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 own name, resulting in Double Shein: https://i.imgur.com/0buR8Hq.png
As a user, I'm still baffled that the interface to view and manage the apps I have installed on the system - which is 90 out of 100 times why I'm opening the play store - is tucked away in some obscure corner of the app.
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.
I actually do open the app store specifically to find a cool new app to install. I do this maybe a couple times a year.
It never works. The apps it suggests are all ad farming garbage. I have found maybe one fun game doing this over the years, but mostly its been repeated frustration. I keep doing it occasionally in hopes that I find another diamond in the rough but I think Google has just trashed this whole thing up.
There is probably a set of users who download tons of apps and throw money after them like crazy, and that's probably what Google has optimized for.
I always do this on F-Droid, always find nice gems in there.
Wouldn't dream of doing it on Play Store, it's all trash, and even the stuff I go there to download specifically, I wish I didn't have to most of the time.
Games are the exception here. The category has real creative churn and relies less on name recognition. Discovery still feels too shallow though. Reddit is still the best source for game recommendations.
> the interface to view and manage the apps I have installed on the system
Why do you go to the play store to view and manage installed apps? If you swipe up from home screen you should get to the app drawer. Or Settings > Apps.
If you want to do manual updates you do it in play store rather than the OS settings utility. That is buried under your account settings which isn't logically related.
I have bookmarked the play store update view as separate icon by long pressing the play store icon, then long pressing/dragging the my apps section to an own "app".
That way I can skip the store garbage and directly go click update all apps button.
I just tried on apple device s few weeks ago and it took me many minutes to find the listing where I can update installed apps and it was missing the update all button...
Of course they know the UI doesn't really do what you want. But they also know they make more money when it's filled with manipulative anti-patterns.
Companies love algorithmic content because because it's the ultimate shield from criticism. "Don't blame us for bad content! It's just the algorithm and we can't control it! Maybe if you interact with it more it will give you better results." Or course in practice it means they have plausible deniability when they shove a stream of ads in your feed.
The one that kills me is on YouTube: "show fewer shorts". fewer than what? Why isn't zero an option? It just means they will shove them in your face again and again. Don't want them at all? Too bad! We need to increase metrics so the PM of shorts can get their promotion!
In the old days, TV was chock full of ads, sometimes to such a degree that you watched more ad time than movie time during a movie, assuming you didn't switch to other channels in between, always either missing the beginning of next part of the movie, or resigned yourself to watch some ad content afterall in order not to miss that beginning.
Ads will always be around, I guess. Doesn't Google offer a pay search version too, without ads? Like youtube...
It's simply optimized to upsell you on other apps when you are there for a different purpose.
Just how supermarkets are designed, IKEA is the most egregious, they try to force you to look at and tempt you with a whole load of other products on your way to getting what you came for.
But you go to IKEA for IKEA and get IKEA. With the phone stores or search engines you go to them for $result and you get $something_else.
It's similar but not quite the same. Even the parallel with the physical world fails us here, IKEA can't put everyone's desired product at the entrance. Google can.
When I go to IKEA for a desk chair, I have to walk though many other unrelated things to see the desk chairs. The difference is that IKEA sells IKEA only.
> I have to walk though many other unrelated things to see the desk chairs
That's what I was trying to say earlier with the limitations of the physical world. IKEA implements a lot of psychological tricks to get your eyeballs on as many products as they can but at the end of the day they can have only so many corridors and entrances to the store. You want a chair, I want a pillow, someone else wants a flower pot. Sooner or later someone will need to walk a bit to get to what they want, IKEA can't put everything right at the entrance.
But Google can put my desired result right at the top, at the entrance. It's the advantage of digital, it can be changed to suit each individual user. As it turns out, Google made it only their advantage.
When I go to IKEA for a desk chair, I have to walk though many other unrelated things to see the desk chairs. The difference is that IKEA sells IKEA only.
This is the sort of thing that makes people on HN start screaming "ZOMG! Walled garden!!!!11!!eleventy!1"
Opening the App Store to download a bunch of apps - in general - is probably the #1 thing people are doing when they open the App Store. Of course, installing a specific app is a top use case. But I think you're just not the average user. Lots of people open the App Store frequently to just check out what's available.
~10 years ago I would do this all the time. It's fun, kind of like surfin' the net was back in the old days, but in a walled garden of applications.
is there actually any data to back up the claim that the "#1 thing people do" is open the app store to see what's available besides your singular story about what you used to do a decade ago when all of this was much more novel in general?
I'm surprised to hear this, as I am in the same boat as the other poster. Of course it makes sense, they wouldn't build that junk if there weren't junk consumers on the market. But I still can't grasp the concept of "just installing apps".
It seems plausible that casual browsing and downloading remains a significant use case. Apple surely wouldn't design the App Store focusing on discovery this way otherwise. Not sure about the #1 activity hypothesis. What I'm certain about though is that the App Store is deeply broken and they've started rushing down the path of platform "enshittification" (real thing) where online platforms become less useful, less enjoyable, or less user-friendly.
> As a user, I'm still baffled that the interface to view and manage the apps I have installed on the system - which is 90 out of 100 times why I'm opening the play store - is tucked away in some obscure corner of the app.
Analytics driven development.
They realized that doing it this way leads to greater ad clicks and time spent on the app.
As an aside, am I the only one who has problems finding the Play Store icon amidst the various Google tools? All these icons look the same. They're basically all red/green/yellow/blue.
I am not baffled, because managing and viewing your already-installed apps is almost certainly lower marginal revenue than showing new apps, for the bulk of app store users.
Just opened the App Store to check. There’s an ad for chrome on the home screen. I click search and before I start typing search suggestions pop up. The first one is for chrome. I type Firefox and click search. The first result is chrome.
At least it's always only one ad, but on the other hand it takes up half the screen. Plus the title is the name of the app, not "Firefox". Really, the bar is not very high for ads
The worst thing about it is that it looks exactly like a regular app listing, too. The only indication that it's an ad is a tiny "ad" icon - a pale blue square with slightly paler blue text. And that icon isn't even next to the (large and visible) app name, it's next to the (small and greyed out) tagline.
This is also true on Apple's app stores, to be fair. I didn't know this until I got a MacBook Pro recently and my assumption that Apple's controls would be tighter than Google's was proven quite wrong when I opened the Mac App Store for the first rime.
For all of those app stores, the current approach prints them money and lets them claim impartiality, while still allowing some control through acceptance rules, ToSes and automated security measures. All those things scale well. Any other approach I can think of ends up having corner cases that involve human support or interfacing with regulatory systems - and these things do not scale well.
I don't know if curation is really the problem. Nearly every other platform has a search that when you search for "Mr Beast" on YouTube or "Elon Musk" on X they know you mean the popular one and not some 2-bit dork's fan page or parody that happens to have those words in the title/keywords.
I think they just (A) have no idea what they're doing when it comes to search and (B) the scamware that fills all their App Stores makes Apple a ton of extra money compared to people finding the real apps which usually are monetized outside the app store due to Apple's absurd revshare.
A lack of oversight is what I see as the problem, and the solution would require a significant human element.
Expecting a retailer to know/inspect the product they collect margins on shouldn't be a big ask.
The retailer has to know what they're selling, but Apple seems to turn a blind eye to shady listings because of the way Mac App Store results are shown and the lack of useful filtering available to the user.
Lack of care, like previous commenters mentioned, each sale is a sale, and 30% to Apple. It does not matter what you sell. One step deeper and it does matter what you sell: it seems to incentivise spammy apps, why block these money makers?! It is all about money. Nothing else.
When we propose alternatives the answer is that they want to protect customers.
But they don’t protect their cash cow from massive daily influxes of scam apps. It’s better one million scam apps generating 50k per month and drowning my two or three apps for which I spent months of work than a few thousand quality apps from which everybody would profit.
Let’s be real it takes a special kind of mad developer to try to make a business that relies on the AppStore. First if you are unlucky you get rejected on day one or two. And if you aren’t and are wildly popular you risk Apple copying your business model.
Because deep down some people at Apple despise the App Store developers and think they can do much better. This has been at the core of Apple culture for ages.
Anyway we legit indie developers who care about our products get drowned in irrelevance. Who cares.
> Nearly every other platform has a search that when you search for "Mr Beast" on YouTube or "Elon Musk" on X they know you mean the popular one and not some 2-bit dork's fan page or parody that happens to have those words in the title/keywords.
> Nearly every other platform has a search that when you search for "Mr Beast" on YouTube or "Elon Musk" on X they know you mean the popular one and not some 2-bit dork's fan page or parody that happens to have those words in the title/keywords.
Well, that's what you expect as a user and as a technology person, but as the TFA demonstrates, this doesn't apply to Google without an ad-blocker.
In fact, I just tried searching for "Microsoft Word" in the Mac App Store, and it was the first hit (with other Office apps coming next).
I did a search for "Instapaper" and again, first hit.
On my iPhone I did the same thing, there was a single sponsored app as the first item (and oddly completely unrelated), and the first app after that was the one I typed.
There's that saying about "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating." The apple and play stores are like that. They don't care what you buy as long as they get to control the choices you choose from.
Yes they do. Their search already sucks in normal circumstances—I remember searching for “Pinboard” (the bookmarking service) and had to scroll by thirteen pinball (the game) apps before starting to see Pinboard apps—but you can type in the exact name of the app you want had have an ad for a competitor above it. Not only is it allowed, it’s encouraged.
They seem to have fixed that, at least for me all the top results are Pinboard clients or other products with Pinboard in the name.
With the ads it really feels like Apple is playing all sides, they almost always show the competitor first. When you search the competitor it's a different competitor at the top. You can keep going until you terminate at some app that presumably pays top dollar to appear as an ad for themselves right above their app in the search results. The only thing I'm surprised by is that they even allow people to put ads over their own first party apps
The ad slot is purely a revenue tool, not a discovery aid. It forces developers to pay just to defend their own branded search terms. App Store Search ads are a hidden increase in commissions that you either accept to pay by bidding on your own app's name, or omit at the expense of having competitors show on top of you all the time, stealing your revenue. It creates a significant drain on resources for indies, to the point that it's often no longer worth it to bother creating apps.
That's why Apple is now doing everything in their power to make app development easier, but that will more likely increase quantity and not necessarily quality, as it only deepens the ecosystem's problems by inviting more noise. The practical reality is, if you are not VC-backed and if you are not playing the heavy ad spend game, the App Store is more of a barrier than anything else.
I just tried this, searched for "Pinboard" and it was the first app after one sponsored app (that was oddly completely unrelated). Tried a couple of other things, like "Instapaper" "Unread" and they were the first hits after a single sponsored app.
Learned that App Store does this too during a recent MFA rollout.
What really surprised me was that when instructed to install Google Authenticator, a significant portion of people (I'd estimate close to 50%) would search the exact name and then proceed to reach to install the sponsored top result with a completely different name until I stopped them.
Absolutely this. It is so disappointing that the big tech companies provide ANOTHER opportunity for less-skilled users to make a mistake.
And a mistake that might hurt them with security and certainly cost and functionality.
And in a core, security-sensitive function like "what third party apps should I have on my personal device?" This is not searching for fun memes on Reddit!
A lot of the MFA apps that Apple allows to appear above the official apps do work, but they have a $10/month subscription fee. The MS Authenticator clones have very similar icons and names
I rather suspect that this kind of thing constitutes the majority of shovelware on all the app stores, rather than outright malware. The latter gets you quickly ejected, but if your app is technically within the rules, it's just a steady trickle of $$$ from people who install it by mistake or because they just don't know better.
I would love to see trademark law changed to ban this practice. Google, etc should not be allowed to, in effect, charge money to avoid having one’s trademark become a search term for a competitor.
Paying for ad slots to raise brand awareness is one thing, but a search for a trademark should resolve first to a valid holder of that trademark.
Why would that happen? Participating large businesses are completely fine with the existing practice. Sure, someone can bid on your trademark, but you can also bid on theirs and probably don't want to lose that ability.
Fortunately laws aren’t limited to be exclusive to large business interests and, at least occasionally, can be drafted with intent to benefit consumers in a market.
Same thing happened to me. I wanted to get "Fit Notes" - a free and ad-free app. I searched for it and the first result is some adware/subscription-based crap. I skip over. I scroll down part the "Sponsored: Related to your search" section with a whole bunch of others. I am still seeing more paid/in-app-purchase/subscription-based apps.
At this point I thought that the app didn't exist for newer versions of Android.
It turned out that it was the second result, just above the "sponsored" one. It looked so much like a part of the first result that I just skipped over it.
I usually use the app store in Fedora and am used to finding what I want and having it installed within secounds.
Occasionally, I help people with their Mac's, and it can easily take half an hour to get something installed (finding their password etc), and on iOS, there are ads that buries the real results.
Then I am reminded how spoiled I am in the Linux world! No ads and quick access to a large selection of open source and commercial programs, no accounts or logins!
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 application names in place of the type of data/work ("Excel file" being used to refer to a CSV).
…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?
Paying to parasitize the brand recognition and trust of a competitor has become the norm. he comparison to retail product squatting perfectly illustrates why this feels like an unfair infringement, not just aggressive marketing.
> Now browsers in general are associated with the firefox term.
Pardon? I’ve never heard a human call a browser “firefox” (as a generic term), or “chrome” for that matter (though people do assume you use Chrome by default now).
I just searched "Firefox" in the app store. The top result is Google Chrome with an Ad indicator (Google paid for higher placement). Second is Firefox.
Sometimes it's good to live in a region that no one cares about. I just searched for Firefox in the Android Play Store application, there were no ads, and the first result was Firefox.
I also don't get any ads in American and UK podcasts for the same reason (except for those read by the host, but there are few of those and they're easy to ignore).
On iOS App Store at least, my observation is they just show you a random irrelevant ad at the top if there’s no one specifically bidding for the term. Well that’s my assumption for why I get irrelevant <app with deep pocket> ads when I search for obscure terms. But maybe they don’t show an ad if there’s no bidder at all for garbage spots in <country>?
Podcasts are normally plain mp3 (or similar) files that get downloaded as-is off an rss feed, as far as I understand. I don’t think anyone gets extra ads outside the sponsored/host-read ones.
The big podcast networks like iHeart are able to dynamically splice ads into episodes, so they can be targeted based on geoIP or whatever other signals they have on you.
