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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

#411
post #343

I call this the squeeze. Google, even after all its attempts, is still a one trick pony. They have to grow at least 20% year over year to justify the market cap. They weren’t able to create a two pillar company like Amazon (AWS + Retail) so what do uncreative master executives naturally turn to? Of course their only cash cow. “ Rabban! I place you in charge of Arrakis. It's yours to squeeze, as I promised. I want you…

This year they’ll make the screen 20% bigger! Everyone gets a folding phone!

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

#412
post #160

it s really a mess. Searching for 'viper' brings up 'Viber' as the first result, the rest is cars except for a link to 'viperidae'. It's a goddamn snake, google

For me it's a different results bubble, but still a mess: Dodge Viper, a brand of booze, a tattoo parlor, two different video-game characters called "viper", a "tactical clothing" store, a Go library, a bar, a TV series, an iOS design pattern. To get actual snakes I have to search for "vipers".

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

#413

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,…

Google results have for a while stopped having anything to do with the actual search query. In the past they were magical, like Google could almost read your mind and guess exactly what you mean, but nowadays you can type in the exact search string, and still have the first page of results where Google just ommited half of the string to give you sponsored content. Like even for simple "C# " why are the first few resu…

[deleted]

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

#414
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am on Kagi Beta but IMO they do not have a valid monetisation strategy that I would pay for. Their current pricing model is planned to be $30 a month for an 'all you can eat' subscription, or $10 a month for a 'lite' membership that gives you 20 searches per day and then charges you $0.02 per search after that on a pay-as-you-go model (but if you check your search history, you may be suprised how many searches you…

Just a few notes. Search costs money and it seems we needed to get to 2022 to realize that. We made a choice of user = customer so yes the cost is real, and it is suddenly on the user. What they get in return is (at least a promise of) a superior search experience with a product that has many features that Google and similar ad-supported search engines simply never can. Our $10 plan is likely going to give the user 1…

> 80% of users search less than that monthly, even average HN users (who are majority of our beta users).

I suspect 80% of your users also are not daily-driving though, are also using other search engines at the same time, and have not set Kagi as a default on all their computers and their mobile devices (which I did!). In order to do that I had to change my mobile browser from Safari to Firefox, which is part of the reason I suspect most people have not done this.

1000 sounds like a lot more than 33 a day - particularly when if it is a search with a lens applied that drops to c16 per day, or a search that then clicks through to images.

I also think that the people that are willing to pay for search are likely to be the 'power users' which use search more. If your target market is 'people who are willing to pay for search, but don't use search that much' I suspect you will be limiting the market that find the subscription valuable.

> I would argue that our monetization strategy is valid as it is the only one that at least has a chance of making the business sustainable. Whether enough people would pay (which is what I think you were getting at) is another matter.

I think the problem is a monetization strategy is only valid if people are willing to pay for it. Anyone can create a monetization strategy that is designed to cover costs, but it's not going to lead to a sustainable business unless it generates more value for customers than the fee provides.

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

#415
post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience people making these "freedom stands" are a statistical minority that in no way influences actual mass markets, much like those Greenpeace people chaining themselves to oil & gas equipment to stop it from being used. I mean, it's nice and noble but the vast majority of people don't follow you and corporations don't care as long as you don't become a social and political landmark. If you go quietly for…

>In my experience people making these "freedom stands" are a statistical minority that in no way influences actual mass markets >.., favorite content producers moved to another platform,.. This was my grip against youtube, it wasn't merely a principled stand. Numerous independent content creators that I had followed and subscribed to on Youtube have been either censored, demonetized or blocked completely in the last…

They just need to keep content creators happy, which is a much smaller customer base. So if numbers really start falling that's going to be a much easier thing to fix.

And keep in mind that content creators have their own interests ($$$, fame, etc) not all of which align with their viewers' interests.

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

#416
post #160

it s really a mess. Searching for 'viper' brings up 'Viber' as the first result, the rest is cars except for a link to 'viperidae'. It's a goddamn snake, google

Just add another word "viper snake" and the problem is solved. I don't see the problem. You wouldn't shout "viper" at a random person and expect them to correctly guess you're talking about a snake at first guess.

English is not my native, i wasn't sure it's a snake

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

#417
post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a few notes. Search costs money and it seems we needed to get to 2022 to realize that. We made a choice of user = customer so yes the cost is real, and it is suddenly on the user. What they get in return is (at least a promise of) a superior search experience with a product that has many features that Google and similar ad-supported search engines simply never can. Our $10 plan is likely going to give the user 1…

> 80% of users search less than that monthly, even average HN users (who are majority of our beta users). I suspect 80% of your users also are not daily-driving though, are also using other search engines at the same time, and have not set Kagi as a default on all their computers and their mobile devices (which I did!). In order to do that I had to change my mobile browser from Safari to Firefox, which is part of the…

I don't know how the paid search API of Google and Bing work, but I will say one thing here. When I'm searching for technical data, I often search, and click through to more than one thing. I also tend to modify search terms, too, trying to winnow the results a bit.

My point being, there is a lot of potential for "show the same search results again, because the user re-searched 5 minutes later" and "show the same search results, but filter locally on an additional word" too.

If Google/Bing give "1000 results per search", then there is also value in storing that single search too. I guess:

- I'm not sure how the API works, so I can't add much value here

- But, even though it adds local cost for storage and DB, caching searches per user could reduce costs in some scenarios

Because, while I love the idea of paid search... I think I do 100s of searches per day, so if you pay for each page of search results, and winnowing down results with additional terms....

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

#418

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,…

Google results have for a while stopped having anything to do with the actual search query. In the past they were magical, like Google could almost read your mind and guess exactly what you mean, but nowadays you can type in the exact search string, and still have the first page of results where Google just ommited half of the string to give you sponsored content. Like even for simple "C# " why are the first few resu…

Seems like the SEO people have successfully reverse engineered Google‘s algorithms.

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

#419
post #5
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.

It's fraud, effectively. I've seen a bunch of people that are not tech savvy do Google searches, and they have no idea they're clicking on ads. I pointed this out a few times and they seem to not care anyways. Google knows this very well and they pretend like they're giving search results, but the majority of users are getting ad search results instead.

Yup. Our competitor advertises against our company name, and Google helpfully optimises the text of their ad -- some ML algorithm finds text most likely to be confused with the search results. Optimising for "clicks" is just optimising garbage.

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

#420

Could it be that google is relying too much on the input from the address bar? Unlike new search engines, google doesn't have to scrape and analyze the web because Chrome shows them what people want when they are searching for a set of words. Since Bing/DuckDuckGo doesn't have the same level of manipulation, I would assume that SEO spammers have managed to influence Google by faking browser feedback. I would assume t…

Oh, that could very well be the "secret new SEO sauce". I could well imagine Google having an entire division focused on the quest of dealing with backlink spam SEO that is targeting OG pagerank, perpetually kept occupied by SEOs that don't know better, while a new generation of SEOs simply avoids that battlefield and aims directly at ranking inputs beyond pagerank.

Thousands of artificial Chrome instances, or maybe just hundreds of Chrome extensions running on millions of instances engaging in a DSEO attack each individually well below the background noise floor. If that browser feedback is easy enough to fake then the visit pretender SEO wouldn't even need to poison an extension, they could just run it from any site they can get to run some JS on.

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