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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

#401
post #15

no ublock origin = pebcak

So you blame the user for not filtering the ads? And you don't blame Google for serving them?

Google does what they think it's better for them and the user should do what it's better for him.

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

#402
post #343

I call this the squeeze. Google, even after all its attempts, is still a one trick pony. They have to grow at least 20% year over year to justify the market cap. They weren’t able to create a two pillar company like Amazon (AWS + Retail) so what do uncreative master executives naturally turn to? Of course their only cash cow. “ Rabban! I place you in charge of Arrakis. It's yours to squeeze, as I promised. I want you…

I can totally see Sundar Pichai riding a sandworm.

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

#403

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,…

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.

have you tried Bing recently? I tried DDG for almost a year and in every other search I had to switch to Google. I started using Bing a couple months ago and now I only try Google as a last resort (and most often than not I end up not finding what I want)

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

#404

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,…

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.

Same here, one thing I find especially annoying with Bing/DDG/Brave is that they not only return worse results, but sometimes completely nuke certain search terms, e.g. try "aoi jav" (NSFW) in Bing image and video search. It gives zero results. Regular text search gives a few, but also looks heavily censored. Try the same thing in Google and you get millions of results.

Don't fully understand what is going on here. Safe search is disabled. Worse results would be expected, but zero results seems like an excessive amount of censorship. Other similar search terms work fine.

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

#405

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,…

Under Search tools there is a toggle for all results/verbatim. If you switch it to verbatim it will give you something closer to you want. I hate that it is this way, and that most of the old google hacking tricks don't work.

The problem is that Google is no longer a search engine for the world wide web. It is an app that can answer questions, that happens to also have a web front end

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

#406
Could it be that google is relying too much on the input from the address bar?

Unlike new search engines, google doesn't have to scrape and analyze the web because Chrome shows them what people want when they are searching for a set of words.

Since Bing/DuckDuckGo doesn't have the same level of manipulation, I would assume that SEO spammers have managed to influence Google by faking browser feedback.

I would assume that there are thousands of artificial Chrome instances that fake active users and flood Google with wrong user feedback.

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

#407
post #279

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.

[deleted]

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

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. Spurious garbage SEO programming sites showing unhelpful code snippets in particular have had a big productivity hit on my coding. I wonder what the people working on those sites think about what they’re doing.

Making money from Ads?

Personally if I was making money at the expense of humanity’s ability to access knowledge, I wouldn’t feel so great about it.

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

#409
I am not so much concerned about a search engine, which is superficially free to the end user, displaying adds.

I am totally concerned though that the non-adds results are those where the interests of the company behind the search results and my interest are deeply leaning towards the interest of the company instead of mines.

In clear text: Content of sites disguised as original content yet serving no other purpose but linking to Amazon or sites which display a ton of adds served by Google.

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