Everyone posts to centralized RSS feeds these days. The company that owns the feed creates duplicates of the uploaded file, inserts ads into them, and serves a version of the file containing ads localized to the downloader's country.
If the same podcast is uploaded to Youtube through the uploader's official channel, it won't contain those ads and you're better off downloading that.
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, any search I make comes back with what looks like spray and pray SEO.
Maybe it's actually a hard problem to solve, or maybe the goal is "sell anything!" (including better placement the seller pays for) rather than "give the user what they want".
Ikea is different though: they only sell their own products so there's so earning incentives from paid product placement. Of course they want to improve their own sales but I feel that's a very different, less nefarious goal.
Searching for anything really on amazon is... an experience. 15 sponsored vs nothing of substance. And there is no way to know that a given, say, boardgame is not even available on Amazon.
In fact, the results are so bad that most of the time I go through Google.
Every Amazon product page has a unique identifying number within the URL that can be used to relocate that exact product again if it is still online later.
If you copy & save the whole URL it works as expected when you paste it into a browser next time, unless that page is gone for good.
But if you just read the ID number to somebody and they type it into the search box, the product will appear as a tile surrounded by a few related product tiles and the rest unrelated. Completely outnumbered, and intentionally crafted to make it easier to buy some other product besides the exact one desired.
And that's when you already know exactly what you want.
Only if you then click on the correct one will it take you back to the exact same product page.
I avoid using the Amazon app exactly because of this. Firefox with uBlock makes it a lot better, and you can still switch to the app after finding the product if that's better for finishing the purchase.
Sometimes it's not even close, I went to download the PAX Australia app and the top result was Revolut.
I'd love to know the set of circumstances that the algorithm picked them to sponsor there.
Yes. In fact, I often get sponsored stuff before Apple’s own apps, when I’m searching for the Apple app. I’ll also get things like games, when I’m looking for development or productivity apps. It’s crazy.
One of the things that I do, each morning, is take a long walk, listening to music.
I’m an Apple One subscriber, so there’s no limit to the music from the catalog. I don’t buy individual songs. It’s already been paid, so they aren’t selling me anything.
I use the “Discovery Station” playlist, which gives you random songs, based on your preferences.
It used to be quite good, but lately, it’s been stuffing weird pop songs into the playlist. These are ones that I’d never listen to, otherwise. I will tell Siri that I don’t like the songs, but they keep coming, anyway. I often dislike up to five songs in a row; at which time, the phone gives up on the station, and starts feeding me random songs from my library.
This renders the “Discovery Station” pretty much worthless.
It’s fairly obvious that the playlist has been corrupted by paid results.
Pandora has always done the best job of selecting relevant unknown music for me, but the limit on skips (even for paid accounts), makes it worthless. Undiscovered music is frequently obscure for a reason, so I can sometimes skip a majority of the selections. I’ve always been puzzled about why Pandora never got borged by Apple or Microsoft. They were excellent, a decade before the AI hype bubble was even a broken rubber on the drug store shelf.
You would be surprised to know Apple started this in AppStore before Google on PlayStore. I assume it is because Google wanted to be safe from Antitrust lawsuits (Follow Apple rather than going there first).
As a curiosity, this is a common strategy for advertising! But people still disagree whether it is the best investment. You can generally win on your own name with comparatively low bids, because it is obviously the most relevant search term, and relevance is often factored into the price you pay for ad placement. So you may choose to bid defensively, to stop competitors from advertising on your name. Even so, the obvious counter-argument is that the person searched for you _explicitly_ by name, so how likely are they to click on your competitor's ads? I don't have a ton of experience, so perhaps some orgs make the decision in a data-driven way, but I suspect most make the decision in a mostly faith-based way.
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 matters to the board, namely profit. Their metrics are in sales at best, but most likely just clicks.
I have never worked anywhere where it has been joined up. You wouldn't believe how much gets sold at a loss with customer acquisition costing more than the product. Imagine paying lots for the ad, some more for the hosting, some more for the affiliate marketing, then discounting the product and then free shipping, all with an outsourced warehouse that costs a fortune.
In regular retail you just don't have this level of waste since there is a different cost structure and growth is unlikely to be double digit.
Meanwhile, money is sucked out of the world and funnelled into ad tech. In the olden days adverts might support the local paper so the money stayed in the community.
> 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 ads are not the brightest on the team
lol, surprise! I run marketing for a small business, I am the guy buying the ads haha. I’m not offended at all, but am a bit surprised the engineer-vs-sales feud is still alive. Fwiw I also do product design! Can’t we all get along?
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.
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
The iOS AppStore is just as bad. Even if your search term is the exact app name, they’ll show you random stuff first (maybe they’re hoping you buy before realizing it wasn’t what you were looking for). And since App Store contents are like 98% crap, the chances of randomly finding something worthwhile are miniscule.
Letting users do what they want to is just not a business model for these megacorps.
Searches for Amazon, Temu, Shein - result in each being listed in the promotional panel and then as the first result.
For Firefox: Chrome is listed in the promotional panel and Firefox as the first result (below it).
The promotional panel has a different background colour and “Ad” badge, but is otherwise identical to other listings.
Two results fit on the screen: the promotional panel and the first listing. Diverging from Google is that the ad result is obvious and doesn’t push the search result out of view.
The sponsored spot is appalling, I reported something that looked dodgy which appeared above the UK gov identity verification for passports and such app. When people search for a specific app, putting something else in front only makes me think you are untrustworthy scum, so my trust in the play store is fundamentally broken. There's a fundamental incompatibility between giving the right result for what was searched for and pushing promoted irrelevant results.
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 speaking English. And I occasionally got surprised seeing someone trying to find something online and spending minutes, if not hours to get to the right place.
Last couple of years I found it to be way, way harder. And it's noticeably getting worse almost on a daily basis right now.
Recently I've tried perplexity and it was absolutely amazing.
I know this may sound like a sales pitch, but I was really blown away by the user experience. Except it sometimes says "results cannot be found or I am not suppose to show them to you". Well, fair game, I wouldn't be able to find these results on google either.
I've seen a lot of change in the industry last 30 years, things we took for granted or thought would stay there forever. I genuinely think Google is finished as a search engine for the web. The only problem is that we don't have a solid contender yet. Perplexity is close tho.
Is Perplexity, as a business, sustainable? I'm skeptical of these "AI search is better than web search" claims. Not because it's not true, but because of how wildly subsidized these AI things are. Web search doesn't suck because it's an impossible problem, web search sucks because it has to be profitable, and the profitability comes from making it suck. That's not true today for AI tools, but it will be in a few years. What will stop AI tools from being sucked into the same ad-infested black hole once the free money runs out?
People said the same thing you're saying about Google in the late 90s, early 2000s before their IPO (and immediately afterwards). There was a sense in which people didn't really think search -- which seemed more like a public utility -- could ever be profitable. Yahoo and AltaVista and Excite blanketed theirs in ads and junk. The search itself was seen merely as a draw into a "portal."
It's not inevitable that the same thing happen with services like Perplexity. But I do think things are going to get shaken up.
It seems like Google agrees at some level, because they seem to have just given up.
The big difference with Google monetizing in the 90’s is that they owned their platform, which gave them control to build out a search and ad network that scaled.
Perplexity uses frontier models under the hood, it doesn’t own all core aspects of its platform. They’re extremely dependent on frontier models and therefore reliant on underlying model pricing remaining sustainable.
Yeah I don't think Perplexity in particular is all that interesting.
But these days I do do a lot of 'research phase' stuff right in Claude Code. If looking at a technical issue, etc. I'll give it URLs and terms to search for and let it do some research for me. Mixed results.
Perplexity's CEO openly admits that their Comet browser offering is intended to track users for ads. So it seems they will head down the encrapify path soon enough.
Pro tip: get a free account and don't go pro. Their free account is bananas good atm "while supplies last"
> web search sucks because it has to be profitable, and the profitability comes from making it suck. That's not true today for AI tools, but it will be in a few years.
Many people pay to use _AI tools_, that already brings in revenue. I had chatgpt plus since very early days, which was 20$/month, I don't have it at the moment because my company provides pro plan to me (and every other engineer) which is probably around 200$/month/user.
Of course, serving a single inference on LLM's probably costs a lot more than a serving a single search on google, but they've already got a solid business model and they won't need intrusive adds _in a few years_ (if at all)
I'm skeptical that a significant number of people will be willing to pay cash money for these products when web search still exists for free, but we'll see!
It's not just Perplexity, it's any of the "deep research" offerings on the market really. And the reason why they work so well isn't because of any kind of secret sauce, it's because they have infinite patience to wade through all the bullshit and can thus brute force this without necessarily knowing the shortcuts. It's basically more of the same: https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/altoids-by-the-fistfu...
I find it's still not that difficult to have that "special power", but you have to adapt your tools. Before the only tool you needed was Google, now you need to know which one to use for each type of request.
I mostly juggle with Google, Kagi, and various LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity... but the differences matter less).
My experience with DuckDuckGo has been very mixed. I have to frequently resort to Google, especially for error messages where DDG returns zero results yet Google has indexed and finds a GitHub issue with that exact same text in it. The image searches are also really bad. I am sticking with using DDG but I have a shortcut ready in case I need Google and overall I'd really like something else considering it's a thin wrapper around Bing. I'll try out Kagi and see if it's worth paying
It only works well for mainstream search subjects. If something is slightly off the spotlight, it will often fail to find it even with exact name of the page/article in quotes in my experience.
> I genuinely think Google is finished as a search engine for the web.
Google Search is garbage, but highly unlikely to be "finished". Millions of people still find it useful, and Google is adopting "AI" on the results page just like any other "AI" web search service. The reason the UX is not good is, first of all, subjective, and second of all, because Google is in the advertising business, and they've found it more profitable to corrupt their results page and deal with any negative feedback, than to deliver clean results like they did decades ago without the profit.
This is a carefully planned, tested, and executed design decision, just like anything they do on the SERP, and not some arbitrary sign that they don't know what they're doing anymore.
The possibility of a new player disrupting the dominance of a trillion-dollar corporation that has built a highly optimized index of the entire web over decades, by leveraging technology that requires vast resources to run, is highly unlikely. Not impossible, but highly unlikely. Google could improve the search UX tomorrow if they wanted to.
> The only problem is that we don't have a solid contender yet.
Sure we do. Kagi offers a much better UX, and I haven't had the need to rely on external results for nearly a year now. I haven't tried Perplexity, but I imagine it could be good as well, depending on the quality of its index.
But these are relatively niche services catering to an audience that cares about these things. The sad reality is that most people simply don't, and will use whatever search engine is set as default in their browser. Which is why being the default is worth paying millions, and is literally keeping companies like Mozilla alive.
This sounds correct to me. Cory Doctorow wrote explicitly about how Kagi uses Google's own index, but just presents the results in a more useful way, which validates everything that you're saying.
> In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google.
> The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product
Right? Google is dog caca now. Myself and everyone I know keep getting sent to AI-written garbage nonsense slop websites, or for some reason, to the Hindustan Times
I've completely stopped using Google since the ChatGPT search Chrome extension came out. That was, what, almost 2 years ago? More? It simply redirects URL-bar searches to ChatGPT (with the web search toggle active) instead of Google, nothing fancy.
I didn't explicitly decide to stop using Google, it just happened, I didn't need it anymore, just like I went from using StackOverflow daily to never opening it again. ChatGPT with search is just better (at least ChatGPT Plus). Granted, it is noticeably slower to get a first result, but end-to-end it's a much faster way to find your answer.
That's how you know that our economy is not really working to the benefit of most of us - because all the numerous ways to profit by fucking people up, from dark patterns to mass layoffs, are rewarded financially.
Yeah for some reasons it ranks among the first newspaper any times I am looking for some US news. It feels like someone tweaked the algorithm for money.
oddly this "caca" felt more visceral to me that most "poop"'s or "shit"'s I've seen in a bit. summoned an image instantly. probably just surprise - good choice!
reminds me of a blackhat presentation of a web crawler
two young gentlemen introduced it as "caca", seemingly an acronym for sth, but they just couldn't help themselves and kept chuckling for next five minutes.
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?
> I didn't thought of that as a special power. I thought it was natural, like driving a car, or speaking English.
You’re clearly taking for granted any learnt skills which you have and projecting them to others. A substantial portion of the world population can’t speak English, and I suspect the grand majority of humans don’t know how to drive a car either.
I know you have to turn the wheel to turn the car and that I should keep to the right, but that doesn’t count as actually knowing how to properly operate a car.
I'm going to assume good faith on your part. OP is using analogy as a rhetorical device, using things in their own life that would be recognizable and transferable to others. When he says its like "speaking English", it is because he speaks English, but it can be understood that any non-English natives would insert their own mother tongue. 88% of European households and 92% of US households own at least one car. Driving, as something that once learned you take for granted since you do it pretty much daily, is something most people can related to. Even those that cant, are probably intimately familiar with those that do. It isn't something exotic and specialized, like airline pilot or submarine crewmember.
If I say "its like finding out someone ate the last of your favorite candy", it is meant to analogize a feeling of disappointment. If you personally don't like candy, I would expect that you have the ability to understand the meaning and intent and not focus on how the analogy doesn't perfectly align with your individual personal experiences and preferences. If you want to complain about how some cultures don't really eat candy, while others focus on collective sharing over individual ownership, I suppose you can.
OP clearly (to borrow your choice of word) wants to express that they thought people simply learn how to find information by simply using a search engine over time, just like you can become proficient in other activities by repeatedly doing them; and they gave some examples that many people here can relate to as such. I don't think OP wanted to offend anyone who doesn't know how to drive a car, or suggest that everybody should be able to.
So, yeah, things are not always that clear. That's why it's so useful to give people the benefit of a charitable interpretation of their words by default.
The examples OP chose are actually excellent: both of those activities require deliberate practice and years of training (education) and people who don't do either of those suck at them.
Think of the average person you know that had terrible results in middle school and high school or of the average driver, that thinks he's better than 80% of drivers out there.
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.
It absolutely is. I fear for the older generations and less tech minded people who google their bank, and get some random phishing site. Or similarly google what should be libre software and get some random malware on a site that looks 'close enough'.
Lets call it what it is, a cancer, one that literally enables countless bad actors and purely for a search engine's own profit.
