taking money from its operations, which it should be spending on expanding those operations and increasing its value, and spending that money on artificially inflating its share price, by effectively wash trading the shares, creating artificial demand, and artificially reducing supply.
Yeah, that's a stupid objection.
The substantial first half of it would equally well apply to dividends. (And the whole point of giving money to companies as an investor is that eventually you are getting more back.)
The second half is just not how any of this works. Does he even know what a wash trade is? And what's 'artificial' about this?
This is like listening to RFK talk about medicine.
Their only material difference is in taxes. Yes, I am in favour of putting dividends and buy backs on the same tax footing, just in the name of simplicity. And while you are at it, also put dividends and interest payments on the same tax footing.
At the moment, many jurisdictions advantage interest payments, thus encourage financing companies with debt instead of equity. And then they awkwardly pair it with other rules that try to tell companies (especially financial companies like banks) not to use so much debt, not to be so levered.
Google's original founders still hold the majority of voting rights.
Making trading less efficient wouldn't change anything here.
> 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.
No, your proposal wouldn't work at all.
A big problem is actually that most managers in most companies mostly work for themselves. It's called a 'principal/agent problem'.
Exactly as you say 'execs get more room to bullshit.'
Btw, there's private equity funds with very long capital lock-ups. Their effects on companies typically aren't loved by the people who voice similar concerns to yours.
In any case, good luck designing your system in such a way that's (A) not trivial to bypass, and (B) doesn't gut the economy.
As a customer (and worker and investor) you have to vote with your feet and wallet to show the market what you want and don't want in your companies.
For many years they were very profitable, with great search results and good quality ads.
It seems the only things certain in this industry are death, tax, ads, and graphics cards.
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.
Don't blame ordinary shareholders here! The original founders still hold a majority of decision making power (I think via super voting shares).
2000, launched ads: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ads
2001, profitable: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2001/aug/08/internetn...
They still do have it.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Edit: I stand corrected. Ads were added later, but when first introduced they were clearly marked. I got my history wrong.
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.
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.
If you like Brian Eno it engaged his curiosity also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_07003:_Bell_Studies_fo...
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.
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.
There were lots of "differentiators" that did not really matter, including speed. The differentiator was result quality, not how or when they were presented.
It was a big contrast and a signal of classy goodwill, back in the age of replicating popups and garish blinking text.
However, the lean interface without blinkentags and ads was definitely a selling point. Also, IIRC, the guarantee that you'd only get sites that actually contained all the words in your search query (that feature is long gone, too, of course).
The interface and speed were great, no doubt. Did you ever encounter another search engine that produced similar or better results that you otherwise would have used, but Google's interface sold you? I never did, so it wasn't a selling point for me.
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.
Google should be fearful for how easy it was to replace them entirely with Kagi, and how little I miss it.
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)
> ..."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!
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
Also translate.kagi.com is much better than Google’s one.
The only people who would say that are people who would be better off just asking ChatGPT.
Any nuanced search that isnt some encyclopedic fact is terrible on DDG.
In my recent experience, I'm far better off asking ChatGPT or just using it through Bing/Copilot than what I used to do a decade ago, which was deep dives through 5 pages of long-tail search results.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=midjourney&ia=web -> Hmm, midjourney the AI thingy is not even there for me! Just https://www.midjourney.com which is not really clear on what it is. Midjourney is at Midjourney.online, which is not even on the first page. So Argualbly Google is still better. What a world.
Btw, I search DDG from the Firefox bar, and that does not let me copy the URL anymore!!! Wtf. There is just the search term, like there is in the field below it!! Omg, now I have the same thing twice, and a useful thing has been lost.
https://www.midjourney.com/explore?tab=video_top
Midjourney.online doesn't show up on either platform for me on the first page.
Yeah, I just noticed too. Go to Settings->Search there's a checkbox just below the default search engine. Uncheck that. Should be something along the lines of "Show search terms in the address bar in search results" (sorry for any errors in the translation, my browser's language is not English).
