Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

bitbytebit.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 740 posts

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

#111

Post by boringg »

justapassenger wrote: post #59
peab wrote: 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.

Wouldn't it be nice if some companies instead of ramping up ads for revenue passed along the value to consumers? Once they made their money back on the original investments convert to a lifestyle and provide a valuable product without squeezing every penny our of it and in the end killing it. One day maybe.

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

#112

Post by owenthejumper »

mattigames wrote: post #81
peab wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

That capitalism technically already exists in the US. We have very strong monopoly laws. It's just...nobody is enforcing them. Unlike the 70's and 80's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

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

#113

Post by cyborgrising »

Mistletoe wrote: post #28
freediver wrote: post #7

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%.

How will you fight the inevitable slide that happens if you ever got on top? I’m convinced Google started with the absolute best of intentions before the money and greed turned them into a horror movie villain.

Observationally, Google search and Kagi are fundamentally different business models.

Google followed/trailblazed the "enshitification" arc of providing a free service that sees widespread adoption by the public, and then financially exploiting the widespread adoption by leveraging usage of the service to serve ads like in the screenshot.

Kagi is a subscription service you pay for and they generate their best effort at an ideal service for you using the money you gave them.

The Google model of providing a free service sort of requires that it be enshitified in order to close the circle on the business case. Reliance on VC money in this model is likely a further aggravating factor to aggressively exploit usage of the service once widespread adoption is achieved.

The Kagi model has an opposite pressure, where if it tries to exploit adoption of the service in a way that users don't appreciate, users will simply abandon their subscription, putting a core revenue stream the business has built itself around at risk.

Is it possible for Kagi or a business like that to become shitty? Sure, a new manager that misunderstands core realities can show up anywhere and ruin the business, or sagging business financials could require VC injection which then pressures further financial extractions from uses. But the structural pressures on a Kagi-style model certainly seem to steer it in the right direction when Google's structural model invariably steered it into something that becomes less pleasant than we all initially knew.

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

#114

Post by balder1991 »

irrational wrote: post #15
jsheard wrote: post #12

They do the same thing on the Play Store, for example I just searched for Firefox and the first result is a sponsored spot for Opera. Does Apple do that on the App Store? A funnier example: searching for Amazon gives Temu as the first result. Searching for Temu gives Shein as the first result. Searching for Shein gives Shein as the first result! ...but only because they outbid everyone else for the ad spot on their o…

I just searched "Firefox" in the app store. The top result is Google Chrome with an Ad indicator (Google paid for higher placement). Second is Firefox.

Same here.

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

#115

Post by jameson »

amatecha wrote: post #31
CSMastermind wrote: post #19

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

Had to dig up this link, 1999 review[0]: "Google (www.google.com) is a pure search engine - no weather, no news feed, no links to sponsors, no ads, no distractions, no portal litter. Nothing but a fast-loading search site. Reward them with a visit." [0] https://i.redd.it/uea6u7c4oje31.jpg

i feel sometimes it's best for the company to stay private

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

#116

Post by darth_avocado »

justapassenger wrote: post #59
peab wrote: 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.

I think there’s a middle ground between not making any money by not showing ads and plastering half the page with ads in a way that almost renders the product useless. I’m sure this was a result of a long list of promo packets that incrementally kept adding 0.01% increases to the ad impressions.

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

#117

Post by miladyincontrol »

yunohn wrote: post #49

Every time this comes up, I don’t understand what the alternative is supposed to be. X (Midjourney in this case) may/not be trademarked in the user’s country - so what makes X so special that Google/others should rank this one over others? Does this mean X owns the keyword and other related searches on Google forever? That sounds worse than domain squatting! Speaking of, quite often, X.com is already registered, so c…

The issue you're describing is ranking results or ranking between promoted/ad content.

The problem more at hand is unless you're paying big bucks, they can and will place content that at best is another competitor, or at worst is genuinely trying to harm your users. Ads being inline and as close in appearance to regular results as google can legally get away with is the problem. There are heavily misaligned incentives at play, ones that enable a lot of malware and phishing attempts.

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

#120

Post by mc3301 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #71
crazygringo wrote: post #27

When I search for "midjourney" without an adblocker a bunch of times, I'm getting: - No ads, with correct midjourney.com as the top result, about half the time - A legit ad for midjourney.com with the title "Your Imagination, Unlocked", the other half the time. It's the only ad, and the correct midjourney.com is also still directly below it as the first organic result So both seem fine for me. I've never seen ads on…

I am highly suspicious tech markets do not see realistic average Google behavior for whatever reason. The pervasive belief in tech that Google Search is even passable suggests people in the Valley or even Austin aren't getting the experience most people do. I recall a Googler once suggesting to me that Googlers seeing ads might look like ad fraud to advertisers, so I'm not positive Googlers dogfood how bad this is ei…

I'd go as far to guess that the tech-literate people (who would be both less susceptible to clicking on enshitified links and more likely to report or discuss them) have, somewhere in their tracked-data-portfolio, a "don't serve too much garbage to this person, they aren't gullible and they'll tell people we're serving garbage" setting.

Apologies for the weird grammar.

Post reply on HN