Live data from Hacker News

Every Google result now looks like an ad

twitter.com

1–10 of 1001 posts

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#2
Perhaps it's worth quoting Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in the original paper on the Google search engine:

> "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. ...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. "

(http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)

At the time they thought this was a bad thing...

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#3
I wish there was a way to directly help Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yandex improve their search results. I've tried both, and it's just not the same.

Google I can bang in cryptic queries like > centos 7 tuned no daemon

and get the 3rd link about how to run tuned in a no daemon mode. Bing/DuckDuckGo have the article at around 7th or 8th place, but prefaced by a lot of "while technically not wrong, not what I'm looking for" links. It's even worse for more niche errors or code snippets.

We cannot, as a healthy internet, let Google control so much of the web.

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#4
post #3

I wish there was a way to directly help Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yandex improve their search results. I've tried both, and it's just not the same. Google I can bang in cryptic queries like > centos 7 tuned no daemon and get the 3rd link about how to run tuned in a no daemon mode. Bing/DuckDuckGo have the article at around 7th or 8th place, but prefaced by a lot of "while technically not wrong, not what I'm looking for" links.…

Do they factor in the number of clicks on each result? If so then it would presumably improve over time.

I know Google also factors in how long people spend on the resulting webpage.

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#5
Not sure about the facts underlying the analysis. In my search results (and it's important to remember that it's possible you get different results than another user, due to launch experiments and trials) the ads do not have icons. They say "Ad" in bold text. The "organics" results have icons.

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#7
post #4
post #3

I wish there was a way to directly help Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yandex improve their search results. I've tried both, and it's just not the same. Google I can bang in cryptic queries like > centos 7 tuned no daemon and get the 3rd link about how to run tuned in a no daemon mode. Bing/DuckDuckGo have the article at around 7th or 8th place, but prefaced by a lot of "while technically not wrong, not what I'm looking for" links.…

Do they factor in the number of clicks on each result? If so then it would presumably improve over time. I know Google also factors in how long people spend on the resulting webpage.

Yes, they do factor in number of clicks. They also consider "regret" -- returning to the search list and picking a different result.

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#8
post #5

Not sure about the facts underlying the analysis. In my search results (and it's important to remember that it's possible you get different results than another user, due to launch experiments and trials) the ads do not have icons. They say "Ad" in bold text. The "organics" results have icons.

Yes I see the same, it's really easy to tell what is an ad and what isn't...

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#9
Huh... I thought it was just me. I have a rather atypical setup with my privacy extensions and browser settings, so I just assumed that one of them was changing the DOM to make it look like this. Just yesterday I was searching for some ISP offers and clicked on an ad result. Well.. I think I just need to get over my lazyness and finally host searx locally.

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#10
post #2

Perhaps it's worth quoting Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in the original paper on the Google search engine: > "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. ...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. " ( http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html ) At th…

Money can change almost anyone's opinion about almost any subject.
Post reply on HN