In theory theres a time and place for ads, but maliciously inline and disguised as the actual results people want arent it.
It's already happened to an elderly family member who was trying to troubleshoot a printer problem. The top results were 1-800 hotlines run by scammers looking to get remote access to their machine to "fix" the issue. Google has hordes of these companies padding their pockets and won't lift a finger to remove them.
The only real difference that matters between a fake site and a real site is that the information on it is genuine, the form doesn't really factor into it. Which makes this a very tricky problem: You can't tell if the data is genuine before you have the genuine data.
If you're trying to do something for the first time with a big company, you usually know the domain name. Like Google is google.com. Or for something like your bank, it'll be printed on your credit card.
My parents were highly computer literate and taught me how to use them growing up. These days they can barely even send emails and spend 30-60 minutes looking for files that are either on their desktop, download folder or in Recent Documents menu in Word/Excel. At some point in the aging process computer skills are one of those things that seem to go.
I don't think they go at all, I think software development is just bad all around. Almost all software is really, really bad and we just put up with it or are used to it.
Most software does not value consistency or UX maintenance AT ALL.
What I mean is, a lot of those older programs arguably had much better user interfaces in terms of usability. More contrast, more text instead of glyphs, and often still simpler.
UI is like fashion, it changes because change is good. Not because those particular changes are good.
Compare Windows 11 and 7, or XP, or even in a lot of ways 95. What's the prettier experience? 11, I guess. But which one doesn't make me scream at the computer? Not 11.
But it's not just Microsoft, Apple does it too. We throw away literal YEARS of user understanding and memory for nothing. Users get tired over time. They can't keep up, nobody can, and it gets frustrating when things just get worse and worse over time.
But they deserve it when the manufacturer has one of those enterprisey sites where you need to go through 10 searches to maybe reach your manual, when the 3rd party site just shows it directly.
Not really, and the third-party sites almost never show the PDF directly without first trying to harvest your email or phone number or subscribe you to spam, sometimes they try to steer you towards unaffiliated 800 numbers tricking you that those are associated with the manufacturer, sometimes they bundle the download of manufacturer's PDF with malware, browser cleaner app installers etc.
Sometimes the third-party sites are helpful and benign, sometimes they are merely spammers trying to upsell you, occasionally they are malicious.
Agreed, the manufacturer site behavior is also annoying.
Yup. For reference, on Android your best bet is to install Firefox + uBlock Origin. On iOS, I believe Kagi's Orion has built-in content blockers but you can also install uBlock Origin [1].
What's odd is that the search engines, youtube, etc. get to claim the impartiality towards content applies to "impartiality" towards ads. I am younger, and I still almost got scammed trying to find a phone number to call a travel booking site. I called the number shown on Google, and they wanted to "verify my account" and triggered an email verification code. Only at the last minute did I realize it was an account takeover attempt. But that isn't Google perpetuating a crime?
Happened to my father who got routed through ads on his phone while booking flight tickets to some seedy website. He regretted it but thankfully got refunds initiated successfully because of issues with the flights themselves and a lot of back-and-forth. He resolved to only do critical monetary operations on his laptop where I've installed any and every possible adblocker.
The web is so hostile to the inform and the old. It takes one moment of weakness and there's someone ready and waiting with a scam.
You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid, or if you don't want to use search results from Bing's index, I've been very happy with Brave Search.
For me personally the issue is that some of my money would go to Yandex, and, by extension, to Russian government. I understand it is only a symbolic amount per user, but still, for me, this is unacceptable (I was a happy Kagi subscriber before I found out about this).
America is nearly as bad as Russia. Dollars paid to American companies are taxed and used to bomb children in Gaza. Are you boycotting all American companies?
From my point of view United States, all things considered, is not nearly as bad as Russia. I do not boycott all American companies but I do boycott some.
people say that but they often come back to Google ;)
I've just learnt to use ad blockers. the only time I disable it is when I look up the definition of something or the location of a place and the entire page goes blank because of some rules I've added to uBlock.
I haven't used Google (apart from their as-of-yet undefeated image search, the occasional hard link from a web page, and the two times I tried the Circle to Search feature) for at least five years now and I have zero interest in going back.
> people say that but they often come back to Google ;)
The thing is that Google is actively becoming more hostile and difficult to use. Not just Google Search, but really all their products.
They're becoming Facebook, slowly but surely. Something we might be forced to use now and again, but nobody actually likes.
The reality is that Google is such a poorly run company that they will destroy their own products, given enough time. Their competitors need to do nothing. Literally nothing.
DuckDuckGo falls hard in quality when it comes to queries which are not in English. The only search engines who are good for those are Google and Kagi, in my opinion.
It's solid, I use it 95% of the time, that 5% Google usually still disappoints.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=midjourney&ia=web -> Hmm, midjourney the AI thingy is not even there for me! Just https://www.midjourney.com which is not really clear on what it is. Midjourney is at Midjourney.online, which is not even on the first page. So Argualbly Google is still better. What a world.
Btw, I search DDG from the Firefox bar, and that does not let me copy the URL anymore!!! Wtf. There is just the search term, like there is in the field below it!! Omg, now I have the same thing twice, and a useful thing has been lost.
> I search DDG from the Firefox bar, and that does not let me copy the URL anymore
Yeah, I just noticed too. Go to Settings->Search there's a checkbox just below the default search engine. Uncheck that. Should be something along the lines of "Show search terms in the address bar in search results" (sorry for any errors in the translation, my browser's language is not English).
I agree somewhat, but those searches are getting less and less good on Google though.
In my recent experience, I'm far better off asking ChatGPT or just using it through Bing/Copilot than what I used to do a decade ago, which was deep dives through 5 pages of long-tail search results.
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.
We can absolutely expect Google to be a gatekeeper for advertisements they run on their platform. These aren't just middlemen, they're scams.
We shouldn't just be used to Google being allowed to essentially run infinite scams. Remember, they directly profit off the scams.
Its like if I had a billboard and then let someone put an ad up that said "give me all your money and you'll live forever!"
Am I off the hook? Why, lil ole me? I just run the billboard!
You might then say, well, obviously looking at every ad you accept is far too onerous! Its not like a billboard, because the billboard owner must see all the ads!
Which then I would reply - why is Google entitled to a business model like that? If they can't reasonable run their business in an ethical way... Perhaps they shouldn't run it all.
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
Last time i had to get a visa through these kind of channels, it looked almost deliberate. Outright bribing is now frowned upon, so they make the visa process as frustrating and opaque as possible. So that people have to either waste several days at the embassy, or go through one of those visa agencies instead. You pay for a totally legit above-the-table service, but it is effectively a "socially accepted bribe". And the administrative problem magically disappears.
Yes, it's the same everywhere. In any country with byzantine and convoluted visa and immigration procedures (i.e. most of them) there's a thriving industry of people who will eat the turds for you for a fee.
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 Origin [1]. You know, the one that allows companies to PAY to have their ads whitelisted.
This doesn't even cover browsing on a smartphone which unless you're running Android Firefox which supports browser extensions, you have very few options.
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.
No, the previous admin's FBI did [0].
But then that alert page (on ic3.gov, Internet Crime Complaint Center) was taken down almost immediately after the 11/2024 election, before even the director was replaced. I genuinely expected this sort of basic alert should remain non-partisan.
(at minimum, a search for "ad blocker" on ic3.gov should turn up some authoritative and useful advice page, not a random jumble of articles and press releases)
Indeed. I got my credit card phished after buying tickets from an 'official' local museum website, it was the first result on Google. Later on I realized that all five top results were scam sites, the real one was 6th. They eventually fixed it.
All of the ad links are broken by our firewall at work. People complain but eventually they learn to skip the ads. Absolutely a security risk, search ads are second only to phishing emails as a threat vector.
This is the entire argument for manifest V3. So, if we believe this argument, then modern chromium derivatives should be safe with the ad blockers that run on them.
V3 still allows for extensions that have full access to the content of your websites, and obviously adblockers need to be in this category to function at all.
Having it hallucinate a valid url that is spoofing the site I’m looking for feels less likely than someone managing to game SEO. Eclipse is a good example: the first result in Google is eclipseide.org, not eclipse.org.
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.
"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.
Can you in principle sue people buying these ads for trademark infringement? (I realize in practice the answer is that it's not worth the game of whack-a-mole.)
The trademark infringement is when their ad includes someone else's trademark.
Look at the screenshot in this post. All four of the ads at the top of the search results include the trademarked name "Midjourney" in the title of the ad.
This is more like putting up a giant sign outside of your Honda dealership saying "Best deals on new VWs!" but when you pull in they don't sell VWs, they sell their own competing products.
Some players circumvent this by creating "blog posts" where they compare/about multiple tools. Like it is a fair use but in reality is an ad in disguise.
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 days, so I directionally agree even though I can't reproduce this issue. Still, it's interesting to see how much our searches differ. I can't imagine what algorithm in Google decided to give me great results and you trash.
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 alternatives triggered.
This is kinda like Amazon retargeting you with alternative toasters after you just bought a new toaster. Most people think this is stupid. Well, the most likely cohort to buy a new toaster is a person that just bought one because they’re not satisfied with their purchase.
they still have to pay to stock, ship, then return and restock the shitty one - then stock and ship the better one. Hard to imagine there’s profit in that.
IDK about most people but I rarely bother to return a cheap broken item. It's just not worth my time. I'd just grumble and replace it (but probably not from the same seller).
>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.
That's insane. Someone searching for something they've searched for in the past is looking for stability of the search results; they're trying to get back to where they've been before. If they wanted different results, they'd change the search query.
Is this the "logic" behind Google and Youtube search results being different each time a query is run?
> This is kinda like Amazon retargeting you with alternative toasters after you just bought a new toaster. Most people think this is stupid. Well, the most likely cohort to buy a new toaster is a person that just bought one because they’re not satisfied with their purchase.
I don't think that makes sense. The goal of Amazon can't be to have you unhappy with shopping on Amazon, if for no other reason that returns cost money.
You know how you can ask ChatGPT the same thing 3x in a row and get 3 completely different results? Google's basically the same and has been for a long time.
If you and me both ask for something hyper-specific, we'll see the same results. But the more generic the search term is, the more hyper-personalised it gets.
In some ways it makes sense, for example we shouldn't see the same thing when we search for "restaurants" as we're unlikely to be looking for restaurants on the other side of the world, in many other ways it's annoying and counter-productive.
I oversimplified. :) Main gist is that SERPs are personalized and based on your targeting profile which makes the results non-deterministic, as we're experiencing. Google is the only entity who will ever truly know.
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.
Yes, I see something similar for the query "Midjourney": 4 sponsored results from Deevid, Artlist.io, Lovart, Pollo AI
(see the screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/ESM3xtJ)
Finally Midjourney. Unlike in the article I have never visited Midjourney.
Kudos for Kagi. I stopped using Google and gladly pay Kagi for search to not show advertisements or junk.
If Kagi ever starts showing ads to me, a paying customer, I'll ditch it too. If I get the feeling that Kagi is selling my search history, I'll ditch it too.
I pay for Kagi so that I'm not being peddled ads or junk when I'm trying to be productive, as my ADHD-riddled brain can get easily distracted. It gets quite upsetting when I've wasted non-trivial amounts of time on those distractions that I subconsciously fall into.
I absolutely cannot use Google because of their seemingly endless attempts to distract me from what I'm searching for.
The final nail in the coffin was their actions to get rid of uBlock and other effective ad-blockers. It's a serious anti-pattern, and (I strongly argue) is effectively discrimination for those who struggle with ADHD.
I hope that Kagi can one day effectively filter out GenAI slop websites that look like legitimate content, but I can understand the significant technical challenges in such a feature.
I bought a kagi shirt in the initial batch, got it, and then after one wash it unraveled. Your support team was great and gave me a coupon for a replacement shirt, which I ordered, yet it never shipped. Could I get that shirt :D
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.
I'm in India and it works well. I can even search in Hindi and get good results.
The only thing that doesn't work are local points of interests (restaurants, hotels, local businesses, etc). I still have to use Google Maps to look these up. Then again, even Apple doesn't have good local results for PoIs in India, so I don't expect Kagi to get this right either.
That said, I often turn off localized results completely and just use the international results. Those tend to be more diverse and more useful, at least for the sort of searches I tend to do.
I really like Kagi for this reason, the ability to choose whether I want "international" results or localized to a country (and choose the country, sometimes it's not mine).
I agree that for very localized results (not at country level but city level), I still use Google instead.
I once had weird results with searching specifically in the Switzerland region, it didn't find an obviously Swiss site. IIRC it was solved it by switching back to international search. I'm using Kagi exclusively, and I don't remember having such trouble recently. Maybe they fixed it.
I just did a quick test: local search for a specific law term. Kagi, Google and DDG all found the roughly same relevant sites in the top five. Each has a different top result. Google's and DDG's are a private law company. Kagi's first is an official government site. (With a suspicious non-government domain, so I had to check, but yes it's prominently linked from the main government site.)
Might depend a bit on your desired experience. I find Google to be too aggressively localized, where (from Canada) I’ll search for (made up example) e.g. “Eiffel Tower” and instead of the results that I’d want to be #1 and #2 (wikipedia and toureiffel.paris), I’ll get (after a pile of ads) “JimBob’s Eiffel Towel Of French Fries”, “kid builds scale model of Eiffel Tower for local science fair” and some tour company offering Eiffel Tower tours.
Native Asian, bouncing between Taiwan and Japan. Kagi works quite well for these two locales. Even for gov docs, medical docs, and for some rather obscure Taiwanese language things.
Well, except for local shops and pois in Taiwan. Which is reasonable. Google map also sucks for less-populated Taiwanese areas. I kind of have to rely on my good old legs for that.
There's also a handy country dropdown if you ever want to localize to somewhere else, although I rarely need this, since it's smart enough to eg. show "tokyo hotels" even if your country is somewhere else.
It's not as good as google at knowing where you are (gee I wonder why) but if I search Bahn Mi <my town> the results as good as google. Results for something niche like "Keycaps" are showing lots of local results too (or as local as you can get living outside a capital city in Australia).
I upgraded my phone a few days back and when search defaulted back to Google I realised how worthwhile my subscription is.
