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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

#721

Post by int_19h »

owenthejumper wrote: post #112
mattigames wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That capitalism technically already exists in the US. We have very strong monopoly laws. It's just...nobody is enforcing them. Unlike the 70's and 80's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

It's because the laws were creatively reinterpreted to mean something very different from what the people who wrote them had in mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox

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

#722

Post by int_19h »

MountDoom wrote: post #137
jameson wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i feel sometimes it's best for the company to stay private

The founders of the company still have a controlling stake in the business. External shareholders have little leverage. Going public gave Google a lot of nearly-free money to grow, and it's how you've gotten both Gmail and Google+. But more importantly, it allowed them to offer much higher total comp packages by issuing more stock on the go. I think they're prisoners of the stock market only insofar that if the stock…

> Going public gave Google a lot of nearly-free money to grow, and it's how you've gotten ... Gmail

And in retrospect, was that really a good thing? Short-term, yes - I remember how much better it was than the alternatives. Long-term, we ended up in a situation where email = GMail for most users, and this in turn gives Google undue leverage and strangles competition.

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

#723

Post by int_19h »

tangotaylor wrote: post #234
tsigo wrote: post #206

Meanwhile, over on Kagi: https://cln.sh/LbZ8VBbKzjyzKchNC4hS

I’m still amazed that Kagi search results are basically on par with Google’s (and without the ads) in all my comparison tests that I’ve done. And Google has orders of magnitude more resources. What has Google been doing all this time?

It's even more insane than that. Kagi uses Google as its backing search engine. And some others, to be fair, but a lot of those search results are still coming from Google API.

Which is to say, Google could easily be as good as Kagi is, if they wanted to. What they have been "doing all this time" is turning their search results into a mess.

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

#724

Post by int_19h »

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.

Apple doesn't take into account that users might want to use some other search engine not on their very limited list of options that Safari has. But this is solved by using just about any other browser.

That aside, though, I'm not sure what the difference between mobile and desktop is for this scenario? In both cases you basically have to log into Kagi once using your web browser of choice, it sets the cookie accordingly, and thereafter things "just work". I don't even remember when I did that for my iPhone, but I think it's been over a year now?

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

#725

Post by int_19h »

rorylaitila wrote: post #651

MidJourney not being the first organic spot is a bad experience. But it's normal practice that you can place ads on users searching for other company names. This seems counter intuitive at first, but I think its reasonable. You don't get to exclude every advertiser from any random search string just because you have a domain name with it. How would that be enforced? There are many reasons to bid on brand names that a…

It would be more acceptable if the ad followed the actual correct top search result.

Also, "many brand names are just basic words" doesn't accurately describe the situation where it's blatantly obvious that copycats are picking this same word solely so as to muddy the waters for users trying to find the original.

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

#726

Post by int_19h »

antibios wrote: post #435

This discussion is crazy. Google is a business that sells advertising. They build a free browser so that it is easier for the end user to use their product. Chrome does tricky things to help google like, automatically searching if you don't type a URL into the address bar. You as a user, you have typed midjourney instead of midjourney.com using google search as your dns lookup. Google is a business that has correctly…

Sure, just don't complain when people get fed up enough to burn all this shit down with a vengeance and your retirement investment is all zeroes.

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

#727

Post by int_19h »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #51

Can we be honest here? This isn't (really) Google's fault, because ANY company in the same position would do the same. It's our fault, for letting them. We could pass a law preventing this nonsense tomorrow, and Google would have no choice in the matter. However, "we the people" don't have strong advocates fighting for us, while Google has both (very strong) legal and political contributions (ie. bribery) teams ensur…

It is still their fault because at the end of the day they choose to do this. Yes, the incentives encourage them to make that choice, but if I offer you a million dollars to murder someone and you do that, you're still responsible for what you did.

Now the definition of "their" needs clarification here. Google as a whole cannot be meaningfully morally responsible because it is not an actual person, and as such, not entity that possesses the ability to be moral or immoral in the first place. It's an organization. But all organizations are run by people, and people at the top do have a lot of capacity to make meaningful choices. When they make choices that they do, we can and should hold them morally accountable for them.

