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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

#361

Post by tomatofrank »

ryantgtg wrote: post #273
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,…

Most of the time duckduckgo doesn’t even acknowledge quotations. I can’t tell if it’s because there aren’t results for when the query contains quotations or if they simply don’t acknowledge them most of the time. Either way it’s annoying and it makes me go back to google every time.

Do you have an example query?

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

#363

Post by mbwgh »

freediver wrote: post #278
Closi wrote: 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…

> Our $10 plan is likely going to give the user 1,000 searches.

Do you intend to make the search limit a daily thing, or will it only apply over the whole month?

For me at least, I have spikes in my search behavior, like when I'm working on some difficult project, while on other days there's not much going on. While having a search budget would maybe get some getting used to, I could see myself working with it if I had a way to plan ahead.

It would help if there was UI support for this, similar to what mobile phones have in the "Mobile Data" settings (data used/remaining, usage graphs and so on). I'm also on the beta right now, but haven't seen anything like that when looking just now.

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

#365

Post by tonyedgecombe »

daviddisco wrote: post #212

I can't speak for Google but I think the theory they work under is that for some queries the ads are the best results. In other words, the user is more likely to find what they are looking for if those ads are there. There are many signals used for ranking results and the ad auction price is one signal.

That used to be the case, I remember searching for desktop software and the adverts would be the most relevant results. For whatever reason that stopped working a long time ago.

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

#367

Post by LoveMortuus »

dazc wrote: post #354
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.

The more Google becomes user unfriendly or annoying the more people will shift to different search engines. I've legit seen people that aren't tech savvy use DuckDuckGo, which for me personally was quite surprising. Even my father (58y) switched to DDG without me even noticing it!

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

#368

Post by stavros »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #269
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.

Same with Sheldon Brown’s website on bicycle maintenance. Much of the information on his site is still the best resource on the internet but instead Google would rather serve irrelevant results that show ads.

Same with all organic content. It's just all bullshit SEO spam now, I haven't landed on some dude's blog in ages, and some dude's blog is my favorite part of the web.

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

#369

Post by gambiting »

tomatofrank wrote: post #201

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 results for pages that sell programming courses?????

It's gone to absolute shitter and it's just not worth using outside of a very narrow set of circumstances(when you actually do want to buy something I guess?)

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

#370

Post by gambiting »

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.

Absolutely opposite of that in my experience. Search for anything technical and Google gives me pages selling programming courses, or it just omits the technical part of the query(like the name of the class) and serves pages upon pages of generic results that have absolutely nothing to do with what I'm searching for. It used to be the top engine for programming-related searches, now it's easily the worst.
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