It's not all perfect, for instance I would love to figure out how to stop all map searches sticking with them: sorry Google is just lightyears ahead there so I'd always prefer that. But generally they're about the right amount of customisability.
The killer feature for me is being able to bury sites so you never ever get results from them ever again and to slightly bump up/down results for particular reasons (your own, not due to someone else paying an ad placement fee!)
Yeah I’ve just set any search starting with !m to redirect to google maps. It’s in the custom search settings somewhere.
I also find Kagi good in the UK - it wasn’t amazing when I first subscribed but got a lot better quite fast. I do occasionally add “uk” to a search when shopping but I did that on Google too.
Just curious, are you wondering about location-specific results ("best restaurants"), country-specific results ("how to do my taxes"), or language-specific results ("pasos de división larga")?
Works very well in the UK. Local news, government websites, etc.
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.
That’s my issue too, as a Brazilian. For anything more localized, Google is the only choice that has usable results. I leave DDG as my default engine and intentionally go to Google only when I need something that’s more “Brazilian context”.
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.
I love many of the companies I use and work with... but I'm always on the lookout for a backup plan if one gets greedy. Companies are not loyal to their consumers, we should never make the mistake of providing loyalty to corporations.
It's really us who have to change our mindset about companies. It's foolish to expect them to retain the quality or purported ideology they claimed to have when they were trying to win customers, after they reach a point where they can exploit and extract money and suppress choice and competition. A CEO will say anything now and might even mean it, but it's empty words really, and not even their choice in the long run.
We have to not get attached to companies, and not get the idea that they care or have feelings of good or evil. They are tools, like a hammer, or a stapler. A stapler isn't evil if it mashes up all the staples into a tangled mess. It's just broken. You don't mourn a broken stapler, eventually tools just wear out. You throw it out and get a new one. Corporations are the same, McKinsification / enshitification / etc are a part of their natural lifecycle, you should expect that and just switch to a different tool that actually works.
Observationally, Google search and Kagi are fundamentally different business models.
Google followed/trailblazed the "enshitification" arc of providing a free service that sees widespread adoption by the public, and then financially exploiting the widespread adoption by leveraging usage of the service to serve ads like in the screenshot.
Kagi is a subscription service you pay for and they generate their best effort at an ideal service for you using the money you gave them.
The Google model of providing a free service sort of requires that it be enshitified in order to close the circle on the business case. Reliance on VC money in this model is likely a further aggravating factor to aggressively exploit usage of the service once widespread adoption is achieved.
The Kagi model has an opposite pressure, where if it tries to exploit adoption of the service in a way that users don't appreciate, users will simply abandon their subscription, putting a core revenue stream the business has built itself around at risk.
Is it possible for Kagi or a business like that to become shitty? Sure, a new manager that misunderstands core realities can show up anywhere and ruin the business, or sagging business financials could require VC injection which then pressures further financial extractions from uses. But the structural pressures on a Kagi-style model certainly seem to steer it in the right direction when Google's structural model invariably steered it into something that becomes less pleasant than we all initially knew.
The real difference is market dominance. If Kagi was the dominant search engine used by 90% of all users, they could enshittify while still collecting subscription, and while that would lose them some users, it would still be profitable when everything is added up.
It's even worse for niches where there's some way to lock people in. E.g. look at streaming providers - everyone has either rolled out ads on paid plans or is planning to do so. Why? Because if you happen to have X as an exclusive in your catalog, then people who want to see X either have to suck it up or else figure out how to pirate it without getting caught.
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 customers).
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.
"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 above all else, but many big ones do. Ignoring what incentives (and disincentives) are put on a business drive it's behavior. If you want something contrary to those incentives, you need to change those pressures or you're doomed to be disappointed.
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.
For anyone else wondering, there's an extensive list on Wikipedia. Many of the entries are really significant, though this one stands out the most to me:
When I search for "midjourney" without an adblocker a bunch of times, I'm getting:
- No ads, with correct midjourney.com as the top result, about half the time
- A legit ad for midjourney.com with the title "Your Imagination, Unlocked", the other half the time. It's the only ad, and the correct midjourney.com is also still directly below it as the first organic result
So both seem fine for me. I've never seen ads on Google with the kind of formatting shown by OP either.
Obviously everybody's search experience is different, based on geography, profile, who else is running ads for those keywords, Google runs different formatting experiences as A/B testing, etc.
I am highly suspicious tech markets do not see realistic average Google behavior for whatever reason. The pervasive belief in tech that Google Search is even passable suggests people in the Valley or even Austin aren't getting the experience most people do.
I recall a Googler once suggesting to me that Googlers seeing ads might look like ad fraud to advertisers, so I'm not positive Googlers dogfood how bad this is either.
> I recall a Googler once suggesting to me that Googlers seeing ads might look like ad fraud to advertisers, so I'm not positive Googlers dogfood how bad this is either.
I wonder what Google execs do - like I really have a hard time imagining them using Google search as it currently exists. Is there some kind of special internal flag that just gets rid of ads for their accounts?
I'd go as far to guess that the tech-literate people (who would be both less susceptible to clicking on enshitified links and more likely to report or discuss them) have, somewhere in their tracked-data-portfolio, a "don't serve too much garbage to this person, they aren't gullible and they'll tell people we're serving garbage" setting.
It's certainly possible, and maybe not even maliciously: Advertisers are refining their targeting to get clicks, the best advertisers will only annoy people likely to click an ad. The problem with giant algorithmic platforms is often things go off the rails simply due to nobody at the helm understanding what the platform is doing anymore.
You don't fall into any desirable demographic for targeting apparently, or you've never leaked enough info about you that would signify you as desirable.
In other words, nobody is bidding to reach your eyeballs specifically.
This could be a market inefficiency. OR, it could be you're actually a terrible lead for midjourney-type products, and the market is working correctly.
"Google (www.google.com) is a pure search engine - no weather, no news feed, no links to sponsors, no ads, no distractions, no portal litter. Nothing but a fast-loading search site. Reward them with a visit."
That didn't last long till they added paid results but at least they highlighted the paid results from the organic results... Those were they days when they used to have the motto of not being Evil. Accordingly, now, they are.
Yeah, I remember the long slow fade-out of the colored boxes the ads occupied. They went from like, pastel orange and green boxes, to lighter boxes, to even lighter boxes, to no boxes at all with the word Ad in a little symbol, to the way it is today where you have "Sponsored" on a different line than the ad, and you have to scroll below the fold to even see the first organic result, if there even is one, and only 2-5 organic results are even shown by default. And also of course in the mix, the AI Overview made up from I assume a handful of the spammy results being thrown through the cheapest, smallest model possible and summarized.
This was the venture funding "we're a startup era". And Google succeeded eventually.
But in that era making money didn't matter. It was just about grabbing market space. And oh boy did they succeed.
But all bills become due eventually. Stock holders start demanding continuing increasing profit and that eventually leads to the downfall of any good product.
It's a very common story in industry. You start nimble, and disrupt bloated platforms. Then, as you grow, pressure grows and you also bloat. Then new company comes that brings nimble product and disrupt you.
Search, TV->internet video, newspapers->internet - all of them go through those cycles.
You forgot the main source of pressure: you sell off equity in your company in exchange for cash. The buyers are buying the promise of future profits. At first, you still hold the vast majority of the voting rights, but over time you sell more and more and expectations rise and rise.
Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
Hence a page full of ads, and no reason to think things will ever change.
I think the fact that Valve is still a private corp is a big part of it, yes. It allows for continued ownership by people who have meaningful beliefs of what it means to do something the Right Way and who run the business accordingly. This isn't to say that private corps are always "good" like that - the temptation to go for easy pickings and enshittify is always there. But some owners at least won't do that for various reasons, while a public company seems to always end up chasing short-term profits above everything else.
Google's original founders still hold the majority of votes.
> Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
Amazon's history shows that public shareholders can be very patient with cash being returned to them, or the company ever showing a profit at all. Tesla used to be in the same boat.
Shareholders are very forward looking. They just don't necessarily trust 'visionary managers' not be full of bullshit. Probably rightly so.
>purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
I see this constantly repeated in anti-capitalist/anti-corporate rhetoric, but on the other side, shareholder meetings, finance conferences, financial service talks, no one ever wants this. Maybe the 20 year old stock bros on discord pumping penny stocks, but no serious shareholder of any company with a name you might recognize.
It happens, there are cases of it, but overwhelmingly the vibe is "long term stable profit generation".
If shareholders didn't want it, then they wouldn't appoint (or keep in place) the top management that repeatedly and consistently makes those choices.
Look at the recent Microsoft layoffs. They purged the company of so much tech talent, and tanked morale for basically all the remaining workers. From any kind of long term perspective this is madness. Yet they were rewarded for it by the stock market.
I think it's a mistake to think of these cycles as inevitable, and that it's guaranteed that some small fry will disrupt the current giants. Yes, they may have happened in the past, but large companies are much more cognizant of the cycles of disruption now than they were 30 or 40 years ago. Microsoft was a behemoth in the late 80s and they're currently number 2 market cap in the world. Many folks on this board may be too young to remember Netscape's boast of "The Browser is the OS" in the mid 90s - well, Netscape is long gone and Microsoft is still giant. Only 2 years ago you saw pronouncements that OpenAI was going to be the death knell for Google, and it was it seemed to be the kick in the pants that Google needed to get their AI story working. Facebook just basically bought all its nascent competition (Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.)
I think disrupting large players will be much harder than it was it the past.
I fully accept the heat death of the universe will eventually take down Microsoft, but I don't think that's what the comment I was responding to was really about.
My point was that this cycle is not a recent thing, but has been present all throughout history. Bell labs fell. The hudson bay company fell. Arthur Andersen fell. All these were much more entrenched than microsoft is today. I'm not suggesting you have to wait for the heat death of the universe.
Don't worry. Our legislators around the world are hard working so this doesn't happen again, protecting us from harmful contents and cementing current industry leaders' position.
Can you imagine a more effective way to incentivise more people to start even more disrupting platforms? Can you image a more effective way to get investors to give money to these upstarts?
It's much easier to get your rabble-rousing startup to threaten disruption (and then be bought up as a precaution), than if you had to actually battle it out in the marketplace to the bitter end.
It's a bad thing for the rest of us, because it means that all those platforms don't actually disrupt anything at the end of the day, and we have to keep eating the same turds.
You get way more of these new platforms popping up. And some of the might not get bought up in time. (And the wealth of the incumbent ain't infinite, so there's a limit to how many they can buy up.)
I think there’s a middle ground between not making any money by not showing ads and plastering half the page with ads in a way that almost renders the product useless. I’m sure this was a result of a long list of promo packets that incrementally kept adding 0.01% increases to the ad impressions.
Just one facet of what we call 'promotion oriented programming' (or promotion oriented design).
Google's promotion guidelines used to include that if you want to get a promotion on a technical track, you have to demonstrate a mastery of complexity. Cue the unnecessary complexity in some projects meant to get the author promoted.
(They might still include that requirement. I don't know. I haven't worked at Google in nearly a decade.)
Google managed to dance the knife edge there for a lot longer than most though. AdWords made so much money in a fairly unobtrusive way, that they were able to scale it out without pissing a lot of people off. That and it was actually even sometimes useful.
They clearly decided to just say "fuck it" though. Sometime after Ruth Porat replaced Patrick Pichette and especially after Sundar took the helm (both happened while I worked there) but most especially in the last 3 years.
Wouldn't it be nice if some companies instead of ramping up ads for revenue passed along the value to consumers? Once they made their money back on the original investments convert to a lifestyle and provide a valuable product without squeezing every penny our of it and in the end killing it. One day maybe.
They did pass on a lot of value to consumers. They used their profits to grow, build Gmail, buy and grow YouTube, build Android.
Just running Google as-is without ads would have produced less value in the long run. Plus the SEO tide (which relied on DoubleClick ads that weren't yet owned by Google) began to rise and would've drowned Google Search much earlier if they hadn't grown.
Where I think Google took the bad (for consumers) turn was when they purchased DoubleClick and began to consolidate the entire ad business. Instead of losing money to SEO spammers, they began to make money. This put Google into a conflict of interest against their own users. Ever since then they've been piling onto that conflict of interest, draining more and more value from their products.
I feel like you'd need a new corporate structure or something, like the way an S-corp is different, but on steroids.
Because I agree, the forced obsession with "growth" at all costs, which seems necessary to operate a public company (at least in this century[1]), is imho the #1 reason why enshittification is unavoidable.
[1] I'd describe nearly all present-day corporations as fixated on quarterly results even at the expense of business viability. Something I truly don't understand is why big companies say, 75 years ago seem to have been so much less that way. If anyone has any theories I'd love to hear them.
People overwhelmingly prefer ad-supported to subscription supported. Google would be a dramatically better service if everyone who used it paid. I really, really, cannot overstate that.
The internet sucks because users feel entitled to everything on it for free. They don't want ads and they don't want to pay subscriptions. uBlock origin, archive.is, and constant complaining about how the content sucks.
The internet is full of children with a naive understanding of how things work. The are so deluded that they even call on companies to simply provide them everything for free if they want to be "successful".
Google has almost $100 billion in cash reserves right now. Big tech together has over $1 trillion in cash - that's in the ballpark of the GDP of the top 20 countries.
The notion that Internet sucks because megacorps have to scrounge for cash doesn't pass the most basic smell test.
The problem is who wants to be CEO of that? How many people do you know are simultaneously voracious enough to want to be the CEO of something and also totally chill and down to just have a lifestyle business? How many people do you know would take a salary of $5 million/year and just keep working the same job? Pretty sure almost everyone I know would do that for maybe two years and then quit and retire. Companies doesn't want that. So that leaves us with the kind of people that would take that salary and keep at it. The reason CEOs are different kinds of people from the rest of us is that it stopped being about the money for them a long time ago. It's not not about the money, but after getting enough money for your own lifetime and several other people's, why keep working? Not everyone is cut out for it. Be the change you want to see in the world. Claw your way up to the c-suite and then run the company how you see fit. Just don't let that climb change you so that you no longer want to run it as a lifestyle business.
Well Google has been a very good example of not giving into that pressure for a very long time. Their landing page remained ad free for decades and their revenue came from sponsored links through ad-words which was a minimally invasive ad strategy which didn't show banners etc.
I remember being clever at school and showing off that if you typed "nukes" it would display an advert for ebay down the right-side. "Buy Nukes on EBay".
