Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 284 posts

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

#221

Post by Retric »

listenallyall wrote: post #209
grawprog wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>quality ads I've seen this term for years but I still don't understand what it means. I don't want to see ads. There are no 'quality' ads. All ads are designed to sell me things period. I don't need anyone telling me about what I might want. I understand ads exist to make money and if they didn't we wouldn't have the internet etc. But there's no 'quality' to them, they're a necessary evil i've come to accept and ada…

Your hard-line position that all ads are bad, always, is laughable. If you search for "cheapest gasoline" it's not unreasonable that an ad for an electric car might be interesting. Or if you search for "Orlando hotels", an ad for generally less expensive hotels in Kissimmee (the next town over) is more valuable than a perfectly literal result. And if you search for "k8s cluster deployment tools" then you probably wan…

Signs like those famous Golden Arches can be useful.

However, when browsing the web in 20+ years I have never seen a useful paid for online add. That’s an inherent product of the medium where the only point of an add is to be less useful than the content I am looking at.

Supose your GPS added advertising. so it’s priority is not the best for you but what’s best for 3rd parties. That’s what online adds are, they take something useful and inherently degrade the experience.

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

#222

Post by laurex »

clairity wrote: post #204
grawprog wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>quality ads I've seen this term for years but I still don't understand what it means. I don't want to see ads. There are no 'quality' ads. All ads are designed to sell me things period. I don't need anyone telling me about what I might want. I understand ads exist to make money and if they didn't we wouldn't have the internet etc. But there's no 'quality' to them, they're a necessary evil i've come to accept and ada…

it's really not hard to define what a "good" ad might be--a product (or service) you don't know about but that solves an immediate problem without an immediately obvious solution. it'd anticipate your need, without invading your privacy. fwiw, i generally don't want to be subjected to ads either, particularly for the privacy-invading aspect, but also the time- and attention-wasting aspect too. most ads are absolutely…

The problem with ads isn't "good" or "bad" ads, it's that the nature of building a business of serving ads inevitably leads to an unquenchable thirst for data plus customers whose primary goal in paying you is to sell things, not to provide value (though some may do so as a selling strategy). It's hard to imagine how, or even why, such an ad business could serve the best interests of the end consumer, despite the idea held at one point that perhaps consumers would be so turned off by ads that they'd defect to a different solution. There might be SOME people who don't use Google or Facebook for these reasons, but most people simply deal with poor user experience, security, and frustration because they want to see things listed with reviews on a map, or know what their friends are doing on the weekend.

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

#223

Post by unlinked_dll »

takk309 wrote: post #94
smichel17 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen people type "example" into the address bar, hit enter, then click the Google link to example.com, without realizing that they could just add ".com" to the end of their initial query and go directly to their destination.

My wife does this all the time. If she wants to go to Prime video she types "Amazon Prime Video" into her address bar then clicks the first Google result, often the ad for Prime Video.

To be fair, the actual page navigation to amazon prime video is not straightforward.

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

#224

Post by modriano »

Disruptive_Dave wrote: post #32
jborichevskiy wrote: post #13

> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is bill…

But that's precisely what makes Google "good at ads." They built the firehose. Own a destination where billions of people go everyday, find a way to measure their intent, serve my information to them. That = fantastic at ads.

Sometimes I type the name of a site into the URL bar, but I don't include the top-level domain. Most of the time, the top link is an ad for the site I wanted, and the second link is a non-ad link to the site I wanted.

I always try to click the non-ad link, as I like the sites that I remember the names of and I don't want them to have to pay the troll toll, but sometimes I accidentally click the top link and I feel bad (only very very little, though) about it. Yesterday, I accidentally made Hackaday pay the toll.

I refuse to say that that is being good at ads. It's kind of slimy, forcing sites to do SEO to put themselves at the top of the list when someone is searching their name. I've actually switched over from chrome to firefox (on the machines where I have the option) because of this (and the fact that the top ~7 search results for many queries are SEO'd garbage).

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

#225

Post by gowld »

netcan wrote: post #161
jborichevskiy wrote: post #13

> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is bill…

"Good" is hard to define, when we're talking about monopolistish scenarios, at least in this era. Google's ads make good money because: (1) The overture model for running a search ad market works well (Google acquired and adopted a mature system). (2) targeted ad markets get better with scale. The larger the market share, the smaller a& more targeted a segment is. (3) Ads are also search results. Over time, Google ha…

> By what ethos is Google not supposed to let ad selling concerns influence organic search?