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241008235322/https://www.ic3.g...
My dad was trying to get an ESTA visa a couple years ago and ended up paying twice the actual price, because he can't discern what's the official site or not.
I think that is called affiliate marketing.
We shouldn't just be used to Google being allowed to essentially run infinite scams. Remember, they directly profit off the scams.
Its like if I had a billboard and then let someone put an ad up that said "give me all your money and you'll live forever!"
Am I off the hook? Why, lil ole me? I just run the billboard!
You might then say, well, obviously looking at every ad you accept is far too onerous! Its not like a billboard, because the billboard owner must see all the ads!
Which then I would reply - why is Google entitled to a business model like that? If they can't reasonable run their business in an ethical way... Perhaps they shouldn't run it all.
And EVEN if they do install a blocker, 9 times out of 10 it'll be AdBlock Plus and not uBlock Origin [1]. You know, the one that allows companies to PAY to have their ads whitelisted.
This doesn't even cover browsing on a smartphone which unless you're running Android Firefox which supports browser extensions, you have very few options.
[1] Notice I said uBlock Origin and NOT uBlock.
DuckDuckGo is built in to the browser! Google is still unfortunately the default, but it's just Settings -> Search -> Default Search Engine, and DuckDuckGo is already in the list.
> unless you're running Android Firefox
Yeah, obviously run Android Firefox.
Lets call it what it is, a cancer, one that literally enables countless bad actors and purely for a search engine's own profit. In theory theres a time and place for ads, but maliciously inline and disguised as the actual results people want arent it.
[1] https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ublock-origin...
As far as alternative browsers go, Vivaldi also has an integrated ad blocker.
Sometimes the third-party sites are helpful and benign, sometimes they are merely spammers trying to upsell you, occasionally they are malicious.
Agreed, the manufacturer site behavior is also annoying.
Are there any good, easy-to-understand resources for spotting and avoiding phishing scams and such things for non-tech audiences?
Most software does not value consistency or UX maintenance AT ALL.
What I mean is, a lot of those older programs arguably had much better user interfaces in terms of usability. More contrast, more text instead of glyphs, and often still simpler.
UI is like fashion, it changes because change is good. Not because those particular changes are good.
Compare Windows 11 and 7, or XP, or even in a lot of ways 95. What's the prettier experience? 11, I guess. But which one doesn't make me scream at the computer? Not 11.
But it's not just Microsoft, Apple does it too. We throw away literal YEARS of user understanding and memory for nothing. Users get tired over time. They can't keep up, nobody can, and it gets frustrating when things just get worse and worse over time.
It also doesn't help when you have to visit a new domain for the first time, which tends to be the case when looking up novel information.
Oh wait it happened to me as well. Fortunately it was phishing a recruitment site and all they got is my CV.
The web is so hostile to the inform and the old. It takes one moment of weakness and there's someone ready and waiting with a scam.
We should go back to that.
Product being search users. Customers being advertisers.
- 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.
Weird
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.
Apologies for the weird grammar.
I wonder what Google execs do - like I really have a hard time imagining them using Google search as it currently exists. Is there some kind of special internal flag that just gets rid of ads for their accounts?
In other words, nobody is bidding to reach your eyeballs specifically.
This could be a market inefficiency. OR, it could be you're actually a terrible lead for midjourney-type products, and the market is working correctly.
Tech companies routinely monitor social media like HN to take action.
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).
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.
Midjourney.com is second on the list. Not good. But better.
"No, coffee is not mostly water. That appears to be a misconception based on a popular television show. Coffee is actually about 98% water."
> 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
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.