They had plenty of success with the ads that didn't disrupt the main results until they decided that search results didn't matter and selling their users to malware was more profitable.
For many years they were very profitable, with great search results and good quality ads.
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 that go to taxes plus mandatory social work by its owners/executives.
> instead they got greedier and greedier and made their product worse once they captured most of the market
I wouldn't necessarily put it that way because not Google, nor any company, has moral capacity. They don't have souls. What they do have are incentive structures, and those flip when the stock goes public.
Pre-IPO: the board is mostly founders and VCs holding paper wealth. Their shares aren't liquid, so the only way they get paid is by making the pie way bigger for some future exit. That means "grow, grow, grow." and that means playing nice with customers.
Post-IPO: the board is legally stuffed with "independent" directors, whose pay comes in RSUs tied to the stock price. Now the shares are instantly tradable, and shareholders who can bail in a quarter want to see results in a quarter. Directors translate that into exec comp, and suddenly management's job is "make the stock go up right now."
Some theorists point out the obvious hack: take away the hot potato. Slow the game down. Make shares harder to flip, make earnings less frequent. If you could only trade stock once a year, you'd actually care what the company looks like in a year. If they only reported results annually, you'd be forced to think in years, not quarters.
Upside: management can focus on products and customers instead of quarterly guidance theater. Downside: investors hate being locked up, and capital gets more expensive because people price in that illiquidity. Transparency drops, execs get more room to bullshit.
It's a tradeoff: you can have maximum liquidity and hyper-efficient capital markets, but then you get short-term brain damage. Or you can slow the game down, but then you're basically asking people to trust managers more and accept worse capital efficiency.
Nobody;s found the perfect middle yet. LTSE[1] tried, dual-class shares are a kludge, and otherwise we just live with the cycle: grow like crazy private, IPO, then spend the rest of your corporate life addicted to quarterly earnings.
In the old days, companies were valued on their expected dividend. Share prices didn't move that much, and trading shares took time and had fees attached. You could speculate on share price moves, and people did, but the primary source of income from holding shares was dividends.
Now it's the other way around. The primary source of gains from owing shares is speculation on the share price. Dividends are mostly ignored.
The result of this is that share prices move not on "how well is the company likely to do?" but on "what do we think the share price will do in the next couple of months (at most) [0]?". It all becomes hype and rumour and speculation. Shareholders only care about the price, so boards are incentivised to only care about the price. And so on down. Generating hype about what the company is going to do becomes more important than actually doing it (I exaggerate, but not by much). This then leads to the short-term-ism that we see, and the hot potato effect.
I think the answer would be to tax speculative profits. If you sell something for more than you bought it for, the government takes a cut. Specifically remove this from income tax calculations, because they have way too many loopholes, and make it more like VAT/GST; a tax payable at the point of the transaction. This would reduce the profits from speculation, and hopefully move the emphasis back onto dividends and longer-term thinking.
[0] and obviously, for some privileged traders, the next couple of milliseconds
While the importance of dividends has waned, we should still mention buybacks and liquidation. They still exist and buybacks especially are an important part of delivering shareholder value. Apple is a great example of returning about 4 times more in buybacks than dividends.
How would you feel about tax-disadvantaging buybacks?
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 I don't think it's a place we want to go to. I suspect it'll be further concentration of capital into fewer hands. To the extreme, we end up with all the large companies doing this becoming effectively private, owned by a small group of folks rich enough to keep their holdings while everyone else sells out during the buybacks. That's not good.
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.
> To the extreme, we end up with all the large companies doing this becoming effectively private, owned by a small group of folks rich enough to keep their holdings while everyone else sells out during the buybacks. That's not good.
You can tell your broker to automatically re-invest dividends for you.
Similarly, if you just don't sell when there's a buyback, you own more of the company afterwards. No one is forced to sell.
Btw, most companies (including Apple and Google) keep issuing shares to employees. Buying back some of them in the open market is just an indirect roundabout way of essentially handing employees cash.
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.
How is any of that fraud? Fraud doesn't just mean you have to disagree with something someone does, but you have to have been lied to.
> 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.
Companies can and should adjust the incentives so that the effect of dividends and buybacks are the same for the executive. (They already adjust for share splits for example.)
> 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).
Before you buy any shares, you should check what management says about their plans. At least, if you have specific expectations.
Even if buybacks were outlawed, companies aren't guaranteed to pay dividends. It's perfectly legal to never make a profit, or to give all your excess money to charity. You just have to tell your shareholders.
> 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.
Yeah, that's a stupid objection.
The substantial first half of it would equally well apply to dividends. (And the whole point of giving money to companies as an investor is that eventually you are getting more back.)
The second half is just not how any of this works. Does he even know what a wash trade is? And what's 'artificial' about this?
Buybacks and dividends are financially equivalent. They give money from the company to shareholders. The incentives are exactly the same for all parties involved, too.
Their only material difference is in taxes. Yes, I am in favour of putting dividends and buy backs on the same tax footing, just in the name of simplicity. And while you are at it, also put dividends and interest payments on the same tax footing.
At the moment, many jurisdictions advantage interest payments, thus encourage financing companies with debt instead of equity. And then they awkwardly pair it with other rules that try to tell companies (especially financial companies like banks) not to use so much debt, not to be so levered.
> Some theorists point out the obvious hack: take away the hot potato. Slow the game down. Make shares harder to flip, make earnings less frequent. If you could only trade stock once a year, you'd actually care what the company looks like in a year. If they only reported results annually, you'd be forced to think in years, not quarters.
Google's original founders still hold the majority of voting rights.
Making trading less efficient wouldn't change anything here.
> It's a tradeoff: you can have maximum liquidity and hyper-efficient capital markets, but then you get short-term brain damage. Or you can slow the game down, but then you're basically asking people to trust managers more and accept worse capital efficiency.
No, your proposal wouldn't work at all.
A big problem is actually that most managers in most companies mostly work for themselves. It's called a 'principal/agent problem'.
Exactly as you say 'execs get more room to bullshit.'
Btw, there's private equity funds with very long capital lock-ups. Their effects on companies typically aren't loved by the people who voice similar concerns to yours.
AT&T eventually gave up and agreed to divest of the RBOCs because they didn't like their chances with the regulators. Imagine a Big Tech company having so little faith today in their ability to manipulate the government between lobbying, campaign contributions, and the most modern and economical play, stroking the President's ego.
The same way any tech company works now: use investor money to offer things for free or unrealistically cheap until you corner the market, and once your competitors are no longer relevant you start milking every buck you can.
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 stops going up, they're gonna have a harder time hiring and retaining talent.
In a way, it's the employees holding the company hostage. They're simultaneously complaining about innocence lost and stating their implicit preference for this outcome by demanding top-of-the-line comp.
If you want to be paid the same as at Microsoft or Facebook, you become Microsoft or Facebook.
> 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.
Nope, there were no ads at the beginning. It was a big deal when they announced AdWords. And the ads were unobtrusive and often quite useful at the beginning.
Google was quite vocal about clearly marking ads, in contrast to Overture, Yahoo, and others who mixed ads into search results in the late 90s / early 2000s. I think the period when Google lightened, then entirely removed the colored background that made it easy to identify ads was an inflection point in their fall from being a company that genuinely focused on users towards becoming just another megacorp run by profit-maximizing MBAs.
No, they had no ads for several years. AdWords were introduced in 02000, at which point Google had existed (initially as google.stanford.edu) for four years, since 01996, which was 40% of the amount of time the Web had even existed. I started using Google in probably 01998, when people on Slashdot got excited about how much better their search quality was than AltaVista, but it probably wasn't until 01999 that I switched over completely—at first AltaVista still had better coverage.
Not at the very beginning. But when they first added ads, they were clearly marked in the top with a yellow background (and they didn't take over the whole page), and on the righthand column (and they were clearly marked as sponsored links).
I'd have to dredge it up but someone put up a site that showed the visual changes to ads over the past 15 years, and they've become more and more indistinguishable from organic search results, and they've taken over more of the page.
A great visual history of enshittification, and also how "growth at all costs" capitalism leads to that enshittification. Google was still taking in money hand over fist in the mid 00s when they had a few, clearly marked ads, but capitalism demands the line arcs upwards no matter what.
My memory says that wasn't such a big selling point. When Google first came out it blew all other search engines away in terms of result quality.
If, back then, Yahoo and Altavista were minimalist and Google was a garish nightmare of ads and flashing gifs and nested banners and affiliate buttons, I would still have happily used it for the results.
Google's search interface is still reasonably clean IMO. Nowhere near its minimal best. Yes there are ads and "sponsored results" and shopping frames and all that crap, but they really aren't everything that's wrong with Google Search.
Quality of results and inability to specify queries beyond vague suggestions are the worst things.
I don’t have an image to prove it, but I remember google making it a point and bragging of having clearly differentiated ads (in pale yellow I think?).
It was a big contrast and a signal of classy goodwill, back in the age of replicating popups and garish blinking text.
Exactly this. I remember when it was just a couple small links in a yellow banner you could scroll past. Same with YouTube, the ads used to just be a banner under or beside the video but didn't interfere with the main content.
Once the ads got invasive, I installed ublock and haven't looked back. I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about that.
Of course it was the quality of the search results thanks to the algorithm (Page Rank) that at the time was unmatched and amazingly resilient, compared to the competition, against the primitive SEO tactics of the day (key word spamming etc.).
However, the lean interface without blinkentags and ads was definitely a selling point. Also, IIRC, the guarantee that you'd only get sites that actually contained all the words in your search query (that feature is long gone, too, of course).
I guess it depends how you define "selling point" exactly.
The interface and speed were great, no doubt. Did you ever encounter another search engine that produced similar or better results that you otherwise would have used, but Google's interface sold you? I never did, so it wasn't a selling point for me.
For me at least, it wasn't that either. It was the quality of the results.
I would have put up with slow bloated adware Google results of early 2000s, compared to fast minimal sleek interface with results of Yahoo/Altavista/anything else I tried.
The results were good. I remember admitting that for many things I really could have used 'I'm Feeling Lucky' and bypass the SERP entirely, but I disliked relinquishing that much control, so I never made a habit of it. Today I don't think I could trust it much of the time.
I'm not sure what you are unclear about, but yes I was re-emphasizing my point for you.
There were lots of "differentiators" that did not really matter, including speed. The differentiator was result quality, not how or when they were presented.
Yes. Altavista and Metacrawler worked really well. Google managed to be just a little bit leaner and faster still. They probably did start to have a bigger index at some point, though.
Even when they first turned on ads, it was arguably a net win. I worked AdWords tech-support 2005-2008, and sat in on the “Ads Quality” core team meeting.
They basically had this big money dial, and rather than crank it to 11, they were fiercely protective of the core user experience.
They kept ads mostly to the side (unobtrusive), only served them on queries where there was a high probability of commercial intent, and only promoted ads above organic results if the predicted CTR was extremely high.
I remember being delighted more than once when the ad system surfaced the product I wanted when organic results did not.
Now…? You get all spam above the fold.
The Ads Quality PM back then was Nick Fox, who I just learned became SVP for ads and search last year. Which means he is at least indirectly responsible for the OP. Not entirely sure what to make of that.
I remember when Google Maps allowed you to enter "*" as the only search term, and you'd see every business in the area. Not just a portion of those who had paid for placement. Those were the days...
I knew larry and sergei socially when they were grad students. I completely believe that when they started that was a genuine sentiment. I wonder at what point they realized personally that that was gone
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.
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.
lol, I meant a different search engine. This is awesome though, you’re definitely helping those kids out a lot. You should think about giving them sudo and making them manage the upgrade themselves too though, to push them into learning more. A 7yo might be able to handle that but 10+ definitely.
With what kind of assurance that history won't repeat itself? If anything, the rate at which companies enshittify has increased. Instead of taking 10 years now it takes more like 3 (or less).
Life is change. Sometimes that’s worth fighting for and sometimes it’s worth fighting against. Is the current Google worth that battle for you? I’d rather see what comes next.
And yet they always knew that ad-supported business is going mean enshittification. Kagi website has this epic quote from the original Google paper to drive the point home:
"The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
— The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998
There also has been a drastic change in YouTube search in the past year. It used to be that search would be logical, you search for a specific string and you can go through pages of videos that matchup to that. Now it at least feels like they have completely mixed that original search with a some sort of ranked preference of what they think I want to see. It’s a shame and an actual huge downgrade.
Try searching something and sorting results by most recent. If you then change the upload date filter (e.g. from 'this month' to 'last hour') you'll get completely different results...
YouTube search will also only show you maybe 10 videos relevant to your search terms and then just give you random videos it wants you to watch that have little or nothing to do with your original search.
Yes! This is exactly it and at least for me the change happened sometime in the last year. I often look at real estate online in Vietnam and a year ago I could scroll through pages of houses, now I get a handful of somewhat relevant videos and then it’s cirque videos. It’s wild how bad it is.
Reminds me of how they blew up the rabbit hole of next videos long ago. I remember long long ago, my favorite part was the next video queued up after watching a video. You would go down these wild rabbit holes of videos that got ever more specific. Now it’s the same issue with search a bunch of unrelated videos recommended for watching next.
A similar thing happens when you search “Canada eTA” — a $7 (required) entry visa the government typically issues instantly. But on Google, several sponsored sites appear above the gov site, and charge $100+ for the same service but slower, and they do god knows what with your passport details and personal data.
There are tons of other examples like this. It’s very easy to get tricked by Google ads if you aren’t suspecting a scam.
Yeah, I was waiting for an actual 9 headed hydra of crap, featuring:
* a whole page of sponsored-yet-indistinguishable-from-organic results
* a confidently incorrect AI snippet
* the below-the-fold top organic results being all content spam
* the first actually relevant result from a reputable source being then paywalled with a "you ran out of stories for this month" overlay on a website I have never browsed in a year
* the 2nd actually relevant result prompting a "login with google" overlay with prefilled identity that gets clicked by accident 20% of the time
* all of the above in a Chrome browser, requiring a quadruple opt-out before allowing you to use GMail without also starting a browser-wide session to keep track of your every keystroke
* or alternatively an app based mobile interface where links can't be copied and pasted to prevent loss of tracking
* something with AMP
This is not even close to everything that is wrong, if anything it should be called "barely the tip of the iceberg of everything that is wrong".
