121–130 of 740 posts
I'm not using an ad blocker; when I search for Midjourney on Google the real thing is my first result; I don't even see any sponsored content. Not sure what's happening for OP. (Please don't read this as a defense of Google on the whole.)
How do you tolerate the web without an ad blocker?
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 incentive…
I’m talking about the “simple” solution that everyone alludes to but can’t seem to explain how it would feasibly work.
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.
We have to not get attached to companies, and not get the idea that they care or have feelings of good or evil. They are tools, like a hammer, or a stapler. A stapler isn't evil if it mashes up all the staples into a tangled mess. It's just broken. You don't mourn a broken stapler, eventually tools just wear out. You throw it out and get a new one. Corporations are the same, McKinsification / enshitification / etc are a part of their natural lifecycle, you should expect that and just switch to a different tool that actually works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is Kagi for non-US folks? I've tried switching to DDG a while back but the experience for me, living outside the US, was not great. Sure, programming related searches were pretty good, but everything else was not. Does Kagi have a better localized experience?
Just curious, are you wondering about location-specific results ("best restaurants"), country-specific results ("how to do my taxes"), or language-specific results ("pasos de división larga")?
You might be part of an experiment or have a rogue extension installed that is hijacking the results (it's happened to me).
I'm old enough to remember when a big selling point of Google was that it didn't do this.
I'm old enough to remember when a big selling point of Google was that it didn't do this.
I'm fucking livid. Well actually: mildly unimpressed. The cool kids rarely last as such and "do no evil" ended up behind a green tent and a single shot was heard.
Actually, I am slightly stressed over this whole thing.
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.
It absolutely is. I fear for the older generations and less tech minded people who google their bank, and get some random phishing site. Or similarly google what should be libre software and get some random malware on a site that looks 'close enough'. Lets call it what it is, a cancer, one that literally enables countless bad actors and purely for a search engine's own profit. In theory theres a time and place for ad…