I wish there was an easy way to charge customers who are savvy enough to distinguish between ads and organic results different pricing, but until then everyone is subject to the Google tax. Our numbers still show a significant portion of customers come from ad clicks, and we have no choice but to bid on them to stay competitive. I have no problem with companies charging for services, but by decoupling the payment for Google's "free" services from the buyer we're all getting a screwy deal. At least their engineers are paid well though...
Every Google result now looks like an ad
671–680 of 1001 posts
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#672I've been using duckduckgo and bing for a while now. Google is just a fallback.
I switched a couple months back because Google started messing around with image search. If you click on an image it now displays a small version of it on the side, instead of enlarging it. It's so useless. There are some things I miss about Google (I feel like I got better results when searching for programming questions), but I don't miss it too much.
I don't currently have an alternative I use daily, but programming questions seem to me to be the most annoying use case for Google search. I frequently use 4 or 5 keywords to try to find information on a topic, and it gets a cluster of results which ignores one or more of the words that is absolutely essential, because what I want has few if any hits. But things that are everywhere on the internet, I don't need to search for, dammit!
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#673Well this is Google you're up against. We techies complain every now and then about Google's practices, we hate it and end up moving on and we find ourselves using them again and again.
They already ruined the web with Facebook by riddling their search results with ads, being part of the ICAAN and having their own TLD, and then introducing AMP. In this case for this ad search result problem, uBlock Origin wipes these ad-links anyway. No need for these other funky hacks suggested in the Twitter thread.
It's also funny to see some Twitter users in the thread who have a website only for me to see on uBlock Origin which reports usages of 'Google Analytics'. Looks like we will all go back to spreading Googleware once again.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#674Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not true. CDNs also use their own non-Google domains and infrastructure for AMP hosting: https://amp.cloudflare.com/
Effectively 0 AMP sites are using anything other than Google's CDN.
Is this link using Google's CDN?
https://amp.businessinsider.com/lambda-school-online-coding-...
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#675Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's absolutely extortion, but it's cheaper for Expedia to buy than a competitor due to Google's auction rules. Essentially, the bid to be #1 is discounted by the click-through rate. If 90% of people who search "expedia.com" will click an ad for Expedia, and only 10% of people who search "expedia.com" will click an ad for travelsite.com, travelsite.com has to pay 10x what Expedia does to make up for the lost revenue.
Devil's advocate - isn't this a neat way of automatically being anti-incumbent and pro-competition?
? I don't follow the mechanism you're thinking of here.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#676It's funny, because if you run AdSense on your website, Google has very strict guidelines about not misleading users and making a clear distinction between advertisements and your content. However, when Google shows ads on their site, they don't need to follow those rules, they blend them in as closely as possible. Also, what's the deal with showing an advertisement for the same result that's number one? See the belo…
Is it plausible they've created a Church/State style separation between the Ads and Results? Seems like that would be desirable in a lot of cases, though perhaps not in cases when someone is Googling for something with an obvious first result
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#677Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's absolutely extortion, but it's cheaper for Expedia to buy than a competitor due to Google's auction rules. Essentially, the bid to be #1 is discounted by the click-through rate. If 90% of people who search "expedia.com" will click an ad for Expedia, and only 10% of people who search "expedia.com" will click an ad for travelsite.com, travelsite.com has to pay 10x what Expedia does to make up for the lost revenue.
Devil's advocate - isn't this a neat way of automatically being anti-incumbent and pro-competition?
It might be if it were more transparent. So many people are mislead by these "ads" on branded search keywords though, it really is extortionate.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#678Very much a way to mitigate the FTC's requirements on making advertising more distinct than organic results. It is an unpopular opinion but I believe Google is dying. They have been for a long time. The cancer is that nothing other than search ads generates the revenue and margins they need and the margins on search ads are now down 90% from where they were in 2010. Personally I'm long on Microsoft/Bing as a candidat…
you know why they re dying? because i have to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" or "wiki" to my questions because google often gives shit results, and the mix of ads and results is hilariously confusing. If reddit and SO wake up and realize how well they can monetize their own search, google is gonna be panicking.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#679Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, Wikipedia has been relegated lower and lower in search results. So much so that I now specifically use their search tool rather than go through google just in case some interesting thing pops up.
I use duckduckgo, and for the most part, you know what you are searching for so the !tags are really good. !w search term, just takes you right to wikipedea. When I really have no ideal what or where I'm looking for something, I still find myself looking on google a bit, but for the most part, !youtube, !arch, !git, !stack, get me exactly what I want about 99 percent of the time. Check it out, because it sounds like…
For YouTube you can use !yt, much shorter.
Re: Every Google result now looks like an ad
#680I wonder what the tipping point will be? At what point Google Search revenue will have peaked, pushing Google to accelerate the pace of experiments and new solutions to make more out of fewer users.
Like many around here, I have (re)started using alternatives to Google products last year. We're early adopters, so it will take a while for Google to be affected by a mass exodus, but what will happen when it will start? What medium will they use to fill the gap. The only (currently) untapped options matching Search's reach to display ads are: Gmail, Android, Google Photos. Probably nothing else. What happens for advertisers targeting specifically users like me who end up stopping using Google Search (e.g., how do you reach a high earner from Bay Area if they have completely stopped using Search? Because this, will happen first, and these users are valuable).
The required scale of any alternative is critical. Compensating for Search revenue decline is no easy feat. So much that, until now, nothing else generates anything even close to Search's revenue. If you talk profit, it's even worse as YouTube is probably not as profitable as Google would like (YouTube Premium anyone?) it to be.
So, the future will probably come from outside of Google's own properties, and that is why they are slowly killing competition in the ad tech space (3rd party cookies & Chrome). That is why they have been trying to diversify and are wisely enough pushing very hard with GCP and other proven revenue streams like subscriptions (YouTube Music, YouTube Premium, gSuite).
Probably also why founders really left.
It will be an interesting decade, for sure!