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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

#401

Post by johnfn »

Denzel wrote: post #351
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…

Google SERPs are personalized. Likely OP is a Midjourney user which is recorded in his targeting profile. When OP searches for Midjourney as a Midjourney user, Google’s algorithm infers he might want to consider an alternative because why would an existing user search for the product they’re already using. We see evidence supporting this given no Midjourney ad showed up for a direct keyword match query; and only alte…

Interesting hypothesis, but I am also a Midjourney user.

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

#402

Post by daliusd »

zeroq wrote: post #373

One of my "sales pitches" is "I can find answers online, I know kung-fu". I've been using internet since '98, and I somehow developed this elusive skill of knowing how to navigate all these ads, seo farms, paid content, murky websites, and getting straight to the answer, no matter what the question was. For a long time I didn't thought of that as a special power. I thought it was natural, like driving a car, or speak…

I have found both perplexity and Claude.ai good enough. Since I pay for claude because of development, why not use it as search engine as well? So maybe the future is multi provider?

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

#403

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

I searched on DDG, first result was www.midjourney.com the second result was the Wikipedia article about midjourney.

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

#404

Post by marcus_holmes »

eru wrote: post #398
marcus_holmes wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How are buybacks defrauding anyone? They just return money to shareholders. The only material difference with dividends is the tax treatment. Even all the incentives are the same. > 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. What makes you think so? https://en.wikipedia…

> How are buybacks defrauding anyone?

Mr Doctorow's point is that the company is taking money from its operations, which it should be spending on expanding those operations and increasing its value, and spending that money on artificially inflating its share price, by effectively wash trading the shares, creating artificial demand, and artificially reducing supply.

If you bought shares in the company as a long-term position in order to receive dividends then you do not benefit from buybacks, and arguably lose out (because the money used on the buyback could have been distributed as a dividend). It only benefits short-term speculator shareholders. And, of course, the executives who are incentivised on share price, for whom a buyback is a much, much, easier way to get those incentives than actually doing their jobs and using the money to grow the company.

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

#405

Post by molteanu »

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 can. I get deevid as a first result occupying the whole screen (on mobile) as it lists the sub-links, too (one of them being a sub-link to the "AI kissing generator")

Then comes PixVerse, a sponsored result for a google play app.

Then difuss.me.

Then comes midjourney.

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

#406

Post by SoftTalker »

Denzel wrote: post #351
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…

Google SERPs are personalized. Likely OP is a Midjourney user which is recorded in his targeting profile. When OP searches for Midjourney as a Midjourney user, Google’s algorithm infers he might want to consider an alternative because why would an existing user search for the product they’re already using. We see evidence supporting this given no Midjourney ad showed up for a direct keyword match query; and only alte…

So in fact Amazon is incentivized to sell you a shitty toaster on your first purchase, hoping you’ll then come back and buy a better one.

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

#407

Post by seanssel »

moduspol wrote: post #299
seanssel wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Kagi, been using it for over a year now. Sadly I haven’t been able to get anyone else on board, even with gift subs.

I tried for a while but found too much friction getting it all working on my phone (iOS). It wasn’t TOO crazy—I just think Apple didn’t take into account that a search engine might require authentication. Though maybe it’s easier now—I should give it another look.

Yeah I've never had any issues on iOS, that said I'm mostly using Orion on my phone these days. They have a page here covering iOS browsers: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...

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

#408

Post by southernplaces7 »

This is pretty mild actually. If you do a google search for any remotely "salesworthy" word, like say, "microphone" (because you want a wikipedia article on how they work maybe, or links to organic results for whatever comes up, you get absolutely flooded by a whole pile of sales offers and filters as if Google were fucking Amazon. I've had it happen with all kinds of searches, even some that weren't at all for a product.

It didn't used to manifest in this way with Google results, and it's a ridiculous beshitting of the basic idea of just using its search.

IMGUR link to an example I quickly pulled up.

https://imgur.com/a/EdBLIMg

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

#409

Post by derefr »

thwarted wrote: post #396
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…

I wonder how much this can end up contributing to the Kleenex-ification of a brand or a term. You search for firefox and random other browsers come up. Now browsers in general are associated with the firefox term. Of course, when it comes down to it, there isn't much difference between browsers anyway, the UI is different but they all need to work with the same websites, and people have been using specific applicatio…

…you might have an argument there for this practice of rival-brand-mark sponsored-placement squatting constituting an odd type of trademark infringement.

Imaging if PepsiCo paid grocers to shelve cans of Pepsi right beside cans of Coke, sharing the same inventory tag that just says “Coca Cola”. Coke would definitely be able to sue for something about that, right? Well, isn’t this the same?

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

#410

Post by phanimahesh »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #348
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…

Wondering if OP has malware that’s injecting results into the search.

We all have the malware injecting results into our searches. The ad networks graciously run part of the malware server side.
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