So ad-selling squares don't get to editorialise journalism.

Search is (automated) journalist. Why would you think otherwise? If a search treats users as mere eyeballs to trick and hijack instead if inform well engine, then users learn not to trust the search engine, same as any other kind of journalist

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

#226

Post by gowld »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #198
jborichevskiy wrote: post #13

> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is bill…

I've both read trials of 3rd parties and run campaigns where ads are a significant boost to the site already ranking #1 in organic results . The price of AdWords has certainly gone up, but the value hasn't declined.

Unless you compare to an ad free version of search, you can't prove that the value of placing an ad is more than the negative value of an ad being sold to a competitor.

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

#227

Post by gowld »

tterrace wrote: post #147
awb wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And searching for any company name almost always returns an ad for the company in the first position. This generates revenue for Google with virtually no added value.

Recently there's been cases where searching for a company name will actually return an ad for a competitor. Companies are being forced into a bidding war to win back the top position for exact searches on their own name. See: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 and the SS in the reply: https://twitter.com/webiyo/status/1205534848192045056?s=20

"Forced how"? Because otherwise a web user might buy something "better than Basecamp" and that's unfair? If Basecamp can't sell to a prospect who knows their name unless basecamp is top search result, why does Basecamp deserve the sale?

Basecamp seems to generate more free advertising from playing the victim in the media than they lose from whatever they complain about.

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

#228

Post by gowld »

reaperducer wrote: post #61
gregcrv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are definitely trying to guess what you are searching for. One thing that drives me crazy is that they assume all of your searches are geographically or linguistically "local", they don't have an international search mode where the most relevant result in the world shows up.

One thing that drives me crazy is that they assume all of your searches are geographically or linguistically "local" It wouldn't be so terrible, except that Google is extraordinarily bad at geolocation. Right now, Google thinks my work computer is in southern New Mexico. Google thinks my personal computer, right next to it, is in northern Nevada. Google thinks my mobile phone, in between the two, is in Los Angeles. A…

How is Google supposed to know which location you want if you don't tell it and you don't want it to guess? It can't customize results just for you and serve bad results to the other 99% of users.

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

#229

Post by erikpukinskis »

ogre_codes wrote: post #19

I have to disagree fundamentally with the author on this point: > but then Google was always ugly until relatively recently Google was originally and for many years extremely elegant in it’s simplicity. There is nothing ugly about getting people exactly what they need instantly. As for the main thrust of the article, I’ve already found Google’s results mostly untrustworthy. For some time search results have been so d…

Yeah, it’s as if they don’t understand modernism: it’s about deep understanding of your materials, and letting the forms be driven by the demands of those materials. A truly modern web site feels unmistakably “webby”. Anything with a petina of beauty is more Romantic than Modern.

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

#230

Post by clairity »

laurex wrote: post #222
clairity wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's really not hard to define what a "good" ad might be--a product (or service) you don't know about but that solves an immediate problem without an immediately obvious solution. it'd anticipate your need, without invading your privacy. fwiw, i generally don't want to be subjected to ads either, particularly for the privacy-invading aspect, but also the time- and attention-wasting aspect too. most ads are absolutely…

The problem with ads isn't "good" or "bad" ads, it's that the nature of building a business of serving ads inevitably leads to an unquenchable thirst for data plus customers whose primary goal in paying you is to sell things, not to provide value (though some may do so as a selling strategy). It's hard to imagine how, or even why, such an ad business could serve the best interests of the end consumer, despite the ide…

> "...serving ads inevitably leads to an unquenchable thirst for data..."

well, to continue playing devil's advocate, we've had hundreds of years of advertising (newspapers, pamphlets, and posters/signs before that) without any kind of systematic data collection, so it's not necessarily an intrinsic characteristic of the advertising business to collect data.

in an alternate universe, if banks didn't have such a stodgy and stifling rent-seeking business on the movement of money (transaction fees on everything), microtransactions might be the preferred business model of many online businesses that are now dependent on ads.

Post reply on HN