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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

#351

Post by dazc »

yostrovs wrote: post #5
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.

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.

What's worse is that it's particularly acute with financial services where most ads are scams.

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

#352

Post by Lewton »

nkurz wrote: post #232
tomatofrank wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"like you didn't care I don't know why lyrics r&b" was my query

It would be nice if this worked, but in Google's defense, this is an odd combination of an exact search phrase of common words and then a couple categorical terms that don't have to actually appear on the page. If you help it by searching for just the quoted phrase you want without the additional terms it puts the result you want both as the top result and in a pullout at the top of the page: https://www.google.com/s…

But google used to be able to handle cases like this without quotes...

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

#353

Post by dazc »

wiml wrote: post #295
XorNot wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get how Pinterest hasn't been removed from existence by Google. There is literally no one who is ever searching for things that wants a Pinterest link, but the incredible persistence of Google in showing me Pinterest is amazing. Though this kind of goes to the related question: why Google don't allow you to setup your profile to nuke domains from consideration when you search, I do not know - it would complet…

They did have exactly that feature for a while, unless I'm dreaming. But they got rid of it.

IIRC, it was canned because it was linked to search performance and was abused on an industrial scale for negative seo.

Such a blacklist could be limited to one's personal account though but, I guess, since there is no monetisation benefit for google they don't care to offer it?

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

#354

Post by dazc »

LoveMortuus wrote: post #339

“The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates.” -Gabe Newell When the pain of watching ads becomes greater then the pain of setting up a way to block ads. Blocking ads will become the norm. They're doing this to themselves.

We have a group of local newspaper sites in the UK which cover just about every area and they have clearly adopted a business model of squeezing every last drop of ad revenue they can before the inevitable happens.

There is virtually no actual news on these sites anymore unless it is click bait that elicits a lot of comment.

I'm beginning to think that google are doing the same.

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

#355

Post by pja »

yeuxardents wrote: post #292
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite experience most of the time. I’ve been trying to use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine but I end up clicking my Google bookmark a lot of the time because the DDG results are so low quality. I have no doubt there are edge cases where Bing/DDG outperform Google, but most of the time I have better luck with Google.

I have found that for technical results, and niche programming, and anything really to do with IT, google gives top results. For just about everything else, use any other search engine.

Has to be pretty niche for that still to be the case in my experience. If I search for help on, say, a bit of python syntax I get endless low quality webpages from Google.

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

#357

Post by throwaway2037 »

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.

I have the same experience. I assume these websites are just content farms trying to give away free introductory training for Python programming. Later, they try to upsell you to buy training. I see the same when Googling common Git issues.

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

#358

Post by tomatofrank »

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.

Totally agree. Genius is such a great app. I remember being pretty upset when I read this article a few years ago, which shed light on Google's anti-competitive behavior against small companies that make a difference that Google can't make themselves.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/genius-law...

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

#359

Post by tomatofrank »

hunter-gatherer wrote: post #282
tomatofrank wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Google is still my default browser, though I haven't used other engines enough to develop a strong opinion here. I'll add that I could have been more clever with my query. For instance, if I surround the lyric in quotes, Google returns the right result first. Original query: like you didn't care I don't know why lyrics r&b Improved query: "like you didn't care I don't know why" lyrics r&b At the end of the day,…

I'm still on dogpile. It gets me where I need to go most of the time.

I'll check it out!

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

#360

Post by foxrider »

ViViDboarder wrote: post #326
blhack wrote: post #82

Now that I think about it, I don't use search engines very much anymore, at least not in the traditional way. My searches are almost all site:$foo. Actually, a good majority of my searches are site:reddit.com {product I am looking for}, or site:news.ycombinator.com {some tech thing I want to find again}. I think there is a comparison here to how inbound telephone calls, or to some extent email, have been made useless…

I just try to do as close to first party searches as I can instead. Like, use the Reddit search to search Reddit, or use Yelp to search for businesses, and when I don’t know what site to search from, I just use DuckDuckGo. I find it easier than typing out “site:” especially since my browser allows me to just start the URL and then tab into a search on that site.

I've been using shorthands for websites for a while now, "aw pipewire" looks for "pipewire" on Arch Wiki, "c cassandra" looks through my confluence, "re hotas" is for reddit and so on. It's very easy an intuitive. I'm using Vivaldi, but I'm pretty sure it's a feature in many other browsers that let you add a custom search engine.
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