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For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads
81–90 of 462 posts
Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads
#82Now that I think about it, I don't use search engines very much anymore, at least not in the traditional way. My searches are almost all site:$foo.
Actually, a good majority of my searches are site:reddit.com {product I am looking for}, or site:news.ycombinator.com {some tech thing I want to find again}.
I think there is a comparison here to how inbound telephone calls, or to some extent email, have been made useless by marketers. Google searches for "Phoenix {thing}" tend to be almost all yelp/yelp clone spam.
edit: this made me actually look in my history. It seems that by far the thing I am using google for the most is image search. Second from that is spelling/grammar sanity checks.
Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads
#83To be fair, it depends on the screen. The submission makes it sound like the whole first page is ads, but there’s 4 ads at the top instead of the usual 2-3. It happens to extend to the fold in this Twitter user’s browser. I scroll past all ads out of habit[0], so honestly this doesn’t impact my Google usage. Wish I didn’t have to train that muscle, but here we are. :( [0] my pihole breaks the links anyway
UBlock Origin - available on all major browsers, including iOS (er, this has adblock, but not uBlock in particular) and Android, my friend.
Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads
#84The Facebook stock debacle from yesterday makes me think that maybe there is a limit to how user-hostile a tech giant can be before it really starts to hurt their bottom line. For a while it seemed like companies like FB had captured enough of the market that they seemed impervious to backlash from their many controversies, too big to fail in a way. It’s too early to tell if this is the beginning of FB’s demise, but…
Where do normal people go from Google? I've seen plenty of billboards for DDG, and even radio ads, but how likely is it that a user will switch (& persist) when their browser is controlled by the offending company that isn't afraid of implementing dark patterns to get the users back? Anecdotally, I have a senior citizen neighbor who asked me to look at her computer because of ads (I figured malware/adware) and she was somehow already using Firefox as her browser, so her problem was just resolved by installing uBlock Origin.
Users defecting from FB have a number of options, driven by their in person network, search doesn't. How do new search engines communicate that Google is turning up the (ad/spam) heat and they need to escape the pot? Search results are subjective (that's why Google uses human raters), so what does it take for users, en masse, to start questioning their search results quality and/or excessive number of ads?
Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads
#85I feel like using search engines has become a "jargon arms race" where you have to be smart enough to figure out the right combination of synonyms for what you want, that advertisers, seo spammers, and regulators haven't figured out how to stimey yet. Jargon is almost like a different language at this point, where if you know how to speak in esoteric jargon you have unfettered access to information, and if you don't,…
Even that doesn't help in cases as Google will interpret your jargon filled query to something that's a lower common denominator and return irrelevant results regardless.
Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not duckduckgo's customer either (their primary revenue source is keyword based advertising), or the customer of anything else you don't pay for. The only one I know of that at least plans to have a simple two-way relationship with search users as their customers is Kagi. Currently it's in free beta with a waitlist (took a week for me). When they go live they intend it to be a paid, subscription service with n…
>Currently it's in free beta with a waitlist (took a week for me) When did you apply? I filled out their survey at the end of december and haven't even received a confirmation email. I tried again a few weeks back with a gmail address, and still nothing. So I guess at least it's already at Google-level customer service.
Around the new year. No idea how the waitlist is managed. I was pleased at how prompt it was after signing up for the Github Copilot beta several months ago and not having heard a peep out of them.
Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads
#87Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads
#88The Facebook stock debacle from yesterday makes me think that maybe there is a limit to how user-hostile a tech giant can be before it really starts to hurt their bottom line. For a while it seemed like companies like FB had captured enough of the market that they seemed impervious to backlash from their many controversies, too big to fail in a way. It’s too early to tell if this is the beginning of FB’s demise, but…
Where do normal people go from Google? I've seen plenty of billboards for DDG, and even radio ads, but how likely is it that a user will switch (& persist) when their browser is controlled by the offending company that isn't afraid of implementing dark patterns to get the users back? Anecdotally, I have a senior citizen neighbor who asked me to look at her computer because of ads (I figured malware/adware) and she wa…
Bing, Yandex, and DDG are more than serviceable. Furthermore, you have to imagine every search counts. Sure, Siri results might come directly through Google but that doesn't mean they won't lose some other fraction of your searches if you set your default search on Safari to be Bing.
Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads
#89Yeah I’ve noticed this too. But also the rest of the front page is often either seo spam (like those Pinterest links which catch whatever search term you’ve used) or shopping sites. I’ve found google search to be increasingly hostile to its customers. I guess we’re not the customers. Use duckduckgo or something else.
I don't get how Pinterest hasn't been removed from existence by Google. There is literally no one who is ever searching for things that wants a Pinterest link, but the incredible persistence of Google in showing me Pinterest is amazing.
Though this kind of goes to the related question: why Google don't allow you to setup your profile to nuke domains from consideration when you search, I do not know - it would completely divorce them from any responsibility for search result manipulation and make everyone happier.
Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads
#90The Facebook stock debacle from yesterday makes me think that maybe there is a limit to how user-hostile a tech giant can be before it really starts to hurt their bottom line. For a while it seemed like companies like FB had captured enough of the market that they seemed impervious to backlash from their many controversies, too big to fail in a way. It’s too early to tell if this is the beginning of FB’s demise, but…
…a limit to how user-hostile a tech giant can be before it really starts to hurt their bottom line…
Reading that line I just realized that google lost me as a YouTube viewer in the past two weeks. I used to follow a bunch of ~100k subscriber channels that produced content every couple of weeks on building things and how to build things. I'd generally watch one or two 10-30 minute videos a day.
They've cranked the ads through the roof to the point that I'd see the same 6 second Liberty Mutual bit three times before the video even got through its introduction along with a couple other ads.
I now realize its been days since I even went to the site. So I guess for this n=1 we've found the limit.