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Google ad exec: “it is a worse user experience to not have ads on the page”

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Re: Google ad exec: “it is a worse user experience to not have ads on the page”

#91

Post by UltimateEdge »

chankstein38 wrote: post #50
baja_blast wrote: post #4

Anyone else feel that Google as a search engine has gotten really bad these past few years? Finding information outside of looking up restaurants, songs or products the results are often times completely irrelevant and limited now.

One thing I think affects this, aside from Google just being trash now, is the age of content available. I can't tell you how many times I google for a solution while writing some code and find irrelevant crap from 2013 or something. Don't get me wrong, it's good those things are available to be searched still but I don't routinely need 10 year old data. It would be nice if they'd archive things older than a certain…

For these things you can often just append something like "after:2020" to see current results. (I am not sure if you were aware.)

Re: Google ad exec: “it is a worse user experience to not have ads on the page”

#92

Post by WWLink »

asah wrote: post #3

Before HN jumps all over this, I worked at Google and other ads and search companies... and this is technically true (in selected cases) ! There are certain categories of websites and search results pages, where ads actually improve user experience, measured by nearly any metric you want to pick, from user perception to CTR/conversion, etc. There's lots of random categories, but the obvious ones are commercial/produc…

I disagree. Not once has "sponsored result" ever helped me in my shopping process. If anything, algorithm steering and "sponsored results" hurt because I'm searching for product X while you're pushing (sometimes quite hard) for me to buy something else.

Fuck that noise. If I were on the board of directors I'd push for a vote of no confidence in the CEO over saying something this idiotic.

Re: Google ad exec: “it is a worse user experience to not have ads on the page”

#94

Post by azemetre »

stcroixx wrote: post #71
duped wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's lots of random categories, but the obvious ones are commercial/product searches where you're looking to buy something. I believe that you believe this while also believing that your metrics must be so horribly biased towards indicating that "ads are good" that you miss the forest for the trees. I have entirely stopped using google to search for products because of ads. It is impossible to research products…

It's this failure to engage with reality that will be their downfall. Hubris is at the root of it really, reinforced by the way they hire.

I always wondered if the rise of ds&a/leetcode style interviews often hurt these companies more than helped? You are definitely screening for a certain type of engineer when hiring this way, especially when you want to hire 10,000 of them.

You're basically filtering people who care more about optimizing their career than wanting to make a good product (nothing wrong with putting your career first, but you can't have the entire company made up of these people), but then again all the incentives at these companies reward short term thinking so it's probably beyond the interview level.

Either way there needs to be way more competition in the entire tech space in all sectors. Competition would solve a lot of these issues if Google was forced to break up Chrome, Search, Ads, Android, and YouTube; same for the other big tech co's too. This amount of consolidation is bad for everyone.

Re: Google ad exec: “it is a worse user experience to not have ads on the page”

#95

Post by camtarn »

valine wrote: post #8

It’s disappointing to see google lacking basic self awareness like this. Ten years ago they seemed highly competent and nearly unstoppable.

Ten-ish years ago, Google was still trying to make Google Plus work. I don't think it's been a particularly competent company for a long time.

Re: Google ad exec: “it is a worse user experience to not have ads on the page”

#96

Post by Terretta »

tqi wrote: post #73
Terretta wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> build a better search engine that functions and is better without ads https://kagi.com > The internet is 99.99% scams and trash. It's hard to find the signal in the noise. https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

> We gather new content, published within the last week, from a handpicked list of blogs imo this only only works because it is a niche product? If Google went away, and Kagi became the #1 search engine overnight, I think this approach would immediately become a source of criticism for being too restrictive, gatekeeping newcomers or biased towards a narrow perspective (as Google itself already is).

To be clear, overall Kagi is not limiting itself to the small web.

That's a passion project of the founder who coded it himself to the consternation of his team.

Re: Google ad exec: “it is a worse user experience to not have ads on the page”

#97

Post by Terretta »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #82
Terretta wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> build a better search engine that functions and is better without ads https://kagi.com > The internet is 99.99% scams and trash. It's hard to find the signal in the noise. https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

Strange to define something as better with ~0% market share and not meaningfully growing, but sure.

Strange to define market share as a gating criteria for better.

So not sure I trust definition of "meaningfully" either. Perhaps a better word would be "sustainably".

Re: Google ad exec: “it is a worse user experience to not have ads on the page”

#98

Post by phendrenad2 »

asah wrote: post #3

Before HN jumps all over this, I worked at Google and other ads and search companies... and this is technically true (in selected cases) ! There are certain categories of websites and search results pages, where ads actually improve user experience, measured by nearly any metric you want to pick, from user perception to CTR/conversion, etc. There's lots of random categories, but the obvious ones are commercial/produc…

You haven't proven that it's true in any case, not even "selected cases". You conflated CTR with user experience quality (rookie mistake) and then tried to say that the existence of ads throughout history somehow proves your point (lol?)

The fact that you knew your point was ridiculous, and had to say "let the downvotes begin!" is just icing on the cake.

Re: Google ad exec: “it is a worse user experience to not have ads on the page”

#99

Post by alwaysrunning »

dgrin91 wrote: post #69
alwaysrunning wrote: post #49

Honestly, who here sees ads? My son owns a marketing firm and anytime I see his display it's shocking to me how different it looks than mine.

> Honestly, who here sees ads? Your problem is selection bias. Here is HN, a group of mostly tech-oriented people who all have adblockers. The majority of people actually _don't_ have ad blockers, especially the older crowd.

Agreed, but I was referring to those who visit HN.

Re: Google ad exec: “it is a worse user experience to not have ads on the page”

#100

Post by 000ooo000 »

baja_blast wrote: post #4

Anyone else feel that Google as a search engine has gotten really bad these past few years? Finding information outside of looking up restaurants, songs or products the results are often times completely irrelevant and limited now.

Yep it's pretty awful now. Being tech support and then a programmer, I've been googling very frequently for a long while and only in the last few years have I started to feel frustrated in trying to find what seems like basic info. Seems the variety in results has vanished, e.g. once I could search for csharp xyz and get a stack overflow result with a few solid 'sub results', followed by an msdn article, then a GitHub issue page, then a blog or three. Now, it seems like I get an entire page of msdn results, maybe a stack overflow result, a couple of those dogshit content aggregation sites regurgitating stack overflow content, and that's about it. What should worry Google (ha) is that I'm starting to break the muscle memory of going straight to google and instead asking chatgpt first. I set my custom instructions to include a link to docs for anything it mentions and even if ChatGPT is wrong, I'm usually at the info I want faster than with Google.
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