So...we're back to 1999 when the first 10 choices are paid ads?
FWIW, this site is down about 2-3 screenfuls in Google, well below the fold, so Google isn't blameless here. The results above it are a sports onebox, news universal, and Twitter highlights, though, all about the Yankees/Phillies game tonight, so arguably they are showing what users actually are most likely to want to see.
Google is charging money on other people's brands.
This wouldn't be a problem if there were ten popular search engines, or if portals were still popular and there were ten popular portals.
But what Google has done is gross monopolistic misconduct.
They've "removed the URL bar" and turned it into a search bar. They've put their browser on all devices and made it the default. They've made Google search the default. They've destroyed the ad blocker.
Now, when I search for a brand, I see an ad that looks like an official result in first place.
iPhone -> paid ad
Nike -> paid ad
Midjourney -> paid ad
These are companies' hard earned brands, and yet Google is collecting rent on them.
Google is taxing the entire internet. This ought to be illegal.
Google deserves to be broken up.
No, but they are, with ever increasing accuracy, the web.
You use Chrome and Google, and both are interfering with that process. They're sticking themselves in the middle of that transaction and neither you nor Best Buy want them there.
Also there is a HUGE difference in ad quality between the old pay for placement guys and Google. On Google, your ad has to be relevant and will be downranked into oblivion if nobody clicks on it. On Overture and the rest of them, that was not the case, they just auctioned off the results without regard to whether any of it was relevant. I know some of you refuse to believe this, but Google search ads are themselves a corpus of documents that are responsive to the user's search term.
There was a brief moment in history where we could get concise and efficient answers to any question we had.
Now we need to harness the computing power of an LLM to get something remotely similar…and it’s still inherently worse.
at least with a page full of search results I can compare and weed out misleading or garbage results
With an LLM the users are now just taking whatever they get as the truth. Never realizing LLMs are not designed to be accurate.
I was in SF at the time, and remember Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, Alta Vista, Yahoo, etc.
Google's attraction at the time was not necessarily that it found you the best site for the information you sought, but that it was simple, uncluttered, and more varied. Yahoo, for example, lead you through a tedious "tree" of options, whereas Google allowed you to choose for yourself.
After all, how were you to know that the links provided by Google were any better than those provided by others?
In other interpretations of Google's success is the auction/bidding model for the advertising it did show. This was apparently so successful that it forced Google to become public, i.e. that the revenue it generated prevented Google from continuing to be a privately-held company. Others here might have a better insight into this aspect of Google's success.
Google withheld how well its advertising was doing until that threshold was crossed, and it was a surprise to many how much money it was making. This was before its IPO in 2004.
me: "Here, I'll look for that using google, it's just about the best search engine around right now."
colleague: "If it's really that good, why haven't I heard of it?"
me: "You just did"
Now on Google they are adding paid ads in the middle of the search results, not just the top or bottom.
The reason Google did well was the absence of ads. These LLMs like ChatGPT have now taken that experience that Google has lost.
Their competitors gambled that the portal-aspect provided additional value that compensated for their shitty search results. It did not. That's also largely why they didn't adopt's Google's minimalist style. If they had adopted a similar design to Google it would have really been an apples to apples comparison, which would not have been flattering.
vouaobrasil•6mo ago
jeffbee•6mo ago
vouaobrasil•6mo ago
signatoremo•6mo ago
marginalia_nu•6mo ago
ofalkaed•6mo ago
The portals offered a very naturally curated web, the portal curated the sites it listed and each site offered a curated web as well through those links pages and webrings.
wildpeaks•6mo ago
And come to think of it, it also influenced the way I use social media because I mostly only follow people who curate/recommend interesting links, like back in the day of human curators having ownership of their own categories
signatoremo•6mo ago
vouaobrasil•6mo ago