"Yes, coffee is predominantly water , with a standard cup of brewed coffee being about 98% water and the remaining 1-2% being solids like caffeine and antioxidants. Because water forms the vast majority of coffee, its quality is crucial for a good cup and it contributes to your daily fluid intake"
* a whole page of sponsored-yet-indistinguishable-from-organic results
* a confidently incorrect AI snippet
* the below-the-fold top organic results being all content spam
* the first actually relevant result from a reputable source being then paywalled with a "you ran out of stories for this month" overlay on a website I have never browsed in a year
* the 2nd actually relevant result prompting a "login with google" overlay with prefilled identity that gets clicked by accident 20% of the time
* all of the above in a Chrome browser, requiring a quadruple opt-out before allowing you to use GMail without also starting a browser-wide session to keep track of your every keystroke
* or alternatively an app based mobile interface where links can't be copied and pasted to prevent loss of tracking
* something with AMP
This is not even close to everything that is wrong, if anything it should be called "barely the tip of the iceberg of everything that is wrong".
In their defense it does feature a bunch of other invisible things (lack of cached results, lack of direct links you can obtain with a right click, etc)
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!
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.
I’m talking about the “simple” solution that everyone alludes to but can’t seem to explain how it would feasibly work.
If we agree it's something they can't solve anymore, letting them pay to stay is a disservice to the users.
I think they could still keep up if it was a priority to them. It's complicated, but they have a lot of the best minds of our generation after all.
However, if you are to make this argument - please note that for OP and all the commenters in this post who tested this, all of them got the official Midjourney page as search result #1. Unsure why we’re discussing this at all then?
SEO + AdWords = this
It apparently took everyone decades to notice this is where we were always headed.
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.
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?
(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?
Seriously is this the level of HN discussion nowadays?
> I typed in Midjourney to search for Midjourney because I wanted to use Midjourney.
Also - well-known that ad, sorry, search engines might well give two people different results for the same query.
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.
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.
Clearly if you're not an advertiser, you can call out brands by name for having junky products (e.g. "The Worst Air Purifier We’ve Ever Tested" by Wirecutter on the Molekule air purifier). Similarly clearly, if you're an advertiser, you'll fall afoul of laws around false advertising if you tell non-truths in ads.
I expect that the reason Honeywell or Coway aren't punching down on Molekule in their ads isn't that they're afraid of lawsuits more than the Wirecutter, it's simply that their ads are meant to build their own brand awareness so they don't want to name any other brands.
You can bid on competitor's keywords, but not use their trademarked name in the copy, especially not in a deliberately confusing way.
But I don't think Google moderates this very proactively.
I cannot possibly fathom how they stay afloat with just 50k+ users.
You might be part of an experiment or have a rogue extension installed that is hijacking the results (it's happened to me).
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 as http://example.com This is not a problem in most business sites, but in YouTube it allows any user to impersonate the main page.
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
But daaaaamn. I could see that footer all the time. Lucky I was not able to zoom.
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.
No ads. No LLM BS. While the experience google is pushing is terrible, the underlying tech still works in cases like this.
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_ov...
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.)
Incidentally, Bing's first two results for "midjourney" are the official site, followed by the Wikipedia page.
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.
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.
I was using Firefox previously
So, not only my overall browser experience improved, but Kagi is natively _infused_ in Orion, so that was the easiest setup I had to make
If you have settings synced between devices, I'd see how that would be an issue (I'm still 100% on Firefox on my Linux/MacOS/Windows devices)
I'm a Kagi user, primarily for the non-sponsored search results.
The AI stuff in Kagi doesn't pique my interest. Their Orion pitch also doesn't, but I'm interested in an actual user's opinion.
My top 3 would be:
1. customized and sanitized search results
2. Assistant
3. custom bangs
And to develop more:
- Not only I don't have ads in my results, but they are customized and sanitized based on my settings, since I can block some websites, put a better ranking on others... or even use lenses if I want to use a very precise scope
- With Assistant I have access to (almost) all the most recent and popular models, I can easily switch, even inside a thread, so I don't need to have an account (and a subscription) at OpenAI, Anthropic... They are immediately available in a single web interface (and soon in CLI)
- Bangs are not new, but with Kagi I can create my owns, and they are well implemented within the Kagi _universe_, so I even have custom bangs to start a chat with Assistant with specific models (ex: typing "!cl" will start a chat with Assistant using Claude)
And overall, what's make everything better is that I only need to setup the Kagi extension, and then all my settings are shared between my devices. My custom Kagi style is automatically shared. My search settings are automatically shared. My Assistant threads are automatically shared. My custom bangs are automatically shared.
