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How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

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Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#81

Post by ineedasername »

> What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway?

I don't think that's the case. I mean, in some case yes there are companies buying ads when they would have been among the top search results anyway. But assuming that many ad creators are probably savvy enough to know where they rate in organic search results, they're likely not targeting adwords where they'd be high in those organic results.

I.e., competent users of google advertising are, by definition, users that avoid paying for results they would have gotten otherwise.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#82

Post by munk-a »

xyzzyz wrote: post #71
president wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective Did anyone besides Google sales and marketing people actually believe that?

Indeed, who are all those people giving Google $100B a year, with 20% growth YoY, to run their ads? They must all be fools to believe that Google is giving them anything of value.

Possibly? Or they think that their payments are required to be ranked fairly on Google's service and view it more as blackmail than anything else. Searching for "amazon" brings up an Ad paid for by Amazon, searching for "books for sale" brings up paid Ads for four different book sellers - if any of them stopped paying google they'd be, at best, the fourth result - and the first Ad result is for the first organic result, the next organic result is the fourth ad, the one after it a sub-page in the last result and the fourth organic result is craigslist which didn't pay for an Ad. In fact, Amazon isn't even on the first page of results except for their Ad.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#83

Post by gtirloni »

delusionalwrit wrote: post #72

I'm ready for a pay per search tool that's as useful as google with the privacy focus of duck duck go. A penny a search - I'm game.

I'd certainly pay a fixed price per month for unlimited searches. I think Google knows that won't work so they don't offer it. Or they couldn't ask the same price that they get selling your personal data?

They do offer Youtube Premium without ads but the search engine space is really different. Microtransactions are not here yet.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#84

Post by toss1 »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #4

I've actually moved to other search engines because the quality of the results have gone down dramatically. It seems like google will fixate on one or two keywords in my search (usually the most generic ones) and ignore the rest. In addition, the old google tricks like using quotes for literal values no longer seems to work. It is like google is guessing what I want, rather than trying to find what I have entered as…

YEs.

Switched to DuckDuckGo a few months ago and haven't looked back, the results pages are much cleaner, like the old Google results.

One blatant issue with Google (& DDG still often does not get right) is the search for a specific busines - using the exact business name and sometimes even town - I expect their listing to be at the top. Instead there's piles of Yelp & listing pages, and I often cannot even find the actual Item for which I'm searching - sometimes have to go to the indexers, hunt for their posting of the intended [website], and go that way.

Opportunity for someone to get it actually right...

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#85

Post by jborichevskiy »

munk-a wrote: post #82
xyzzyz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, who are all those people giving Google $100B a year, with 20% growth YoY, to run their ads? They must all be fools to believe that Google is giving them anything of value.

Possibly? Or they think that their payments are required to be ranked fairly on Google's service and view it more as blackmail than anything else. Searching for "amazon" brings up an Ad paid for by Amazon, searching for "books for sale" brings up paid Ads for four different book sellers - if any of them stopped paying google they'd be, at best, the fourth result - and the first Ad result is for the first organic resu…

Related tweet by Jason Fried about Basecamp result placement:

"When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own brand name, you’re forced to pay up if you want to be found. It’s a shakedown. It’s ransom. But at least we can have fun with it. Search for Basecamp and you may see this attached ad."

https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016?la...

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#86

Post by iamaelephant »

skrowl wrote: post #58
blackearl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as any other monopolistic company. Comcast isn't necessarily good at providing internet, in fact most of their customers would say they're shit at it. But most people don't have a choice.

Most people can choose only phone company or cable company for internet (some people only get 1 or the other). There are LOTS of search engines to choose from that are freely available. DuckDuckGo is pretty great these days. Microsoft is even is making a search engine now, I've heard! /s

In this analogy the "cable customer" would be the ad purchaser. I don't know enough about that industry to know if the analogy works, but just saying.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#87

Post by ineedasername »

I think a better question that isn't asked is the following: Has Google created a market for ads where non would exist if they simply provided only organic results?

By this I mean that it's possible the main reason Google Ads are useful for companies is because Google has reinforced a sort of negative Nash equilibrium by allowing competitors to squat on organic results by purchasing ads against those better results. I.e. So the best organic results lose user share & clicks because Google lets competitors set ads against them. Given this situation, those targeted by their competitors have no choice but to try & outbid their rivals. Meaning Google Ads are only useful to companies because they exist at all, and assuming minimal gaming of the organic results system with SEO, both companies and users would be better off if there were no ads and the best most relevant results won out on their own merit.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#88

Post by fjp »

Reedx wrote: post #79
blackearl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as any other monopolistic company. Comcast isn't necessarily good at providing internet, in fact most of their customers would say they're shit at it. But most people don't have a choice.

I don't like Comcast, but at least in my experience, others I know and companies worked at, it's been surprisingly reliable. Used them at multiple locations over the past 15+ years and could count the number of outages or other issues on one hand. Is that unusual? Do we know what the data says about it? Statistics on uptime, ping, speed, customer response turnaround...

I used them in college in Chicago ~ 4 years ago and we have 12+ outages in a single year, several of which took multiple days to resolve, and we never got close to the speed we were paying for.

Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?

#90

Post by tmpz22 »

Reedx wrote: post #79
blackearl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as any other monopolistic company. Comcast isn't necessarily good at providing internet, in fact most of their customers would say they're shit at it. But most people don't have a choice.

I don't like Comcast, but at least in my experience, others I know and companies worked at, it's been surprisingly reliable. Used them at multiple locations over the past 15+ years and could count the number of outages or other issues on one hand. Is that unusual? Do we know what the data says about it? Statistics on uptime, ping, speed, customer response turnaround...

There’s a certain irony that you ask for data instead of anecdotes to chastise /u/blackearl’s claim, then provide a personal anecdote to support your claim.

This seems like a reasonable start to build a case against Comcast:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Comcast

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