151–160 of 1001 posts
https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/ It's a little confusing to read now, so for context: at the time Google published this, it only put ads in the sidebar to the right of search results. This post was written to criticize the practice of putting ads atop search results, which competitors sometimes formatted almost indistinguishably from organic search results.
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Evil is also subjective.
Okay, for the sake of argument, let's accept your worldview where good and evil are subjective and therefore irrelevant. The only thing left then is, what do we want? It becomes a question of what do I want, and who can I view as allies in achieving my goals. I want a search tool that serves my needs, not the needs of advertisers. I want privacy and I don't want distractions. So Google is not on my side, they are my…
How did you make that giant leap? Subjective doesn’t mean irrelevant, it means everyone has their own opinion on it which makes it quite relevant.
Your tangent was difficult to follow on the sole basis that Google is no different than any other entity. The US government is evil because we don’t share the same goals. Vegans are evil because we don’t share the same goals. Football players are evil because we don’t share the same goals. I can go on but you should get the picture by now.
At the end of the day, you should understand that businesses exist solely to make money. If they didn’t make money, they wouldn’t have investors. Without investors, most businesses would not exist. Without those businesses, we would be objectively worse off.
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.…
Not only can you bang in whatever query you want to DDG, you can bang it in via Google, using bangs (https://duckduckgo.com/bang). I think that "!g " is the second stop for many DDG'ers, when DDG itself disappoints. (My understanding is that it still offers some anonymisation over searching directly through Google, but I'm not sure.)
Unironically switch to Bing
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Evil is also subjective.
And yet they felt the need to remove the "don't be evil" clause from their code of conduct.
I've been in this A/B test for a couple of months now, so I've had time to adjust, and I still hate it. I've just become so used to seeing the complete URL in green. The complete URL! If you hover over the results, you'll see that they like to take bits like numeric components or the query string out. This is part of Google's attempt to de-prioritise the URL. Their destructive AMP service confusingly shows you Google…
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For example facebook or amazon could pay NOT to have an ad above their result That sounds an awful lot like a shakedown practice. "Nice search result you got there. Would be a shame if it would be obscured by an ad..."
Their current behavior is no different in that regard AND is more confusing for internet users and business AND is based on the twisted "market price" of the search keywords
Deduplication is the lesser of two confusings.
Prefer DuckDuckGo for searching, if possible. If you don't like DuckDuckGo's results and can't tolerate them, then prefer Startpage to Google, which will give you the same algorithm minus tracking/customization. Even post-acquisition, Startpage is still a more privacy-conscious engine than Google, and their ads are better labeled. And while I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, quick reminder that unless you're r…
[Y] https://www.startpage.com/blog/company-updates/startpage-and...