In what meaning we could ever "trust" Google's search results? We have already witnesses myriad of examples of Google removing and modifying search results to mollify various governments and private groups. We witnessed how Google banned substring "gun" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16479204) from Google Shopping results. We have seen people in Google discussing "ML fairness" (modifying algorithms to fit their perceptions of what results should be instead of showing what they actually are) and more broadly, their responsibility to shape political discussion and national election results. We now know they have the tools, the means and the motivation to influence search results, and that they have done it many times in the past. Commercial considerations add to this mess, but I think if the "trust" is the idea that Google just shows the search results as they are, without any outside considerations not related to the quality of search intervening, then this "trust" is long gone. Now the question is only who gets the power to play with it. Is it worse if Google sells a bit of this power instead of keeping it all to themselves? I don't know, maybe, but by then I don't think talking about any "trust" has any point.
How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
261–270 of 284 posts
Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#262I'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…
What search engines are you using? I'm displeased with Google's search results, but others seem to be just trying to emulate it (and badly).
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Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#263I'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…
What search engines are you using? I'm displeased with Google's search results, but others seem to be just trying to emulate it (and badly).
you might want to give shmoogle.world a try. It's growing rapidly in the artists community
Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's pretty clear what Peretti was talking about--let's make an effort to respond to his intended meaning and not get caught up in semantics. Peretti is talking about quality versus quantity: maybe Google doesn't serve up quality ads, maybe they just serve up quantity ads.
>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…
"Quality" in this Peretti's context would be "effective in selling a product": i.e. it's what advertisers consider to be quality.
I agree with your point though: from a user's perspective there's no such thing as a quality ad: ads are inherently bad.
Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#265Earlier 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…
You may have never seen a good ad then. There was a period of time I would actively look at ads on penny-arcade, because the owners of the site only ever allowed ads (mostly for games) that they themselves could at least tangentially endorse. This meant I basically got hand curated ads for products I was genuinely interested in, by people who’s taste I understood if not agreed with. That said this ended up being the…
Okay, but did those ads contribute anything beyond reading Penny Arcade's reviews of games? For you as a user, how does the ad improve your experience?
Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#266Earlier 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…
> If you search for "cheapest gasoline" it's not unreasonable that an ad for an electric car might be interesting.
No, I still don't want to see an ad. It's not unreasonable that a search result for electric cars might be interesting, but I want results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the advertiser that serves themselves.
> 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.
No, I still don't want to see an ad. A search result for a cheaper hotel in Kissimmee might be valuable, but I want results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the hotel that serves themselves.
> And if you search for "k8s cluster deployment tools" then you probably want as many ads as possible, so your evaluation doesn't fail to include a comprehensive set of options.
No, I still don't want to see an ad. I want to see search results of a comprehensive set of options, but I want those results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the hotel that serves themselves.
> Perhaps you're saying I already know about electric cars and Kissimmee and kubernetes, to which I'd respond, yes, probably via ads. Maybe a commercial or sign or web ad, but also maybe through a TV news spot (pr campaign) or magazine review (expenses paid) or web article (with affiliate link).
No, I'm saying that I want to discover products that are the best for my needs, not products with the best ad placement. I want tools that serve me, instead of serving the best-funded advertisers.
Literally none of the cases you describe are what I want. Ads inherently give inaccurate information.
Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not at all! The positive sum game here goes * 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 adver…
Advertising creates needless ignorance, by giving the impression that well-advertised products are quality products.
GoDaddy and NordVPN, for examples, are garbage products with highly effective advertising. Seeing ads for these products actively harms people, because it prevents them from finding better products like Gandi or PIA.
Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does. Yeah, I think the only way that would happen is if someone came up with a nove…
I can believe that if there were another solution that were marginally better it might not be enough to unseat the top player in the market. But switching costs in search are extremely low so it would be surprising if people did not switch for a substantially better experience. In particular, it would require us to believe that what happened when Google showed up on the scene would not happen again, and to me that ju…
Perhaps switching costs are low, but they're certainly higher than people are willing to pay in many cases. Switching costs as high as "changing the default search provider" are demonstrably prohibitive.
Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Signs like those famous Golden Arches can be useful.
I know this is picking on your example rather than your general concept, but this is a great example of how advertising is harmful. McDonald's has done incalculable damage to the health of Americans, and even if you don't go there, seeing the arches sometimes will get your kids yelling in the back seat, "I want to go to McDonald's!" This isn't helpful to us: it's helpful to McDonald's.
Re: How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's nowhere near enough. Sorry. You do want to see ads, you just don't realise it. Google did actually run this experiment. They aren't stupid and lots of people say they'd rather pay money directly rather than see ads. Because of Google's place in the ecosystem they can actually implement that. So they did. It eventually became Google Contributor and never really launched properly. The early version of Contributo…
Good points, actually very interesting, especially the budget part. But I wasn't talking about just the ads, I was talking about the tracking to optimize those ads. I don't care about the ads. Show me ads, I ignore them anyway. I just don't want to be tracked to build out my personality profile for the rest of my life, because I don't know who will get access to that data and what it might be used for. Show ads based…
Many ads are brand ads. You don't have to click for the advertiser to get what they want, just see their ad at all. Even for click-based ads, well, most people claim they never click on ads. But, they're wrong. Again, Google has lots of data on this. You will never be allowed to opt out of ads if you aren't paying your way, because lots of people would do it and that would render the internet economically unviable (of course no such ad network would survive for more than 5 minutes).
It was easier to inject a person as a buyer for their own profile into the merchandising system, than to rework all the tracking tools and the analytics that runs on it to stop tracking that specific person.
No, they did it that way because otherwise it'd have reduced publisher earnings who would then have gone to other ad networks with no Contributor programme. How do you set the price of not seeing an ad otherwise? The price of seeing it is set by auction. It had nothing to do with tracking which can be disabled by anyone here:
https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662922?hl=en-GB
and here
https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
Tracking isn't actually the big hammer people imagine it is. That's a fiction invented by journalists. It helps a bit but only really basic stuff like "show German people ads in German" or remarketing (show people ads for products they were looking at buying very recently). That's why it's OK to opt out. You become worth a bit less and you'll see more irritating ads as a result, but very few use this option.
Because I value privacy as a principle more than a slightly less useful product, and I would pay for it. But apparently I can't afford it.
Go disable ad tracking then. The options have been there for many years.