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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

#491

Post by WhyNotHugo »

Marsymars wrote: post #313
asadotzler wrote: post #88

There was a time when Google disallowed this. Google even asked us (Firefox team) to report ads squatting on our trademarks. Eventually they stopped caring and now it's in their ad sales pitchdeck just how effective trademark squatting can be.

I feel like there’s at least some country in the world where the legal regime would be amenable to ruling against Google if they were taken to court over trademark squatting by the trademark holders.

In Argentina it is illegal (since the nineties) to mention other brands. So a Coca Cola ad cannot reference Pepsi. Laundry detergents can not make references to other brands, so they say “better than other generic brands” without names or hinting any in particular. I suppose the exact wording is important here, but this practice sound dangerously close to violating this restriction.

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

#493

Post by epolanski »

Zanfa wrote: post #489

Wow, so not only have they lost the war against SEO spammers, they've now decided to completely obscure which results are actually ads. What an embarrassment Google has become, but I guess that sweet-sweet ad money trumps everything else.

Going public puts too much growth pressure on companies.

You can't be happy building great products and thinking long term, nope, you've gotta show higher growth in the shorter term too.

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

#495

Post by sublimefire »

It does not fully show the problem as the result is immediately beneath the sponsored content.

The problem is when you are searching for something more complex and it does not find it immediately, which means you need to jump through the sponsored content over and over to find something (when tweaking a query or paging). It is easier to use simpler search services like DDG and do quicker search iterations compared to google.

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

#496

Post by sehansen »

MostlyStable wrote: post #75
Mistletoe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will you fight the inevitable slide that happens if you ever got on top? I’m convinced Google started with the absolute best of intentions before the money and greed turned them into a horror movie villain.

Since they are subscription based and not ad based, their incentives are inherently aligned with customer preferences. This doesn't mean that they are immune from getting worse, or just becoming complacent, but it does at least make it less likely. Ad-supported companies succumbing to enshittification is virtually guaranteed thanks to the misalignment of basic incentives between the company and users (note: not custo…

Exactly this. There's no guarantee Kagi will never get worse, but it will become worse in a different way than Google has since Kagi isn't ad supported.

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

#497

Post by jstanley »

vunderba wrote: post #89
beckthompson wrote: post #20

Its sad but I think at this point its kind of a safety issue not to use an ad blocker. Those results are not clearly ads and I've clicked on fake links in the past when they were.

Strong agree but unless it gets built-into the browser, the average net denizen simply won't do it. The number of times I've seen a friend of the family try to show me an article on their laptop while casually trying to shoot down the pop-up ads like they're playing a marketers version of Missile Command was astonishing. And EVEN if they do install a blocker, 9 times out of 10 it'll be AdBlock Plus and not uBlock Ori…

> unless it gets built-into the browser

DuckDuckGo is built in to the browser! Google is still unfortunately the default, but it's just Settings -> Search -> Default Search Engine, and DuckDuckGo is already in the list.

> unless you're running Android Firefox

Yeah, obviously run Android Firefox.

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

#498

Post by sehansen »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #338
d4mi3n wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Don't get greedy" and similar variations assumes intent rather than what I see as the reality of how companies operate within the US--not a failing of individual virtues. If you're a public company, your shareholders will want stock prices to go up and are more than happy to use their shares to vote for whoever is willing to make that happen. This is, of course, an exaggeration. Not all shareholders value profits ab…

Is there a minimum percentage of voting stock you have to issue in US law? IIRC, google is split in half into voting and non-voting shares with a clause in their incorporation to buy back shares to keep their prices roughly equal.

There isn't. Snapchat went public by issuing only non-voting shares to the open market.

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

#499

Post by wiether »

rkomorn wrote: post #479
wiether wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to Orion as my main browser on my iPhone I was using Firefox previously So, not only my overall browser experience improved, but Kagi is natively _infused_ in Orion, so that was the easiest setup I had to make If you have settings synced between devices, I'd see how that would be an issue (I'm still 100% on Firefox on my Linux/MacOS/Windows devices)

If you don't mind taking the time: as an actual user, what would you say are the top 3 things you, personally, get out of this? I'm a Kagi user, primarily for the non-sponsored search results. The AI stuff in Kagi doesn't pique my interest. Their Orion pitch also doesn't, but I'm interested in an actual user's opinion.

Sure!

My top 3 would be:

1. customized and sanitized search results

2. Assistant

3. custom bangs

And to develop more:

- Not only I don't have ads in my results, but they are customized and sanitized based on my settings, since I can block some websites, put a better ranking on others... or even use lenses if I want to use a very precise scope

- With Assistant I have access to (almost) all the most recent and popular models, I can easily switch, even inside a thread, so I don't need to have an account (and a subscription) at OpenAI, Anthropic... They are immediately available in a single web interface (and soon in CLI)

- Bangs are not new, but with Kagi I can create my owns, and they are well implemented within the Kagi _universe_, so I even have custom bangs to start a chat with Assistant with specific models (ex: typing "!cl" will start a chat with Assistant using Claude)

And overall, what's make everything better is that I only need to setup the Kagi extension, and then all my settings are shared between my devices. My custom Kagi style is automatically shared. My search settings are automatically shared. My Assistant threads are automatically shared. My custom bangs are automatically shared.

As soon as I setup the Kagi extension, I have the same great Kagi experience!

Regarding Orion, I use it on my iPhone since it provides better performances than Firefox and Kagi works great in it. But on computers I still use Firefox because I have more expectations, I'm not only on MacOS and, to be honest, I haven't found the experience that great; mostly because I'm not a fan of the UI.

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

#500

Post by mavhc »

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…

On play and app stores if you search for Microsoft Authenticator, which I imagine most people working at a company would be doing, there's an Ad first, which is rather annoying for a security application
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