In their defense it does feature a bunch of other invisible things (lack of cached results, lack of direct links you can obtain with a right click, etc)
No, the swimming pool on the Titanic is not full of water. The pool is empty due to the ship's sinking and the immense pressure at the depth where the Titanic lies. The pressure would crush any voids within the ship, and the base of the pool cracked as the ship sank, letting out the water.
Here's a more detailed explanation:
Pressure and Depth:
The Titanic lies at a depth of 12,500 feet (3,800 meters). At this depth, the water pressure is immense, exerting thousands of pounds per square inch. This pressure would crush any enclosed spaces, including the swimming pool.
Sinking and Damage:
The Titanic began to sink, the base of the pool cracked, and all the water escaped.
No Time to Refill:
The crew was focused on evacuating passengers and didn't have time to refill the pool before the ship sank.
Deterioration:
The ship has also deteriorated over time, further contributing to the loss of any remaining water in the pool.
- on the other hand -
> is the pool of the titanic still filled with water? why?
Yes, the swimming pool on the Titanic is still filled with water. It's thought that the pool was filled with water when the ship was contracted to be built, and that the contract to fill it didn't expire just because the ship sank. The pool is located far away from the main damage caused by the iceberg impact and is also separated by watertight doors from other areas of the ship.
While the exact reason for the pool remaining full is not definitively known, it's believed to be a combination of the ship's structural integrity in that area and the fact that the pool was designed to be watertight.
While the pool remains filled, it's worth noting that the Titanic's hull is deteriorating due to underwater bacteria, and the ship is predicted to collapse within the next few decades, potentially releasing the water from the pool.
Interesting. I did this google search and i get this:
"Yes, coffee is predominantly water
, with a standard cup of brewed coffee being about 98% water and the remaining 1-2% being solids like caffeine and antioxidants. Because water forms the vast majority of coffee, its quality is crucial for a good cup and it contributes to your daily fluid intake"
Yeah, it was just a creative example of the type of awful AI responses search engines, including Google, give. It tends to contradict what you say, push everything towards useless and inoffensive "there are many complicated factors" analysis, and even contradict itself.
> was there a US president named Bob, Robert, or who went by either?
> No U.S. president has ever gone by Bob or Robert as their common or official name. The closest case is James A. Garfield (20th president), whose full name was James Abram Garfield — no Robert in there
Why is James A. Garfield the closest???? What metric are we using for this comparison, lol
I'm not using an ad blocker; when I search for Midjourney on Google the real thing is my first result; I don't even see any sponsored content. Not sure what's happening for OP.
(Please don't read this as a defense of Google on the whole.)
Same here, though for me the second result is the Midjourney Discord rather than Reddit.
But I'm in Europe. Perhaps that affects results? I wouldn't be surprised if the Google experience were more ad-heavy in low-consumer-protection nations.
Mine has one sponsored link which is just a course for midjourney. But I don't doubt at all that the OP post is real. This stuff is all dynamically generated. There is probably even some AI deciding how many ads you'll put up with.
Ideally Google would offer some kind of ad free option, perhaps on a higher tier of the Google One plans.
odd, I also don't see any sponsored content any longer for any search whereas I definitely remember seeing what OP has for other searches. But I also now see a tab for AI mode next to ALL which is new... but I also switched to DDG a while ago
I was searching for a specific library for Python the other day, and Google kept pushing me to 'Top 10 Python Courses!' articles or giant comparison boxes for products I didn't need. It has decided that whenever I type a technical query, what I really want is to buy something or sign up for a newsletter.
The moment the algorithm switched from trying to understand 'what information does this user need?' to 'how can we make money off this user right now?' is the moment search broke for anyone doing actual development work. We're now filtering through commercial noise just to find the docs.
Market momentum probably. People "Google" things. People don't "Kagi" things or "DuckDuckGo" things.
I question why Instagram is so popular. I don't use it but my wife does and she constantly runs into errors and bugs. It's a multi billion dollar company and suffers from the sort of issues that beta software does.
They got to their position first, got the market share and then enshittifed from there.
They seem to classify users in a way that puts technically-proficient users in a separate class to regular users.
One class receives a more traditional experience.
The other receives whatever they're currently pushing. For example, my Dad's Gmail has a much higher "ad email" : "real email" ratio than mine. Also, the styling of an "ad email" line is far more subtle than what I receive.
I checked with my technical friends. They all receive similar experiences to what I do. But my parents and other people I help with their personal tech receive the ad-heavy version.
My conspiracy theory is that they're trying to detect journalists, lawmakers, regulators, and more, in an attempt to avoid being forced to push ads less aggressively.
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.
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.
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?
- 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.
So what's crazy about this is that I remember, when I first joined Google in 2011, that they were particularly proud of how people would just stop using URLs and use Google to navigate. So people would type "amazon" to get to Amazon.com instead of actually typing out `amazon.com`, or using a bookmark or directory etc. And they wanted to keep search at a quality that would continue to get people to do that. And later the fear with mobile becoming ascendant was that people would stop using search in this way, etc.
But it looks like they just keep giving people more and more reason to... not do that.
For what it's worth, when you view a Google search results page, part of the page is populated by ads (results come from the Google Ads teams) and part of it by search results (results come from the Google Search team, and unaffected by anything to do with ads).
The post points out a problem with the fraction that is allocated to Ads, but pretty sure that's not "everything that's wrong with Google Search" (if true, it would actually be an endorsement of the quality of the organic search results, which I doubt is the intent).
Not really, its just a condemnation of the amalgamation which is unable to be perceived as different from the user - it shits on the organic search in their mind and anyone saying "well our search is still good!" is completely missing the point.
I have better things to spend my brain power on remembering. Fortunately, my browser will autocomplete the URLs for sites I frequently use, but a lot of sites I want to visit for the first time.
Throw in the fact that known bad actors will purchase common typos of domains like this and potentially setup websites to fish for credentials or push malware and it's something best avoided.
It’s likely that Google has tested how many ads it can place in search results before users lose patience and turn elsewhere.
On paper, the approach makes sense: push profitability as far as possible. But in practice, it can leave customers feeling squeezed and resentful, much like the increasingly nickel‑and‑dimed atmosphere visitors now complain about in Las Vegas, and the proliferation of tip screens.
It becomes even sadder when Google caters to political propaganda of any kind, from any party or country, if the price is right. I wish Google realized how much greater and more beneficial the product and company are to the people who use them than all of that. I am not naïve -I understand they need to profit- but perhaps they are focusing on short term gains while introducing this poor user experience, which will eventually lead to major losses.
I just googled Toyota Highlander (my car) and the ad in the search results is "please consider the Honda Pilot."
Now it's unlikely that I am shopping for a midsized SUV and am not aware of the major competitors, but squinting that away for a second - if I am searching for a car I think I want and Google informs me of a perfectly viable alternative that might be cheaper or better in some other way that can have a huge positive impact on my life. So in this case I am obviously aware of Honda but an ad for one of the Korean or domestic makers I hadn't considered could be useful.
Similarly if I am Google midjourney as in the article because I heard that somewhere and Google positions for me potential cheaper/better alternatives as ads - that's not a terrible thing and you could say hits at the best usecase of an ad - making me aware of an alternative solution to a problem I have that's driving my search to begin with.
I obviously don't feel this way about the majority of ads I see but when it "hits right" it's really useful
Fair point, but I'd argue that "Google informed [you] of a perfectly viable alternative that might be cheaper" isn't what happened. What happened is "Google offered you Honda first, for no other reason than Honda paid them money to do so".
If you squint they may look like the same thing, but their subtle difference is important. One is a tool suggesting "Hey I see you're trying to do A, but I think B might also fit your needs", and the other is "You want A? Ok, I'll eventually point you towards A, but only after you consume this message from our sponsor."
Google's not genuinely thinking "Hey this will help the user more!" and building that into their tool - it's an ad platform that mimics being helpful, in the name of growing profits.
(That's fine for them to do btw; They're a company and they need to make money somehow.)
Okay, then show those ads to people who google “midsize SUV” or “AI image generator”, not people who google the specific product by brand name. Sending people who google “midjourney” to competitors’ websites makes as much sense as sending people who google “midsize SUV” to bicycle websites: the user already made their preference very clear.
There are clear and obvious ways to show advertisements without making those advertisements look like top search results. You know this. Google knows this. There's no reason for anyone to pretend otherwise.
In my view a lot of this hinges on how well the results are identified as ads, and whether they’re vectors of fraud.
I’m not inherently opposed to ads that are relevant to a user’s search query, but I am opposed to watering down their visual differentiation until they look just like regular search results. Once upon a time Google put ads on a yellow background labelled “Ads”. Now they’re “Sponsored results” and they look mostly identical to the rest. This is simply not about providing interesting and relevant alternatives, but about tricking the user into clicking the ad so Google can charge the advertiser.
What I truly can’t abide, though, is the volume of fraudulent and malicious advertising circulating their network. Given Google’s $100 billion profit in 2024, the amount of fake/scam versions of real websites that they allow to appear in search ads, or deepfake Elon Musk bitcoin giveaways they allow in YouTube prerolls is a calculated choice, not an inability or lack of resources to prevent it. At the end of the day it would eat into their profit if they were to make it harder to post deceptive ads.
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 are not necessarily squatting. Such as if my product is an integration of the tool. Many brand names are just basic words. Many brand names are very similar in SMBs.
But you can't use another company's trademark in your headline or adtext. Using another companies name is asking to get your ads taken down and lead to an account ban.
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.
> You don't get to exclude every advertiser from any random search string just because you have a domain name with it.
To my understanding, Google keywords are already semantic. It's not that it shows ads because it can't tell that the string is a specific product name - it's showing ads because it determined that string to be referring to Midjourney (the entity in Google's knowledge graph).
> There are many reasons to bid on brand names that are not necessarily squatting.
Google is a leader in AI - I feel they could very easily filter out these blatantly misleading ad campaigns, while keeping "legitimate" ones, if they didn't have financial incentive to turn a blind eye and have more people fooled into clicking ads.
My first result is midjourney.com. I so often see people criticizing Google search but I never see the negative with my own eyes. Whenever I search I get what I want or need.
Google Search must be highly personalized, and I don't know what I'm doing right but clearly my personalization is working.
Edit: Oh I realize now it's the sponsored results they're complaining about. Well that's just greedy. I mean, you haven't paid a cent for Google Search since 1998? And you just expect them to do everything for free.
I happen to not see the sponsored results right now, maybe because of uBlock, or chance, but even if I do see them I don't mind them at all. Poor Sundar Pichai has to keep the lights on somehow.
Author has never ran startup on the internet. For past 15-20 years, if you have competitors you have to bid-buy top ad slot from Google. That’s hundreds or thousands of dollars monthly.
Midjourney don’t do that because they are doing good with new signups without it.
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 identified that users are most likely unable to type the full URL into a browser and uses this opportunity to display some advertising. As my retirement investment holds a small amount of ETFs that would own google shares, yay for me. Thank you for not typing .com
At least it was on the first page. I just searched for Midjourney on the iPhone App Store. It put 2 other results first. Each result is about 2/3rds the height of the screen meaning the actual "midjourney" result was a screen and a half down, so off the screen.
I just got good first page hits and ranking for a search for "midjourney", but it looks like Midjourney is paying for 2 Sponsored spots on the first page, even though the user searched exactly for Midjourney's well-known brand name.
On a search for exactly this particular well-known and fairly unique brand name, I think probably midjourney.com should've been the first hit, as a freebie, without needing to buy ads. (Either that, or the second hit, and the Wikipedia entry as the first.)
(Incidentally, it felt a bit retro not to get the usual clutter of AI/infoboxes/etc. at the top of the page this time.)
I found it mildly amusing that when I googled for jlcpcb recently, pcbway showed up before them in the google results. I still don't really know if there is any meaningful difference between the two companies
I use an ad blocker, so I don't worry about sponsored links for fake products appearing above genuine ones. Also, this isn't just a Google problem; Bing has it too. My issue with Google is that it includes YouTube results in the main search results even though there's a separate Videos tab.
We can have the plain old good Google search results page back on by default. It works by making the "Web" tab the default. Tested on Firefox and it works great. No extension needed. Instructions in the topmost comment of this post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ctk95k/comment/l4...
I don't have a problem with this in general, I do have a problem when they deceive users, which happens often. If I search for Amazon and get Temu ad - that's OK. But often when I search for X they will show sponsored results that pretend to be that X. This is esp true with apps on their play store, which is something fairly new. I barely use Google Search these days so don't know how bad it is with search.
This is a pattern you see often. A product gets to a point where it's hard to grow revenue as the market expects, so the company does everything they can to squeeze more revenue.
It’s been like that for years. Just stop using it along with other Google-services, their products are unsafe dogshit, their earning model is to sell you and your privacy, not make great products.
I use several search engines (Brave, duckduck) to find stuff along with different AI-models (outside the browser, I disable the browser ones). This way I have at least some semblance of control of my information and no one company controls everything. Something like Google or Microsoft shouldn’t even exist.
> I remember a company saying its most effective ads were search ads for their own name
I don't have the full context, but this is almost a tautology. Of course you get the highest click-through-rate and highest conversion for searches that are your own name. You usually also get a relatively cheap bid, because most search engines prefer to prioritize relevant results, and you will be very relevant for your own name. But you would have gotten most of those clicks and conversion _for free_ even if you didn't advertise on your name, because the searcher would see your organic result. Advertising on your own name is defensive, not offensive -- you protect customers that are already yours, you don't get new ones.
source: I run marketing for a small business, we advertise on our own name too, and of course it is also the most effective if you calculate it naively.
I stopped using Google because I'd quickly search something, click the first link then, like Wiley Coyote, slowly realize I'd run straight off a cliff.
I can't believe that's what their standard is now.
My key complaint (in addition to the one cited in TA) is that, if there is a wikipedia article related to what I'm searching for, I want that at the top of the results. Maybe above, or possibly right below, the link to midjourney.com. Maybe others don't see the value in that, but Google has had literally a quarter of a century to figure out what I want, and hasn't yet learned that.
I wonder what this does to all the people that type even known URLs into Google instead of the location bar to go to that URL. You know, people like my parents.
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.
