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Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

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Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#81
post #44
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did they make any money at all without ads?

they didn't - hence the ads

But like always they didn't stop once they were a bit profitable with a few ads, instead they got greedier and greedier and made their product worse once they captured most of the market, I have wonder if there can exist some variant of capitalism that punishes becoming a bit too greedy, like a soft ceiling (tied to the minimum wage) over which most of the profits go to taxes, and a hard one where all profits over that go to taxes plus mandatory social work by its owners/executives.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#83

They still get away with it as ‘only’ 1% complain and Google thinks they don’t matter. We built our entire company for that 1%.

Hey freediver, I bought a kagi shirt in the initial batch, got it, and then after one wash it unraveled. Your support team was great and gave me a coupon for a replacement shirt, which I ordered, yet it never shipped. Could I get that shirt :D

Today is the day you find out whether you're the 1% of the 1%!

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#85
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they didn't - hence the ads

It's a very common story in industry. You start nimble, and disrupt bloated platforms. Then, as you grow, pressure grows and you also bloat. Then new company comes that brings nimble product and disrupt you. Search, TV->internet video, newspapers->internet - all of them go through those cycles.

Don't worry. Our legislators around the world are hard working so this doesn't happen again, protecting us from harmful contents and cementing current industry leaders' position.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#86

  > I typed in Midjourney to search for Midjourney because I wanted to use Midjourney.
For one thing, the author could have just gone right to midjourney.com instead of going through an intermediate. Additionally, when I tried typing midjourney into google, midjourney.com was the first result. This is on mobile Firefox, with no extensions installed.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#87
post #58

Its sad but I think at this point its kind of a safety issue not to use an ad blocker. Those results are not clearly ads and I've clicked on fake links in the past when they were.

You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid, or if you don't want to use search results from Bing's index, I've been very happy with Brave Search.

> You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid

The only people who would say that are people who would be better off just asking ChatGPT.

Any nuanced search that isnt some encyclopedic fact is terrible on DDG.

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#89

Its sad but I think at this point its kind of a safety issue not to use an ad blocker. Those results are not clearly ads and I've clicked on fake links in the past when they were.

Strong agree but unless it gets built-into the browser, the average net denizen simply won't do it. The number of times I've seen a friend of the family try to show me an article on their laptop while casually trying to shoot down the pop-up ads like they're playing a marketers version of Missile Command was astonishing.

And EVEN if they do install a blocker, 9 times out of 10 it'll be AdBlock Plus and not uBlock Origin [1]. You know, the one that allows companies to PAY to have their ads whitelisted.

This doesn't even cover browsing on a smartphone which unless you're running Android Firefox which supports browser extensions, you have very few options.

[1] Notice I said uBlock Origin and NOT uBlock.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

Re: Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

#90

I'm old enough to remember when a big selling point of Google was that it didn't do this.

My memory says that wasn't such a big selling point. When Google first came out it blew all other search engines away in terms of result quality. If, back then, Yahoo and Altavista were minimalist and Google was a garish nightmare of ads and flashing gifs and nested banners and affiliate buttons, I would still have happily used it for the results. Google's search interface is still reasonably clean IMO. Nowhere near…

Speed. Altavista, Dogpile, Metacrawler and the rest were slow, and Google felt instant.
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