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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

#381

Post by colordrops »

kibwen wrote: post #346
kajaktum wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In hindsight, we should have known this would happen eventually. At this point, we have to be actively be against free services. Every time its just a ticking time bomb. There's literally no incentive for them to be an actual good service, just good enough that you tolerate it and not consider other options, but shit enough that they can extract value out of you.

> At this point, we have to be actively be against free services. Nah, GCC is free, Linux is free, Debian is free. What we need to be against is free stuff provided by for-profit entities , because the love of money is the root of all evil.

They said service, not software.

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

#382

Post by eru »

andrewmutz wrote: post #132
justapassenger wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You forgot the main source of pressure: you sell off equity in your company in exchange for cash. The buyers are buying the promise of future profits. At first, you still hold the vast majority of the voting rights, but over time you sell more and more and expectations rise and rise. Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term. Hence a page full of ads, and no r…

Google's original founders still hold the majority of votes.

> Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.

Amazon's history shows that public shareholders can be very patient with cash being returned to them, or the company ever showing a profit at all. Tesla used to be in the same boat.

Shareholders are very forward looking. They just don't necessarily trust 'visionary managers' not be full of bullshit. Probably rightly so.

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

#383

Post by ragall »

jpmattia wrote: post #210

Like many of you, I serve as IT support for family. Some of those family are beginning to slip cognitively, so I'd like to say: Fk google for doing this. You are confusing my relatives who cannot tell the difference between your ad-spam and actual links, and it is not an exaggeration to say that you are now taking advantage of old people. I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock) and move them over to chatgpt when po…

Kagi is a better alternative.

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

#384

Post by Cheetah26 »

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…

Learned that App Store does this too during a recent MFA rollout.

What really surprised me was that when instructed to install Google Authenticator, a significant portion of people (I'd estimate close to 50%) would search the exact name and then proceed to reach to install the sponsored top result with a completely different name until I stopped them.

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

#385

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

jpmattia wrote: post #210

Like many of you, I serve as IT support for family. Some of those family are beginning to slip cognitively, so I'd like to say: Fk google for doing this. You are confusing my relatives who cannot tell the difference between your ad-spam and actual links, and it is not an exaggeration to say that you are now taking advantage of old people. I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock) and move them over to chatgpt when po…

I just use duckduckgo and turn off the ads in search settings

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

#386

Post by marcus_holmes »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #329
marcus_holmes wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the old days, companies were valued on their expected dividend. Share prices didn't move that much, and trading shares took time and had fees attached. You could speculate on share price moves, and people did, but the primary source of income from holding shares was dividends. Now it's the other way around. The primary source of gains from owing shares is speculation on the share price. Dividends are mostly ignore…

While the importance of dividends has waned, we should still mention buybacks and liquidation. They still exist and buybacks especially are an important part of delivering shareholder value. Apple is a great example of returning about 4 times more in buybacks than dividends. How would you feel about tax-disadvantaging buybacks?

Good point, and good question.

I like Cory Doctorow's take on this [0], that this is basically defrauding the shareholders. It used to be illegal, it probably should be illegal again.

It's also unsustainable, in that you can only do this for so long before you've bought up all the open shares and there's so few remaining that your company is no longer effectively tradeable.

I don't know where this practice leads, but I don't think it's a place we want to go to. I suspect it'll be further concentration of capital into fewer hands. To the extreme, we end up with all the large companies doing this becoming effectively private, owned by a small group of folks rich enough to keep their holdings while everyone else sells out during the buybacks. That's not good.

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/06/computer-says-huh/

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

#387

Post by henridwyer »

johnfn wrote: post #249

Can anyone reproduce this? When I search "Midjourney", I get an ad for Midjourney (from Midjourney), followed by Midjourney, the site. After that, I get the Midjourney Discord, the Midjourney subreddit, the Midjourney Wikipedia page, and then (inexplicably), another Midjourney ad. That seems about as good as it could be. Edit: I guess I should say that I do agree that the quality of Google Search is pretty poor these…

Yes, I see something similar for the query "Midjourney": 4 sponsored results from Deevid, Artlist.io, Lovart, Pollo AI (see the screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/ESM3xtJ)

Finally Midjourney. Unlike in the article I have never visited Midjourney.

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

#388

Post by eru »

dvngnt_ wrote: post #73
justapassenger wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Used to be. Now the megacorp just buys the disrupting platform

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Can you imagine a more effective way to incentivise more people to start even more disrupting platforms? Can you image a more effective way to get investors to give money to these upstarts?

It's much easier to get your rabble-rousing startup to threaten disruption (and then be bought up as a precaution), than if you had to actually battle it out in the marketplace to the bitter end.

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

#389

Post by eru »

darth_avocado wrote: post #116
justapassenger wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just one facet of what we call 'promotion oriented programming' (or promotion oriented design).

Google's promotion guidelines used to include that if you want to get a promotion on a technical track, you have to demonstrate a mastery of complexity. Cue the unnecessary complexity in some projects meant to get the author promoted.

(They might still include that requirement. I don't know. I haven't worked at Google in nearly a decade.)

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

#390

Post by eru »

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…

Not all places even have minimum wage laws.

In any case, good luck designing your system in such a way that's (A) not trivial to bypass, and (B) doesn't gut the economy.

As a customer (and worker and investor) you have to vote with your feet and wallet to show the market what you want and don't want in your companies.

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