As soon as I setup the Kagi extension, I have the same great Kagi experience!
Regarding Orion, I use it on my iPhone since it provides better performances than Firefox and Kagi works great in it. But on computers I still use Firefox because I have more expectations, I'm not only on MacOS and, to be honest, I haven't found the experience that great; mostly because I'm not a fan of the UI.
That aside, though, I'm not sure what the difference between mobile and desktop is for this scenario? In both cases you basically have to log into Kagi once using your web browser of choice, it sets the cookie accordingly, and thereafter things "just work". I don't even remember when I did that for my iPhone, but I think it's been over a year now?
I've pinned all results from wikipedia.org, which is a killer feature and why I'm paying for Kagi, instead of giving away my data for free to Google.
I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock) and move them over to chatgpt when possible. If anyone has better ideas, I'm all ears.
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.
Studied with a guy from old Soviet Union, they were educated in a way that every modern invention had a Soviet inventor.
ChatGPT can create an individualized reality and truth for everyone depending on which advertiser’s target demographic they fit in.
> Is there controversy over the true inventor of the telephone?Yes, there is controversy over the true inventor of the telephone. While Alexander Graham Bell is widely credited, several inventors and researchers argue for recognition based on their contributions:
> Antonio Meucci: An Italian inventor who filed a patent caveat for a "voice communication apparatus" in 1871, five years before Bell's patent. Meucci's device, the "teletrofono," could transmit voice over a wire. Due to financial hardship, Meucci couldn't renew his caveat, and Bell was granted the patent in 1876. In 2002, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution (H.Res. 269) recognizing Meucci's contributions, stating he demonstrated a working device earlier, though it didn't officially credit him as the inventor. Some still argue Meucci deserves primary credit.
> Elisha Gray: An American engineer who filed a patent caveat for a telephone-like device on the same day as Bell, February 14, 1876. Bell's patent was filed hours earlier, leading to disputes. Some claim Bell may have had access to Gray’s ideas through patent office connections, though no definitive evidence supports this. Gray later challenged Bell’s patent but lost in court.
> Philipp Reis: A German inventor who developed a device called the "Reis telephone" in 1861, capable of transmitting music and some speech. While it was less practical for clear voice communication, some argue it was a precursor to the telephone.
Even if improvements continue for years we might already be near the peak of LLM usefulness because all of greedy and abusive dark patterns are sure to follow once the manic land grab settles down.
Kagi is a similar boat - the product is what you pay for, not what they can get users to put up with.
Netflix also attempted to give a paid option, but now we have an "ad-supported" plan. I think that same logic of maximizing profit means that even if there are some people paying for ChatGPT, the amount of free money that is sitting on the table means that we will see "ad-supported" ChatGPT pretty soon once the low-hanging fruit for quality enhancement start to dry up, which is kind of already happening.
Yeah, sure, "ad-free plan". As long as you don't watch (what feels like) the majority of videos on the platform.
I pay for premium, but I'd gladly pay 4x as much if Youtube also required creators to mark sponsored segments and let them all get skipped automatically if you paid for youtube "double premium double ad free" or whatever.
You are right, that you still need to hit that button. It would be need to trigger it automatically. As far as I can tell, creators already tag the relevant segments as sponsored for other legal reasons.
From what I've seen, the timeline usually doesn't call out exact sponsor segments and the only tagging applies to the entire video.
