521–530 of 740 posts
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.
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That's down to US Government policies. If you tried middle-manning any for-profit like that, you'd get a cease and desist letter really quickly. But USG doesn't seem to care. We can't reasonably expect Google to be a gatekeeper here.
That's not just the US. I've seen that myself with Vietnam and Seychelles, and I'm sure it's a problem with any other country where a visa or other documents are required
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If you're trying to do anything in terms of official documents, there's a middleman charging more. I searched for "passport application" the other day and it was 4 ads of people offering this service. My dad was trying to get an ESTA visa a couple years ago and ended up paying twice the actual price, because he can't discern what's the official site or not.
That's down to US Government policies. If you tried middle-manning any for-profit like that, you'd get a cease and desist letter really quickly. But USG doesn't seem to care. We can't reasonably expect Google to be a gatekeeper here.
I think that is called affiliate marketing.
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…
The other 10 times, it's because I want to install some specific app that I already know and I just want to get to the page of that exact app - either through a direct link or through the store's search.
There were exactly zero times where I opened the store with the motivation "gee, I really feel like installing a new app, but I have no idea what it should be... Let's check out the recommendations!"
Yet this seems to be what the entire UI is optimized for.
lol :^)
They still get away with it as ‘only’ 1% complain and Google thinks they don’t matter. We built our entire company for that 1%.
How is Kagi for non-US folks? I've tried switching to DDG a while back but the experience for me, living outside the US, was not great. Sure, programming related searches were pretty good, but everything else was not. Does Kagi have a better localized experience?
You can easily change the country in the results page, which is useful for people who speak multiple languages. With DuckDuckGo, I sometimes had to resort to !g to use Google, but I haven't done that in Kagi for ages.
Every time this comes up, I don’t understand what the alternative is supposed to be. X (Midjourney in this case) may/not be trademarked in the user’s country - so what makes X so special that Google/others should rank this one over others? Does this mean X owns the keyword and other related searches on Google forever? That sounds worse than domain squatting! Speaking of, quite often, X.com is already registered, so c…
You're describing the exact (complex) problem that Google Search was born to solve. And at some point they successfully did. If we agree it's something they can't solve anymore, letting them pay to stay is a disservice to the users.
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…
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I don't have access to any data that supports my vibes, but it just feels like any business that sells stuff has very little incentive to actually give you what you're searching for. I can't think of a single online store that's good at search and it seems like it's because the thought is "don't miss anything that might come close to the search terms". Whether it's Amazon, IKEA, the supermarkets where I live, etc, an…
Probably the virtual variant of the Gruen effect in action: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruen_transfer Fortunately we still have Geizhals in AT[0]/DE[1]/PL[2]/UK[3] to work around that. [0]: https://geizhals.at/ [1]: https://geizhals.de/ [2]: https://cenowarka.pl/ [3]: https://skinflint.co.uk/
Meanwhile, over on Kagi: https://cln.sh/LbZ8VBbKzjyzKchNC4hS
I've pinned all results from wikipedia.org, which is a killer feature and why I'm paying for Kagi, instead of giving away my data for free to Google.