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For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads

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Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads

#311

Post by rattray »

Tenoke wrote: post #206
tomatofrank wrote: post #201

Last night I watched a YouTube video that had a song in the background that I hadn't heard but really liked. I pulled up Shazam but it didn't recognize the song, so I took to Google. I entered the lyric and added the search terms "lyrics" and "r&b" at the end. Google returned 4 YouTube videos to songs that didn't contain the lyric, a link to a Boyz II Men song on Genius that didn't contain the lyric (good job Google,…

For what is worth, DDG's main provider is Bing so it's nor surprising they returned similar results.

Source?

Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads

#312

Post by ssss11 »

omnicognate wrote: post #12
ssss11 wrote: post #2

Yeah 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.

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…

I agree with the “if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer” mantra.

I do believe we should pay (a reasonably small amount! :)) for products that companies provide. It’s the “free” model that got us into this mess.

Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads

#313

Post by smukherjee19 »

I had a very similar experience. Only two days ago, I tried looking for something related to a friend's phone not recognizing the correct lock pattern on Android (Asus Zenfone 7), the term was "zenfone 7 does not recognize lock pattern even when correct and it's locked", and the first two pages were, with the exception of an official Asus support page, ALL the results were crap ones going to generic tutorials...

Searching for the same phrase in DuckDuckGo, the 2nd result pointed to a Samsung forum thread [1] which, while pointing to doing things with a Samsung account, said it started working by itself in 1-2 days, which it did.

Setting aside the fact why Android would behave like that, the search results in Google were so low quality and awful... While this is just an anecdote, it seems for quite a few types of search results, their quality has dropped hugely. Is it due to people hijacking the results by using clever tricks? Or has Google's algorithm starting to hit some sort of limit in terms of the amount of content that needs to be indexed and ranked? I don't know. But something definitely seems off to me.

[1]: https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/other-smartphones/my-pat...

Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads

#314

Post by soraminazuki »

benlivengood wrote: post #305
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #298

I'm just gonna throw this out there as I'm noticing it more and more at this point since switching languages. What the actual F has happened to google search results for programming issues? I used to be able to google a question and get, more or less, a right answer from a forum or stack overflow. Recently, many coding tutorial websites have clearly figured out how to hack googles pageranks and now instead of one 'ri…

Python has been the worst for me; it's almost impossible to find the official documentation for modules/functions. Defining search aliases or custom search engines in the browser with URLs like ''' https://www.google.com/search?q=site:docs.python.org+%s ''' is probably the reasonable thing to do.

https://devdocs.io is nice when you're searching for official documentation.

Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads

#315

Post by llamataboot »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #298

I'm just gonna throw this out there as I'm noticing it more and more at this point since switching languages. What the actual F has happened to google search results for programming issues? I used to be able to google a question and get, more or less, a right answer from a forum or stack overflow. Recently, many coding tutorial websites have clearly figured out how to hack googles pageranks and now instead of one 'ri…

SO search results have also been broken for about 8 years unless you know how to filter for recent results. There is no good search on the internet anymore. I'm to the point where I wish I could !g2 bang DDG to go to the first result on the second page of search results.

Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads

#316

Post by llamataboot »

Tenoke wrote: post #279
heavyset_go wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still bitter that they've deprioritized results from SongMeanings.net in favor of garbage like Genius. The former is one of the only sources for lyrics from smaller acts, especially from the 90's to early 2010's. Since it's from the pre-Web 2.0 era, it's disappeared from Google's search results.

I get songmeanings from Google sometimes but I personally like Genius due to the annotated and upvote/downvoted comments and it is a more visited site so I get why it's ranked higher.

Maybe someday web 7.0 will remember than engagement doesn't equal quality and there's a long enough tail of people that would pay for a good search engine that they'd support your small company just fine, and the hockey sticks, venture capitalists, and the masses can go drown in adwords.

Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads

#318

Post by Tenoke »

rattray wrote: post #311
Tenoke wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what is worth, DDG's main provider is Bing so it's nor surprising they returned similar results.

Source?

>We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing[0]

They add more than just Bing results as they mention but it's the main provider. You can also confirm by checking results for different queries.

0. https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/

Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads

#319

Post by soraminazuki »

slyzmud wrote: post #125
jws wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

…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…

Have you tried Youtube premium? We always say companies should move out of the ad revenue model and start charging for the services instead of pushing more ads. For me, paying Youtube premium has been a great decision.

People aren't going to pay for companies they've had enough of. People open to the idea of paying would pay to companies that would treat them better.

Re: For some searches the whole screen on Google is now ads

#320

Post by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn »

jeffparsons wrote: post #272

Just as I saw this link a notification popped up on my Pixel phone: > Trending: "Turkey inflation rate" > See search results I've already put a lot of effort into purging as many categories of Google spam notifications from my phone as possible, but they just keep adding new categories that I have to track down and opt out of individually. And the only way to silence them from the notification itself is to block all…

I run /e/ OS ( a de-Googled Android clone) on a Fairphone 3+ device as my daily driver and it's been quite liberating being freed from the yolk of Google exploitative practises.
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