2. Once the market is captured and solidified, ads and enshittification ensue. If you're willing to put on your tin foil hat for a second, I'd tell you that as a matter of fact the technologies to integrate different services with ChatGPT are being developed right now, and once they're ready it's just a small step to make sure that ChatGPT prioritizes answers mentioning those integrated partners, which can easily be justified to users as legit quality-of-life improvements.
Maybe the answer is indeed to just buy a book and go touch some literal grass, and let the civilization drown in the sewer of disinformation it produces.
Now it seems like they all do!
Sure, so move them off OpenAI, once they start paying back?
Bizzaro solution. Sign them up to kagi.
I guess they are all on Firefox.
It’s a slight security risk since it shows where you have accounts.
If you are savvy, build your own search that just passes it to an LLM and returns as page.
The only thing money can't buy, yet, is a phone network free of robocalls.
Happy customer here as well
It’s kind of cool being treated like a customer
New feature releases aren’t about ad placement or SEO or personalization / tracking
Instead, their product updates are targeted at me - cool nifty features that I can immediately try out
Like kagi or not, just the feeling of having devs care about my actual personal experience is a breath of fresh air
I know not everyone is an fortunate, but I’d happily spend on other software of this caliber
I've been slowly working to find other paid services as alternatives to the free ones that I'm currently using (next big one was shifting away from Gmail and onto a personal domain for mail using Fastmail). Migrated away from Notion and using Obsidian with Syncthing running on my unRAID server at home. Generally just trying to find alternatives that aren't in the data mining and user lock in sphere and more about maintaining a positive user experience without taking advantage of their users and their data.
Be sure to try the assistant if you haven’t and browse the settings page for all the things you can do, again if you haven’t
It’s my default on my phone through their extension it works well
I’ve contacted their support in the past and they always give me real answers to questions about he product or suggestions
Gl!
I am sure there have never been such a time, but I long for it anyway.
Nah, GCC is free, Linux is free, Debian is free. What we need to be against is free stuff provided by for-profit entities, because the love of money is the root of all evil.
What I’m saying is that, hypothetically, if the entire business-world suddenly ditched Linux overnight and went back to IBM and Burrows like it’s the 1960s again again (and let’s pretend Android isn’t a thing either) then no-one would be funding significant Linux dev/eng work, and as much as we value the hacker-spirit of unpaid community/volunteer projects, I feel it isn’t enough to keep Linux viable and secure (especially in high-visibility, high-exposure scenarios like desktops and internet-facing services).
(I used to work with the Xen folks.)
That's a huge mistake.
But it looks like they just keep giving people more and more reason to... not do that.
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.
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.
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.
Not sure why they get very different result.
Going incognito, the first link is a sponsored ad for... midjourney
- the official site - their subreddit - their Discord server - Wikipedia - Facebook - LinkedIn
When OP searches for Midjourney as a Midjourney user, Google’s algorithm infers he might want to consider an alternative because why would an existing user search for the product they’re already using.
We see evidence supporting this given no Midjourney ad showed up for a direct keyword match query; and only alternatives triggered.
This is kinda like Amazon retargeting you with alternative toasters after you just bought a new toaster. Most people think this is stupid. Well, the most likely cohort to buy a new toaster is a person that just bought one because they’re not satisfied with their purchase.
You know how you can ask ChatGPT the same thing 3x in a row and get 3 completely different results? Google's basically the same and has been for a long time.
If you and me both ask for something hyper-specific, we'll see the same results. But the more generic the search term is, the more hyper-personalised it gets.
In some ways it makes sense, for example we shouldn't see the same thing when we search for "restaurants" as we're unlikely to be looking for restaurants on the other side of the world, in many other ways it's annoying and counter-productive.
I don't think that makes sense. The goal of Amazon can't be to have you unhappy with shopping on Amazon, if for no other reason that returns cost money.
That's insane. Someone searching for something they've searched for in the past is looking for stability of the search results; they're trying to get back to where they've been before. If they wanted different results, they'd change the search query.
Is this the "logic" behind Google and Youtube search results being different each time a query is run?
