the quality of the results is going down, not to mention the suggestions... it seriously looks like the suggestions were made up by their PR department. Everything is going downhill, use DDG
Every Google result now looks like an ad
391–400 of 1001 posts
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#392So a bad person can steal favicon of say New York Times and trick users clicking their fake links because eventually users will get used to establishing "credibility" of brand by recognizing the favicons? (granted the bad person is great at SEO best practices and their search results show up at the top)
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
They display both because Google is selling ad space on searches like these, where people search the name of a site. If that site doesn't buy the ad, their competitor will. So sites are being forced to buy ads on their own trademark.
I understand why it's happening and I mentioned it in my comment. However, I just find it incredibly inappropriate that... 1. When I search an exact domain Google will take money from a competitor and show their "advertisement" first. I say that in quotations, because it looks like they're showing a search result, not an advertisement. At this point it feels like companies are paying for their search placement. Pay e…
To play devil's advocate, these kind of brand ads are usually very cheap and frequently generate some incrementality - you're basically paying to have your links take over a larger part of page 1. Even if competitors weren't going to advertise, it might be worth it.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#394I've been using duckduckgo and bing for a while now. Google is just a fallback.
My biggest beef with DDG is that they do not do worldwide results very well. Their results are overwhelmingly US centric. As an example.... I search on DDG, "buy cricket equipment near me". I am not behind a VPN and whatsmyip correctly identifies my hostname with the correct European country suffix. However, the top results on DDG for this query is "Dick's Sporting Goods". Click on that and I get a nasty "GDPR DSG So…
I use DDG, but I have the same exasperation. Even appending 'Melbourne' to a search, I'm liable to get results from a tiny town in Florida rather a metropolis in Australia.
It's frustrating, because for geographical based results, I'm forced to drop back to Google consistently, and Google's getting worse and more user hostile/advertiser friendly.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes the parent's point, as "for over 15 years" means you've started around 2005 -- well into the Google era. You never known the web without Google, which is why you can say "Google built the web" and other such nonsense.
> You never known the web without Google Of course I have. I used Ask Jeeves before Google even existed, and navigated via those awful web directory services before that. I never claimed that Google "built the web", but that they've contributed to it. You're putting words in my mouth.
>I never claimed that Google "built the web", but that they've contributed to it. You're putting words in my mouth.
Is this your gig, being all touchy and getting into arguments over small stuff?
You've already flagged one person for "abuse" because they said "Were you even born 10 years ago?" (such abuse!), and now you're complaining I'm "putting words in your mouth" because you "never claimed that Google "built the web".
You did write, and I quote literally: "They've [Google] contributed more to the web than probably any company outside of CERN" which is pretty much the same thing in my book.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
So the user sees your URL, you're getting the revenue from the ads that are shown, sharing will share your URL, your statistics work flawlessly. In other words: if it behaves exactly as a page hosted on your site (just faster), why do you care? I'm getting the impression that HN users care a whole lot about seeing the request in the nginx log they are tailing.
Well, as a user, I care about not announcing loudly to Google every single step I take on the web.
Then why are you searching on Google? That's where you would see an AMP page served from a Google AMP cache. If you searched on Bing, you would get AMP pages served from a Bing AMP cache instead.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does DDG use for an algorithm? Originally Google was just using pagerank but that was too easy to game by SEO. This means DDG needed to address this, and apparently they have (e.g, search for 'favicon' like the post). How long can we rely on DDG staying neutral in their algorithm?
They use this little known "algorithm" as their backend: https://www.bing.com/ . It's remarkable, BTW, that most people at the same time believe that Bing sucks, and DDG is "just as good as Google". For me that hasn't been my experience at all: Google is far, far ahead of Bing (and by extension DDG) in terms of relevance.
It seems possible without bias, DDG went full on with instant results. I guess Bing does those now too, I don't know, but the choice of scope and resources to use can be enough distinction to colour people's perceptions.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#398I'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…
AMP obscuring the URL is a side effect of the current technical implementation, not a goal – and they are working to fix it: https://searchengineland.com/google-announces-signed-exchang...
Actually, that so-called "fix" obscures the actual Google URL where the content is served from.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#399Yes, I think Google reached "peak search" awhile back, and we're now on a downward trend. The search results are increasingly degraded by commercial intervention, by Google and its paying customers. There has always been a conflict of interest between Google and its public consumers, and Google is now leveraging its near-monopoly market position to shift the balance of that conflict to its financial advantage.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is part of Google's attempt to de-prioritise the URL. URLs have always been an implementation detail and not a user feature. From the very beginning it was intended that users would follow links, not type in URLs. HTML was built on hiding URLs behind text. Then AOL keywords happened. Then search explosion happened. And short URLs. And QR codes for real-world linking. And bookmarks because yet again typing in U…
> From the very beginning it was intended that users would follow links, not type in URLs. so, about that 4.6 Locators are human transcribable. Users can copy Internet locators from one medium to another (such as voice to paper, or paper to keyboard) without loss or corruption of information. This process is not required to be comfortable. you can't copy a page title into a client and expect it to find the right reso…
> you can't copy a page title into a client and expect it to find the right resource, now, do you?
You can type it into Google, though...