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Google to push new ads on its apps

reuters.com

31–40 of 151 posts

Re: Google to push new ads on its apps

#31

Time to install a mobile browser with ad-blocking capabilities. Suggestions? I haven't used Firefox on my phone in years, but I remember it being slower than a snail

I’ve been using Firefox Focus with DDG on mobile for about a year and don’t miss Chrome even a little.

Re: Google to push new ads on its apps

#32
> The gallery ads are part of an effort to make search results more visual.

By distracting from legitimate results?

Like others will say here, I finally switched to DDG earlier this week. It’s good enough and you get accustomed to doing a !g pretty quickly when needed.

Re: Google to push new ads on its apps

#35
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Google be desperate, though? They are hugely cash positive, have enormous cash reserves, and essentially no competition outside of China.

They have had many years of revenue growth that exceeds eyeball growth. They did that by slowly pushing organic results down the fold in favor of ads. That trick is played out now...there's little real estate above the fold left to cede to ads now. So, to maintain revenue growth that exceeds eyeball growth, they need new tricks. Basically, they set the bar very high.

My wish is that adds fill the first SERP so that I can just go to page 2 and be done.

Damn you, Overture, why did you have to do that!

Re: Google to push new ads on its apps

#36
post #2

This is "break glass in case of emergency" levels of desperation.

Why would Google be desperate, though? They are hugely cash positive, have enormous cash reserves, and essentially no competition outside of China.

Greed? Please Wall Street?

I don't really know really. Maybe the executives are in fear they will be swept out if they are not delivering on hiking the stock price?

Re: Google to push new ads on its apps

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Google be desperate, though? They are hugely cash positive, have enormous cash reserves, and essentially no competition outside of China.

Because they appear to be obsessed with growth at nearly all costs. Which each passing month it looks more and more likely that short term thinking has began to drive how Google acts and reacts.

This has been getting more and more clear for a while. I had already lost a lot of respect after Google decided to become a defense contractor, but this is just greedy and antithetical to the values that made most of us start using Google in the first place.

Google has been selling garbage ad placements for years which has been an obvious revenue boosting game, but nobody seemed to care.

Let’s hope Google gets its priorities back in order. I had thought Schmidt leaving the board was a good thing, but he seems to have been pushed out by those whose incentives are much more short term.

Companies can be hijacked by people with the wrong incentives.

Re: Google to push new ads on its apps

#40

Does anyone have suggestions for an Android based alternative to Google Maps? (preferably open source, etc)

I would suggest osmand.

The basic version is free, you can download data state by state (country by country when you are traveling) so it doesn't need a data connection on the road (but online search is available if you do have a data connection). It does routing for cars / bikes / pedestrian and has decent turn-by-turn instructions that you can configure to your liking. The underlying data comes from OpenStreetMap (hence the name of OSM + and(roid)), so if the data is wrong you can fit it yourself.

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