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Every Google result now looks like an ad

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Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#541
post #29

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.

https://web.archive.org/web/20151213182805/https://www.googl...

https://i.imgur.com/cPQmHB0.png

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#542
post #99
post #29

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.

Your link is gold. A historic artifact. Amazing how clear the writing is, how simple the message. That’s, like, totally not the corpspeak Goog emits now on a daily basis. So, let’s do some digging. Earliest version of url dates back 4+ years. https://web.archive.org/web/20151213182805/https://www.googl... Things were a little better than, but not by much. This has to be earlier. Ah, here is: https://books.google.ca/b…

OOPs - I did the same thing before reading your post...

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It no longer makes sense to be able serve our own content without it being pushed down in search results? We were talking about CDNs because your collegue mentioned AMP CDNs, but the main point doesn't change: we cannot serve our own content from our own servers and get the same placement in search results as AMP content, even if our content loads verifiably fast and is as performant as an AMP page on the client.

> We were talking about CDNs because your collegue mentioned AMP CDNs I have no clue who bdeurst is. They certainly aren't a colleague of mine. > even if our content loads verifiably fast and is as performant as an AMP page on the client. Can you explain to me how your page load time is 0ms? My understanding is that a correctly functioning AMP-cached page will load for the user in a whopping 0ms, because it can be pr…

AMP pages are preloaded, that's how your get the 0ms load time. If Google would instruct the browser to preload other search results the same way, those would also be available in 0ms when the user accesses them.

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is hijacking the domain with Google for AMP not anti-competitive? I'm surprised a class action lawsuit hasn't erupted because of that.

Also what is the technical benefit? On android it feels like a downgrade

It seems faster for me across devices but there’s usability issues, at least on some sites/pages. In my experience “find on the page” is spotty or impossible on mobile sometimes.

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#545
post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effectively 0 AMP sites are using anything other than Google's CDN.

But as long as it's possible it doesn't qualify as lock-in.

You don't need lock-in to be anti-competitive. The requirement of extra work to implement AMP to get that higher search results page placement is the issue.

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#546
post #26

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…

>Thanks for ruining the Web, Google. I posted the solution below, which I found a few days ago. The script will work with greasemonkey and tampermonkey, it will provide you with results similar to the ones before the change. If you also use uMatrix, there will be no ads. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/395257-better-google

F (4 later setup)

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#548
post #26

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…

> 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…

The "web" is built around "human readable" technologies. Even actual implementation details that the user doesn't care about - like the application layer protocol (HTTP) and the source code for pages (HTML, CSS) - is human readable.

The "point" of the web was to serve humans, not machines. If we wanted to serve machines, we'd just throw binary blobs around, which would be orders of magnitude more efficient.

That said, I still have a bunch of "ancient" tech magazines that had directories of URLs for (then) popular websites, grouped by category. That's how we found things then.

People forget that there was a world before Google.

Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad

#549
post #511
post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google hates strong SEO sites, because they won't make them any money. So that's a clever way of pushing them further down. I wondered when all results on the first page will be Ads only.

Do they really? Wouldn't a "strong SEO" site be ideal for their spiders?

I guess sites with real, useful content (e.g. Wikipedia) don't need strong SEO since they have a ton of back-links from other sites that validate their high ranking, so "strong SEO" is really about making a less useful site look more useful, which makes sense for them to hate.

SEO really translates to "How to fool Google into boosting your ranking artifically".

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