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.
Does Kagi have a better localized experience?
You'll still need Google Maps though.
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).
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.
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 add for something different right above it. Not only is it allowed, it’s encouraged.
I believe so - and it seems the devs know it happens, bevause I often see a paid ad for "Chrome" if I search "Chrome"
"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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The post points out a problem with the fraction that is allocated to Ads, but if that's "everything that's wrong with Google Search", then it would actually be an endorsement of the quality of the organic search results (which I doubt).
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."
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!
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.
(1) There are some old rules for a user interface.
(2) Billions of people know these rules and right away and easily can 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 their cartoon 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 their stock?
Seriously is this the level of HN discussion nowadays?
> I typed in Midjourney to search for Midjourney because I wanted to use Midjourney.
wk_end•55m ago
(Please don't read this as a defense of Google on the whole.)
drusepth•51m ago
[1] https://i.imgur.com/Oxo4FJl.png
A_D_E_P_T•49m 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•32m ago
codazoda•43m ago
miltonlost•42m ago
SchemaLoad•26m ago
Ideally Google would offer some kind of ad free option, perhaps on a higher tier of the Google One plans.
stordoff•17m ago