I made the mistake of agreeing to undertaking that I would not use the trademarked brandname of one of my competitors' keyuwords in our Google ads bidding. Talking with a lawyer after the fact, I learnt that we can freely use the keywords but agreeing to the undertaking is a more serious and legally binding corporate promise. Now they are bidding on my brand names but we can't bid on them. So, I do agree Google search sucks, heh.
Possibly part of an agreement to avoid a lawsuit. I think Dropbox and Box had a similar arrangement, because their names are so similar and they do exactly the same things.
Ideally, searching once for 'midjourney' would mean getting the url to directly access it time and again (and, create a bookmark). Perhaps the issue is more on the business model, rather than the effectivness of search offered by Google.
What is search anyway (not being flippant!)? Its quite an odd 'thing' really these days.
I stopped using Google when it started discriminating against browsers without JS recently, and it looks like I'm not missing much. Is stuffing ads in your face this "better experience" that sites are always trying to beg you to enable JS for?
Incidentally, Bing's first two results for "midjourney" are the official site, followed by the Wikipedia page.
If it's any consolation, these companies paying for ads on a competitor's brand name are probably paying through the nose to get clicks that only bounce. IF it's worth it at all, it's probably temporary. It's an indicator that market share is still up for grabs.
I see an opportunity for someone who can code. Make a website that tabulates search results for common terms. Listing the position of the desired search hit could be the ‘veracity score’ and allow users to assess the distortion field of each search engine
Probably not the first comment to this end, but I have been using Kagi for the last few months and it’s good. Past attempts to use other search engines didn’t last long because of search quality but Kagi is good enough as long as I don’t expect local results, which is a fine tradeoff.
I liked the search results a lot better when the ads were on the side. You could see a competitor if that was of interest to you, but you didn't have to scroll when you wanted to just find what would likely be a top result.
I liked it better when these were off to the side, I hope the person who convinced Google to put them as part of the list looking like a search result got a $100 million raise.
On one hand, google forces users to surrender more and more person information for "advance security features" on other hand google allows malicious links to be the top 10 (sponsored) search results. .
Just to nitpick on the example: When a trusted or frequently used webpage is bookmarked, search can be restricted to those bookmarks with `*` in Firefox and with `@bookmarks` in Chrome.
My dad stopped using Google like 20 years ago for exactly this reason. He was not happy when his relevant local small business was pushed off the first page by out-of-state providers of tenuously related services
Google Search jumped the shark years ago. It's the modern-day Yahoo at this point. Even Bing is a better experience, which is not a sentence I ever thought I would type a decade ago.
There have been ads above the fold for about 20 years. I just did the search and the official Midjourney site is the first non-sponsored hit. You'll find this for most searches.
Locale plays a role, I think. Searching from Romania, none of these examples replicate. Amazon is first for Amazon, Midjourney first for Midjourney, etc.
This is how paid placements work, and it's in the app stores as well.
And yes, _most_ people will just click on one of those top 3 links, not realizing that they are not going where they might have hoped to go.
What's worse is that many people actually go to google to search for the website name they want. And the search engine will "help" them by popping up suggestions before the user might have completed typing .com. So now instead of searching for therealwebsite.com, they search for "therealwebsite". That of course will NOT show them the real website, it will show all the garbage.
That's not "everything"! Just wasted ~3 hours trying to set up an account, supervised by me, for my 8 year old daughter.
(1) There are some old rules for a user interface.
(2) Billions of people know these rules, implicitly, and right away and easily use sites that follow the rules.
(3) Google, and others, want a new, different, original, snappy, creative, user interface but in this effort set aside the old rules so that at most only the programmer understands the user interface and in a month he (she) won't be able to use it either.
Analogy: They are really good at making pancakes but now are trying to make Bouillabaisse and are getting only rotten sea food.
Uh, the user interface has a lot of cartoons in a popular, new style but one of their cartoons shows little girl and some of the underside of her skirt -- dumb de dumb-dumb. If they make a mistake like that, then they are sloppy or worse workers and, thus, no wonder the rest is awful. Time to short the stock?
People are really starting to notice the sharp decline of Google search. I blogged[0] of a very similar experience a few months ago.
I don't even mind the AI Overview (too much) but the search results themselves are noticeably worse. In my example, the best search result and the one that the AI summary is clearly based on is the 6th ranked result.
Is Google doing this deliberately to make the AI Overview seem better?
In an ideal world, Google would use AI to provide better search results. Something like: "Here are the results for your search term A, which was slightly ambiguous. I suggest added term B or C depending on what you meant". It seems like that is not going to happen.
Try searching for "FedEx phone number" and it's not even in the top 10 search results. Not sure if FedEx is using SEO or paying to suppress results, but I was shocked Google couldn't even return this basic search successfully. I remember when Google Search used to actually work and have useful results and something like "FedEx phone number" would have the 1-800 number in bold text for you to click and immediately use. Now I use ChatGPT for those type of questions--and get the results I expect.
though I've noticed that they've dialed down the knobs a bit. It's still there, but far less blatant (probably due to the attention-grabbing BARD debacle)
I couldn't remember ever seeing anything this bad. So I tried this in my browser and the real midjourney was the first result. Then I remembered I'm using Brave as my default browser, and most people aren't. In all the years I've been using it I've never once regretted it, and every once in a while I get a little reminder like this about how bad ads are on the web. I don't know why it isn't a more popular browser choice.
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 ensuring that never happens.
The real problem here is that we've ceded our democracy to corporations: blaming Google (or any individual corporation) is missing the real issue.
P.S. But, the good news is ... we can always take our democracy back.
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?
Same shit, different screenshot. The most irritating part is that other folks can't reliably reproduce results like those shown in the screenshot. Yet, I can think of countless examples of this happening to me. My guess is that it's highly beneficial to Google to barf out walls of poor-quality ads when it knows nothing about you. I can't be sure why, but there's a pattern.
When you look for my (somewhat obscure) company's app on the Play store, the first result is always a sponsored listing for some totally unrelated app.
About a year ago, I googled "silverfast" (film scanning program) on a fresh Windows installation not connected to me in any way, and I got several ads for scammy scanner software before the program I was looking for showed up.
When I watch youtube videos from obscure creators while logged out, I routinely get AI-generated ads for random stuff. The funniest one was deepfaked Chuck Norris emphatically telling me I should feed my dog carrots. Yet, when I watch a video from a big YouTube channel under the same conditions, I get ads from major household brands.
My guess is that there's three things happening. 1) More moneyed advertisers have more refined targeting constraints, that implicitly filter out ill-defined user profiles. 2) Google feels the need to do a better job of targeting for advertisers who pay them more. 3) In the absence of a well-defined user profile, Google shotguns a bunch of low-cost ads at you to try to build a profile. Just guesses.
Impressions to logged-in users bid higher than anonymous sessions. There's almost certainly higher tiers of demographics beyond that, not that you're allowed to know.
Hmm I just tried that search and Midjourney's site was at the top.
Regardless, at this point, I consider Google Search "legacy software." I rarely use it anymore. Google's AI mode or ChatGPT Thinking perform much more nuanced searches for me and surface the results I'm looking for much faster.
I used to consider my Google-fu top notch, but even without Google Search "Classic" getting destroyed by SEO spam, it's still more work at the end of the day than AI models. I'm sure spam and irrelevance will be the eventual fate of these AI models too, but for now they're the new Google
I think future app stores should offer users an ad control panel. Let us choose whether to see ads, what kinds we prefer like tools, games, or education, and even which recommendation algorithm we want to use.
I'm going to grumble about the title. If you say "in one image" the you should just link to an image. If it isn't that self evident, then should title it as such.
Everything? That's not even half of it. I don't see any:
* useless faq box
* useless slop box
* unrelated image gallery
* hijacked business listing (with no support for recourse, of course)
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.
This is like going into a butcher's shop and being surprised that they're pushing meat on you instead of flowers or textiles.
Google is an ad company. They're the ad company. They built a search engine to sell ads. They built a browser to sell ads. They built an e-mail provider to sell ads. They built a video streaming platform to sell ads. They built a worldwide street-level navigation system to sell ads. They built an operating system and computers, just to sell ads.
They showed you ads. They gave you what they sell.
You don't like meat? Stop going to the butcher shop. Don't sit here complaining that the butchers keep trying to sell you meat.
Like many of you, I serve as IT support for family. Some of those family are beginning to slip cognitively, so I'd like to say: Fk google for doing this. You are confusing my relatives who cannot tell the difference between your ad-spam and actual links, and it is not an exaggeration to say that you are now taking advantage of old people.
I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock) and move them over to chatgpt when possible. If anyone has better ideas, I'm all ears.
OpenAI has even more VC money to pay back than Google ever did.
Practically all the large tech companies so far have turned to ads and monetizing users rather than charging enough to remain more neutral.
I suspect one day, when you ask ChatGPT "Can you give me a link to mid journey", you'll instead probabilistically get a link to whichever competitor paid OpenAI for the best placement.
> Is there controversy over the true inventor of the telephone?Yes, there is controversy over the true inventor of the telephone. While Alexander Graham Bell is widely credited, several inventors and researchers argue for recognition based on their contributions:
> Antonio Meucci: An Italian inventor who filed a patent caveat for a "voice communication apparatus" in 1871, five years before Bell's patent. Meucci's device, the "teletrofono," could transmit voice over a wire. Due to financial hardship, Meucci couldn't renew his caveat, and Bell was granted the patent in 1876. In 2002, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution (H.Res. 269) recognizing Meucci's contributions, stating he demonstrated a working device earlier, though it didn't officially credit him as the inventor. Some still argue Meucci deserves primary credit.
> Elisha Gray: An American engineer who filed a patent caveat for a telephone-like device on the same day as Bell, February 14, 1876. Bell's patent was filed hours earlier, leading to disputes. Some claim Bell may have had access to Gray’s ideas through patent office connections, though no definitive evidence supports this. Gray later challenged Bell’s patent but lost in court.
> Philipp Reis: A German inventor who developed a device called the "Reis telephone" in 1861, capable of transmitting music and some speech. While it was less practical for clear voice communication, some argue it was a precursor to the telephone.
Antonio Meucci invented the Teletrofono around 1849 and filed a patent for it in 1871. I know this mostly because it was a big deal in a Soprano's episode.
Wait long enough and it seems like almost any company tries anything to increase its bottom line, but the main difference between ChatGPT and Google is at least ChatGPT attempts to give a paid option. Again, I don't think that'll stop them from ever getting to that point... but it'll go farther than "here's search, we pay for it via adtech".
Kagi is a similar boat - the product is what you pay for, not what they can get users to put up with.
> at least ChatGPT attempts to give a paid option. Again, I don't think that'll stop them...
Netflix also attempted to give a paid option, but now we have an "ad-supported" plan. I think that same logic of maximizing profit means that even if there are some people paying for ChatGPT, the amount of free money that is sitting on the table means that we will see "ad-supported" ChatGPT pretty soon once the low-hanging fruit for quality enhancement start to dry up, which is kind of already happening.
I think the coexistence of ad supported plans is orthogonal to the above. E.g. Netflix still has an ad free plan, regardless of the other plans, but Google gives you no option.
"And now let's introduce this video's Sponsor, SpywareVPN"
Yeah, sure, "ad-free plan". As long as you don't watch (what feels like) the majority of videos on the platform.
I pay for premium, but I'd gladly pay 4x as much if Youtube also required creators to mark sponsored segments and let them all get skipped automatically if you paid for youtube "double premium double ad free" or whatever.
The premium plan actually gives you a little button to fast forward sponsor segments. (Not sure, if that's also on the free plan?)
You are right, that you still need to hit that button. It would be need to trigger it automatically. As far as I can tell, creators already tag the relevant segments as sponsored for other legal reasons.
1. The reason why ChatGPT is free despite being honestly very advanced, is that they want the general public to have an association of ChatGPT being "the default AI", just like Google is the default search engine and YouTube is the default video platform. Once they have this position they can throw as much garbage at the users as they want and nobody will care. This is why it doesn't really matter how much it costs now to capture the market, if the potential benefits are huge.
2. Once the market is captured and solidified, ads and enshittification ensue. If you're willing to put on your tin foil hat for a second, I'd tell you that as a matter of fact the technologies to integrate different services with ChatGPT are being developed right now, and once they're ready it's just a small step to make sure that ChatGPT prioritizes answers mentioning those integrated partners, which can easily be justified to users as legit quality-of-life improvements.
Maybe the answer is indeed to just buy a book and go touch some literal grass, and let the civilization drown in the sewer of disinformation it produces.
How's that different to all the time and effort spent on making television shows so that they can direct your attention to the next beer commercial, which also took lots of time and effort to make?
I'd say it's practically guaranteed. It would be wildly unprecedented to not follow up the amount of hype and fundraising in the LLM AI industry without a massive amount of enshittification following it.
Even if improvements continue for years we might already be near the peak of LLM usefulness because all of greedy and abusive dark patterns are sure to follow once the manic land grab settles down.
This is one of the reasons why I’m getting familiar with self-hosting. Local models are improving shockingly fast. I use Gemma3 27B for generating summaries of podcast transcripts, for instance.
In hindsight, we should have known this would happen eventually. At this point, we have to be actively be against free services. Every time its just a ticking time bomb. There's literally no incentive for them to be an actual good service, just good enough that you tolerate it and not consider other options, but shit enough that they can extract value out of you.
I recently signed up for an annual subscription to Kagi on their Starter plan and I couldn't agree more. Search quality with them has been great so far, and I realize their small web search and exploration features too.
I've been slowly working to find other paid services as alternatives to the free ones that I'm currently using (next big one was shifting away from Gmail and onto a personal domain for mail using Fastmail). Migrated away from Notion and using Obsidian with Syncthing running on my unRAID server at home. Generally just trying to find alternatives that aren't in the data mining and user lock in sphere and more about maintaining a positive user experience without taking advantage of their users and their data.
This. Please can we go back to the days where I simply pay for services or items instead of being trapped inside a maze of buy now pay later, credits, coupons, bonuses, gifts, tiers, etc
I am sure there have never been such a time, but I long for it anyway.
> At this point, we have to be actively be against free services.
Nah, GCC is free, Linux is free, Debian is free. What we need to be against is free stuff provided by for-profit entities, because the love of money is the root of all evil.
