231–240 of 284 posts
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> Google was originally and for many years extremely elegant in it’s simplicity. What, no ads?
Google has always and still does have the least-obtrusive ads. I don't like when ads masquerade as content, but if I have to receive ads, I'd prefer Google-managed ads over anyone else's. Even Stack Overflow fills their pages with hideous animated ads, and they're about the second-least-objectionable ad-bearing site.
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I switched to DDG about a month ago, and the results are always dead-on for me. I don’t even notice that it’s not Google anymore.
In theory websites could kill off googles dominance by blacklisting their crawler and only caring about traffic from DDG and other lesser known engines
I don't, anymore. Just as I now don't trust and download a gazillion apps on my phone anymore. I've personally switched to https://duckduckgo.com/lite (wished it was available in dark-mode, may be I should write a greasemonkey script) and make it a point to change search engine defaults on all phones in the household and remove or disable google-search and chrome apps. For most basic searches, ddg/lite works just as…
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>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…
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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.
When I search for "peking duck recipe" show me a recipe for peking duck, and don't show me "local" restaurants which are 300 miles away.
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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…
> Your hard-line position that all ads are bad, always, is laughable. This doesn't seem especially civil. > If you search for "cheapest gasoline" it's not unreasonable that an ad for an electric car might be interesting. Interesting to whom? The parent comment doesn't want to see ads. So no it's not likely to be interesting in this context. > Or if you search for "Orlando hotels", an ad for generally less expensive h…
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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…
There are many factors that might determine which search results I will want to see. Under no circumstances will those factors include "how much money did they pay the search engine". By definition, that can only change my search results to something less aligned with what I want.
> 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…
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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…
There are many factors that might determine which search results I will want to see. Under no circumstances will those factors include "how much money did they pay the search engine". By definition, that can only change my search results to something less aligned with what I want.
* Company creates thing people like you want to buy.
* Company knows if you know about the thing, you will want to buy it.
* Company knows you don't know whether a thing like their thing even exists, so you have no reason to search hard for it.
* Company upfronts the money to defray your search costs, knowing it will be paid back when you buy the thing. This is called advertising.
I am constantly learning about things I would have enjoyed if I had known about them. It is damn hard to make people aware even that you are giving away free lunch. Advertising breaks down that needless ignorance.