Finally Midjourney. Unlike in the article I have never visited Midjourney.
1. Actually website
2. Subreddit
3. Wikipedia
Then comes PixVerse, a sponsored result for a google play app.
Then difuss.me.
Then comes midjourney.
Doesn't link
I can't believe that's what their standard is now.
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?
For example, if I search for "anonbib"[1] it shows nothing but revenge porn links[2].
[1] https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/anon-ib-revenge-porn-site-se...
Another day another weak substack submitted by ....
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
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
The devil doesn't 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.
Talk about a philosophy!
"I'm a neo marxist" , "Oh, I lean more towards @DragonsDream personally."
If you squint they may look like the same thing, but their subtle difference is important. One is a tool suggesting "Hey I see you're trying to do A, but I think B might also fit your needs", and the other is "You want A? Ok, I'll eventually point you towards A, but only after you consume this message from our sponsor."
Google's not genuinely thinking "Hey this will help the user more!" and building that into their tool - it's an ad platform that mimics being helpful, in the name of growing profits.
(That's fine for them to do btw; They're a company and they need to make money somehow.)
I’m not inherently opposed to ads that are relevant to a user’s search query, but I am opposed to watering down their visual differentiation until they look just like regular search results. Once upon a time Google put ads on a yellow background labelled “Ads”. Now they’re “Sponsored results” and they look mostly identical to the rest. This is simply not about providing interesting and relevant alternatives, but about tricking the user into clicking the ad so Google can charge the advertiser.
What I truly can’t abide, though, is the volume of fraudulent and malicious advertising circulating their network. Given Google’s $100 billion profit in 2024, the amount of fake/scam versions of real websites that they allow to appear in search ads, or deepfake Elon Musk bitcoin giveaways they allow in YouTube prerolls is a calculated choice, not an inability or lack of resources to prevent it. At the end of the day it would eat into their profit if they were to make it harder to post deceptive ads.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf
Appendix A. Page 18.
Install an ad blocker.
The spirit of the question I can subscribe to though: too many ads on top of the results these days.
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.
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.
ontopic: This debacle started way earlier than when google decided that the "don't be evil" motto was to be removed, methinks.
I didn't explicitly decide to stop using Google, it just happened, I didn't need it anymore, just like I went from using StackOverflow daily to never opening it again. ChatGPT with search is just better (at least ChatGPT Plus). Granted, it is noticeably slower to get a first result, but end-to-end it's a much faster way to find your answer.
Google Search is garbage, but highly unlikely to be "finished". Millions of people still find it useful, and Google is adopting "AI" on the results page just like any other "AI" web search service. The reason the UX is not good is, first of all, subjective, and second of all, because Google is in the advertising business, and they've found it more profitable to corrupt their results page and deal with any negative feedback, than to deliver clean results like they did decades ago without the profit.
This is a carefully planned, tested, and executed design decision, just like anything they do on the SERP, and not some arbitrary sign that they don't know what they're doing anymore.
The possibility of a new player disrupting the dominance of a trillion-dollar corporation that has built a highly optimized index of the entire web over decades, by leveraging technology that requires vast resources to run, is highly unlikely. Not impossible, but highly unlikely. Google could improve the search UX tomorrow if they wanted to.
> The only problem is that we don't have a solid contender yet.
Sure we do. Kagi offers a much better UX, and I haven't had the need to rely on external results for nearly a year now. I haven't tried Perplexity, but I imagine it could be good as well, depending on the quality of its index.
But these are relatively niche services catering to an audience that cares about these things. The sad reality is that most people simply don't, and will use whatever search engine is set as default in their browser. Which is why being the default is worth paying millions, and is literally keeping companies like Mozilla alive.
> In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google.
> The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/...
They did not expect the public to react to chatGPT the way they did and for OAI to capture mindset and marketshare of Internet Search Queries.
I mostly juggle with Google, Kagi, and various LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity... but the differences matter less).
https://journalrecord.com/2025/02/20/is-google-making-search...