Meaningful regulation is also good, but, well, consider two societies: one has low rates of property crime because of draconian enforcement, the other because people just choose not to do it despite very little enforcement. Which society is more pleasant to live in?

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

#728

Post by Marsymars »

int_19h wrote: post #713
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"other generic brands" is pretty standard ad verbiage in all countries AFAIK. Even when there's no specific law, if you mention another brand by name, you open yourself up to a defamation lawsuit.

I had the parent comment, not the one you're directly replying to... but that actually seems a bit odd to me.

Clearly if you're not an advertiser, you can call out brands by name for having junky products (e.g. "The Worst Air Purifier We’ve Ever Tested" by Wirecutter on the Molekule air purifier). Similarly clearly, if you're an advertiser, you'll fall afoul of laws around false advertising if you tell non-truths in ads.

I expect that the reason Honeywell or Coway aren't punching down on Molekule in their ads isn't that they're afraid of lawsuits more than the Wirecutter, it's simply that their ads are meant to build their own brand awareness so they don't want to name any other brands.

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

#729

Post by Theodores »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #508
Theodores wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I see it, it is like gambling. If you pay for keywords of a rival brand and you get conversions from it to make it worth your while then you can keep paying for those keywords. So yes, it is a data driven decision. However, it is also faith based. In e-commerce the guys buying the ads are not the brightest on the team. Same goes for their organic SEO counterparts. Their metrics rarely include the metric that matte…

> If you pay for keywords of a rival brand… it is a data driven decision Right, I think this is easier to quantify. The hard case is advertising on _your own_ name, defensively (to stop others from doing so). I think it is hard to make a truly data driven decision in this case, since you don’t see the clicks you lose. I think you’d have to do a careful A/B test if you want to tease this apart. > the guys buying the a…

To be honest, I am not the greatest programmer that ever lived and I don't get the gigs with the top tier teams.

The friction comes primarily due to different goals, or rather different timespans, since there is only one goal, to make money. The marketing guys need results now because the sales guys need results now. Meanwhile, I only care about the long term plan. To me there is a lot more involved in that, for example the customer service.

You can discount everything and get the numbers up, to clear stock, get cash flow and more sales for the month. However, these are 'bottom feeders' that only shop on price. They are not brand loyal and, for the following month you need even more discounting, with it becoming a race to the bottom.

If you want repeat customers then there is more to it than price. You need customer service, efficient delivery, a speedy website and much else assuming the products are not that innovative.

As a developer you have tested the shopping cart and checkout a thousand times so you have some idea how to make it slick. However, too often there is a designer that does not know HTML that just does drawings in Photoshop that are non functional mockups, however, due to the process, these designs get signed off by the client and cast in stone. The better way would be to get it all working first then have someone that uses CSS and SVG rather than Photoshop to get it pretty.

So why the beef with the guys that by the ads? Too often I have found that they struggle with spelling, lack product knowledge and assume programmers are to be kept in a dimly lit basement to be whipped into cranking out the code.

Maybe it is just bad luck. If I upped my developer game I could get on better teams where the web development wasn't managed by a marketing guy that is clueless about the core capability that is code.

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

#730

Post by gerdesj »

pitched wrote: post #167
gerdesj wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm old enough to remember when the web didn't exist ... and when I dumped Altavista and Ask Jeeves and co for the cool kids: Google. I'm fucking livid. Well actually: mildly unimpressed. The cool kids rarely last as such and "do no evil" ended up behind a green tent and a single shot was heard. Actually, I am slightly stressed over this whole thing.

Instead of stressing, you could move on to supporting the next cool kids.

Grand daughter is rocking a customer cast off laptop. I was asked for help when the first lock down for covid was announced in the UK. I slapped on Kubuntu and an OpenVPN connection back to my home pfSense router on it, so I could manage it. All a bit slapdash but best I could do at the time.

That was 2020. Six months ago, I find out she is still using it and its a "bit slow". I update it from 18.04 to 24.04 via ssh over an OpenVPN connection on the box itself. Its still in use and is still attached to both one of my home OpenVPN servers and my work Mesh Central.

I've also recently repurposed another Win10 but can't do Win11 laptop to someone so they can do some courses.

I think I'm doing all right with supporting the next cool kids.

I'm still stressing though 8)

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