You’re clearly taking for granted any learnt skills which you have and projecting them to others. A substantial portion of the world population can’t speak English, and I suspect the grand majority of humans don’t know how to drive a car either.
I know you have to turn the wheel to turn the car and that I should keep to the right, but that doesn’t count as actually knowing how to properly operate a car.
So, yeah, things are not always that clear. That's why it's so useful to give people the benefit of a charitable interpretation of their words by default.
Think of the average person you know that had terrible results in middle school and high school or of the average driver, that thinks he's better than 80% of drivers out there.
If I say "its like finding out someone ate the last of your favorite candy", it is meant to analogize a feeling of disappointment. If you personally don't like candy, I would expect that you have the ability to understand the meaning and intent and not focus on how the analogy doesn't perfectly align with your individual personal experiences and preferences. If you want to complain about how some cultures don't really eat candy, while others focus on collective sharing over individual ownership, I suppose you can.
People said the same thing you're saying about Google in the late 90s, early 2000s before their IPO (and immediately afterwards). There was a sense in which people didn't really think search -- which seemed more like a public utility -- could ever be profitable. Yahoo and AltaVista and Excite blanketed theirs in ads and junk. The search itself was seen merely as a draw into a "portal."
It's not inevitable that the same thing happen with services like Perplexity. But I do think things are going to get shaken up.
It seems like Google agrees at some level, because they seem to have just given up.
Perplexity uses frontier models under the hood, it doesn’t own all core aspects of its platform. They’re extremely dependent on frontier models and therefore reliant on underlying model pricing remaining sustainable.
But these days I do do a lot of 'research phase' stuff right in Claude Code. If looking at a technical issue, etc. I'll give it URLs and terms to search for and let it do some research for me. Mixed results.
Many people pay to use _AI tools_, that already brings in revenue. I had chatgpt plus since very early days, which was 20$/month, I don't have it at the moment because my company provides pro plan to me (and every other engineer) which is probably around 200$/month/user.
Of course, serving a single inference on LLM's probably costs a lot more than a serving a single search on google, but they've already got a solid business model and they won't need intrusive adds _in a few years_ (if at all)
Pro tip: get a free account and don't go pro. Their free account is bananas good atm "while supplies last"
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.
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.
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..
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
- 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.
Midjourney don’t do that because they are doing good with new signups without it.
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.
Searching for Midjourney finds Midjourney with direct links to sections of their website. uBlock Origin blocks ads. All is well.
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.
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.
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.
What an embarrassment Google has become, but I guess that sweet-sweet ad money trumps everything else.
You can't be happy building great products and thinking long term, nope, you've gotta show higher growth in the shorter term too.
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.
It has two (or more) customers with different needs. For now, google needs to satisfy us (the users), but not delight.
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.
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.
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.
lol :^)
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.
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.
Marginal benefit vs Marginal cost.
This is how my google search looks in chrome with ublock lite 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.
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?
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.
What is search anyway (not being flippant!)? Its quite an odd 'thing' really these days.
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
Also, searching for "netcup", I got two sponsored cloud services before seeing "https://www.netcup.com/": https://www.google.com/search?q=netcup
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.
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.
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.
At least Google writes the word sponsored, the real world doesn't do that.
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.
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.
wk_end•4mo ago
(Please don't read this as a defense of Google on the whole.)
drusepth•4mo ago
[1] https://i.imgur.com/Oxo4FJl.png
A_D_E_P_T•4mo ago
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•4mo ago
drusepth•4mo ago
codazoda•4mo ago
miltonlost•4mo ago
SchemaLoad•4mo ago
Ideally Google would offer some kind of ad free option, perhaps on a higher tier of the Google One plans.
stordoff•4mo ago
perks_12•4mo ago
driverdan•4mo ago
How do you tolerate the web without an ad blocker?
luqtas•4mo ago
wk_end•4mo ago
chaseadam17•4mo ago
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/hlF6OoU