Linux is free as-in freedom. Linux is not zero-cost: it has taken tens of billions of dollars of investment from thousands of organisations over three decades - and countless volunteer hours - to make it what it is today; that the wider community gets Linux security patches and feature updates for free is a side-effect of the GPL license coupled with the low marginal cost of reproducing software once-written. I’m here to remind people that the bulk of Linux’ codebase was not written for free as an act of charity.
What I’m saying is that, hypothetically, if the entire business-world suddenly ditched Linux overnight and went back to IBM and Burrows like it’s the 1960s again again (and let’s pretend Android isn’t a thing either) then no-one would be funding significant Linux dev/eng work, and as much as we value the hacker-spirit of unpaid community/volunteer projects, I feel it isn’t enough to keep Linux viable and secure (especially in high-visibility, high-exposure scenarios like desktops and internet-facing services).
Eh, I heard lots of complaints from the Xen folks that the prevalence of RedHat in the kernel development community leads to double standards that makes their favourite product (KVM) get nicer and quicker reviews than the Xen related changes.
Not Google related, but cognition and older relative relevant: The amount of predatory scamware targeted towards older adults on the app stores is infuriating. I have a family friend who is now in the early-mid stages of Alzheimer's, but is still able to live at home and enjoy her life. She gets confused and stressed out by the fake 'alert! all your photos will be deleted!!' ads that pop up when she does her adult coloring books or jigsaw puzzles on her ipad. Apple's recommended apps in this category are evil in this regard, every single one. I've had to disable $80/week 'security' subscriptions from her account more than once. It is shameful that this is allowed.
to be fair, I had a Kagi subscription for a year, but I recently cancelled it (mainly because I'm not working now and need to cut monthly expenses). I'll probably rejoin eventually, but I can understand why people cut these things out or won't do it. Recurring monthly expenses can be hard.
This is a real risk. I know of someone who got phished with a fake number for Apple Support (the fake number was promoted and appeared at the top of the search results). Apparently they do this with banking phone numbers as well.
Network wide ad blockers like PiHole are also quite useful but they can cause some confusion from the client side because things just break for no apparent reason.
I pay for Kagi for search, my family uses Kagi.
I pay for NextDNS to block ads, all of my family's devices use NextDNS.
I pay for credits on OpenRouter and host an OpenWebUI instance, all of my family's AI is private.
I pay for the news - The Economist, the WSJ, FT, NewScientist, etc. Lies are free, the truth is behind a paywall.
The only thing money can't buy, yet, is a phone network free of robocalls.
Creat your own family yahoo — a website you maintain that has links to the websites they commonly use like mail and bank. Set as home page and new tab page.
It’s a slight security risk since it shows where you have accounts.
If you are savvy, build your own search that just passes it to an LLM and returns as page.
from a new customer perspective who just heard about midjourney, search may be a good spot to find alternate products. what google needs to know is if it is a navigational search and unless it keeps a long history, it may not know that. the simpler answer may be that companies who know you use a product like the one they make may just be willing to spend a bunch and google may be willing to add friction for the $.
Maybe Midjourney let its brand namespace become too diluted with copycats and also-rans and coasted on their initial work instead of putting in the effort to maintain the space. Maybe a lot of ppl searching for things that are like Midjourney are causing the competitors (who are obviously making efforts to invade the keyword) to be listed alongside. Maybe there's actually way more variables in the mix with OP's search/account/profile (however prolific or not it is). It's just not that clear cut and google is still has massive utility.
Another day another weak substack submitted by ....
Late to the party here but I made a browser extension that helps with this called Cat Search. It categorizes the search results and allows you to vote on them so you can ignore/downvote/banish the results you don't want
I will never use Gemini for this reason. The enshittification of Search is so treacherously disgraceful and user-hostile, that I have no faith that the same fate won't occur with Gemini as well.
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 companies buy getX.com or just non-.com TLDs. Now which one is the right result for searches for X? The pre existing one or the new company? What if they’re in different industries?
Almost all SaaS companies have multiple comparison pages or blogs/articles/etc that mention and compare themselves with competitors - specifically for SEO to show up in those searches. Should this also be banned?
I could go on, but I just don’t see a situation where Google can solve this satisfactorily for everyone, without becoming opinionated and picking/choosing/preferring one competitor over the other. As such, they’ve gone for the easiest model we have in modern day capitalism - put it up for auction and let the market figure it out!
The issue you're describing is ranking results or ranking between promoted/ad content.
The problem more at hand is unless you're paying big bucks, they can and will place content that at best is another competitor, or at worst is genuinely trying to harm your users.
Ads being inline and as close in appearance to regular results as google can legally get away with is the problem. There are heavily misaligned incentives at play, ones that enable a lot of malware and phishing attempts.
Yes, I understand that you/others think this is an already solved problem - my point was that as time passes and the world grows, it no longer is - they can’t exactly solve it satisfactorily for all.
I don't think it was ever a "solved and done" problem, but at least Google kept putting tremendous efforts to lead the arms race and bring a decent solution for most people. It wasn't perfect for everyone of course.
I think they could still keep up if it was a priority to them. It's complicated, but they have a lot of the best minds of our generation after all.
I’m acutely aware that any topic related to Google Ads invites the blind fury of HN. I don’t want to excuse their shitty behavior, but I also dislike the illogical and irrational posts and threads that pop up about this topic on a monthly basis and make it to #1!
However, if you are to make this argument - please note that for OP and all the commenters in this post who tested this, all of them got the official Midjourney page as search result #1. Unsure why we’re discussing this at all then?
With udm14 and ublock origin on Firefox my first link is the official midjourney.com, then the subreddit, then the official discord, then wikipedia, then the offical Facebook page. That is just about perfect and covers what most people would want.
No ads. No LLM BS. While the experience google is pushing is terrible, the underlying tech still works in cases like this.
> I typed in Midjourney to search for Midjourney because I wanted to use Midjourney.
For one thing, the author could have just gone right to midjourney.com instead of going through an intermediate. Additionally, when I tried typing midjourney into google, midjourney.com was the first result. This is on mobile Firefox, with no extensions installed.
Thanks for the anecdote, but everyone’s advertising experience is different — that’s the whole point of targeted advertising. It doesn’t invalidate the OP’s point, though.
FWIW, I just used the Google app on iOS and got one ad (for artlist.io) before the midjourney.com link. A lot of people use Google this way to get to a named website, btw.
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 own name, resulting in Double Shein: https://i.imgur.com/0buR8Hq.png
As a user, I'm still baffled that the interface to view and manage the apps I have installed on the system - which is 90 out of 100 times why I'm opening the play store - is tucked away in some obscure corner of the app.
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.
I actually do open the app store specifically to find a cool new app to install. I do this maybe a couple times a year.
It never works. The apps it suggests are all ad farming garbage. I have found maybe one fun game doing this over the years, but mostly its been repeated frustration. I keep doing it occasionally in hopes that I find another diamond in the rough but I think Google has just trashed this whole thing up.
There is probably a set of users who download tons of apps and throw money after them like crazy, and that's probably what Google has optimized for.
You can do that with F-droid, it's a lot of fun seeing what open source app people developed
I always do this on F-Droid, always find nice gems in there.
Wouldn't dream of doing it on Play Store, it's all trash, and even the stuff I go there to download specifically, I wish I didn't have to most of the time.
Games are the exception here. The category has real creative churn and relies less on name recognition. Discovery still feels too shallow though. Reddit is still the best source for game recommendations.
> the interface to view and manage the apps I have installed on the system
Why do you go to the play store to view and manage installed apps? If you swipe up from home screen you should get to the app drawer. Or Settings > Apps.
If you want to do manual updates you do it in play store rather than the OS settings utility. That is buried under your account settings which isn't logically related.
I have bookmarked the play store update view as separate icon by long pressing the play store icon, then long pressing/dragging the my apps section to an own "app".
That way I can skip the store garbage and directly go click update all apps button.
I just tried on apple device s few weeks ago and it took me many minutes to find the listing where I can update installed apps and it was missing the update all button...
Of course they know the UI doesn't really do what you want. But they also know they make more money when it's filled with manipulative anti-patterns.
Companies love algorithmic content because because it's the ultimate shield from criticism. "Don't blame us for bad content! It's just the algorithm and we can't control it! Maybe if you interact with it more it will give you better results." Or course in practice it means they have plausible deniability when they shove a stream of ads in your feed.
The one that kills me is on YouTube: "show fewer shorts". fewer than what? Why isn't zero an option? It just means they will shove them in your face again and again. Don't want them at all? Too bad! We need to increase metrics so the PM of shorts can get their promotion!
In the old days, TV was chock full of ads, sometimes to such a degree that you watched more ad time than movie time during a movie, assuming you didn't switch to other channels in between, always either missing the beginning of next part of the movie, or resigned yourself to watch some ad content afterall in order not to miss that beginning.
Ads will always be around, I guess. Doesn't Google offer a pay search version too, without ads? Like youtube...
It's simply optimized to upsell you on other apps when you are there for a different purpose.
Just how supermarkets are designed, IKEA is the most egregious, they try to force you to look at and tempt you with a whole load of other products on your way to getting what you came for.
But you go to IKEA for IKEA and get IKEA. With the phone stores or search engines you go to them for $result and you get $something_else.
It's similar but not quite the same. Even the parallel with the physical world fails us here, IKEA can't put everyone's desired product at the entrance. Google can.
When I go to IKEA for a desk chair, I have to walk though many other unrelated things to see the desk chairs. The difference is that IKEA sells IKEA only.
> I have to walk though many other unrelated things to see the desk chairs
That's what I was trying to say earlier with the limitations of the physical world. IKEA implements a lot of psychological tricks to get your eyeballs on as many products as they can but at the end of the day they can have only so many corridors and entrances to the store. You want a chair, I want a pillow, someone else wants a flower pot. Sooner or later someone will need to walk a bit to get to what they want, IKEA can't put everything right at the entrance.
But Google can put my desired result right at the top, at the entrance. It's the advantage of digital, it can be changed to suit each individual user. As it turns out, Google made it only their advantage.
When I go to IKEA for a desk chair, I have to walk though many other unrelated things to see the desk chairs. The difference is that IKEA sells IKEA only.
This is the sort of thing that makes people on HN start screaming "ZOMG! Walled garden!!!!11!!eleventy!1"
I mean, that's not what a walled garden is. A walled garden would be if IKEA sold houses that you can only put IKEA furniture in.
Opening the App Store to download a bunch of apps - in general - is probably the #1 thing people are doing when they open the App Store. Of course, installing a specific app is a top use case. But I think you're just not the average user. Lots of people open the App Store frequently to just check out what's available.
~10 years ago I would do this all the time. It's fun, kind of like surfin' the net was back in the old days, but in a walled garden of applications.
is there actually any data to back up the claim that the "#1 thing people do" is open the app store to see what's available besides your singular story about what you used to do a decade ago when all of this was much more novel in general?
10 years ago that was fun. Today it’s an awful experience.
I'm surprised to hear this, as I am in the same boat as the other poster. Of course it makes sense, they wouldn't build that junk if there weren't junk consumers on the market. But I still can't grasp the concept of "just installing apps".
It seems plausible that casual browsing and downloading remains a significant use case. Apple surely wouldn't design the App Store focusing on discovery this way otherwise. Not sure about the #1 activity hypothesis. What I'm certain about though is that the App Store is deeply broken and they've started rushing down the path of platform "enshittification" (real thing) where online platforms become less useful, less enjoyable, or less user-friendly.
> As a user, I'm still baffled that the interface to view and manage the apps I have installed on the system - which is 90 out of 100 times why I'm opening the play store - is tucked away in some obscure corner of the app.
Analytics driven development.
They realized that doing it this way leads to greater ad clicks and time spent on the app.
As an aside, am I the only one who has problems finding the Play Store icon amidst the various Google tools? All these icons look the same. They're basically all red/green/yellow/blue.
I swear I am basically icon blind at this point over the course of years and thousands of icons across a handful of operating systems
I am not baffled, because managing and viewing your already-installed apps is almost certainly lower marginal revenue than showing new apps, for the bulk of app store users.
Just opened the App Store to check. There’s an ad for chrome on the home screen. I click search and before I start typing search suggestions pop up. The first one is for chrome. I type Firefox and click search. The first result is chrome.
At least it's always only one ad, but on the other hand it takes up half the screen. Plus the title is the name of the app, not "Firefox". Really, the bar is not very high for ads
The worst thing about it is that it looks exactly like a regular app listing, too. The only indication that it's an ad is a tiny "ad" icon - a pale blue square with slightly paler blue text. And that icon isn't even next to the (large and visible) app name, it's next to the (small and greyed out) tagline.
This is also true on Apple's app stores, to be fair. I didn't know this until I got a MacBook Pro recently and my assumption that Apple's controls would be tighter than Google's was proven quite wrong when I opened the Mac App Store for the first rime.
The Mac App Store is such a wasteland. I don't know why Apple doesn't provide it a budget and some real human curation.
The average person searching for Microsoft Word, which is on the App Store, gets screens of templates and junky overpriced apps.
For all of those app stores, the current approach prints them money and lets them claim impartiality, while still allowing some control through acceptance rules, ToSes and automated security measures. All those things scale well. Any other approach I can think of ends up having corner cases that involve human support or interfacing with regulatory systems - and these things do not scale well.
And the iPhone/iPad AppStore is also a wasteland, in relative terms.
It just happens to also have a few software people actually need. But those apps are like a single tiny oasis in the middle of the Sahara desert.
I don't know if curation is really the problem. Nearly every other platform has a search that when you search for "Mr Beast" on YouTube or "Elon Musk" on X they know you mean the popular one and not some 2-bit dork's fan page or parody that happens to have those words in the title/keywords.
I think they just (A) have no idea what they're doing when it comes to search and (B) the scamware that fills all their App Stores makes Apple a ton of extra money compared to people finding the real apps which usually are monetized outside the app store due to Apple's absurd revshare.
> I don't know if curation is really the problem.
A lack of oversight is what I see as the problem, and the solution would require a significant human element.
Expecting a retailer to know/inspect the product they collect margins on shouldn't be a big ask.
The retailer has to know what they're selling, but Apple seems to turn a blind eye to shady listings because of the way Mac App Store results are shown and the lack of useful filtering available to the user.
Lack of care, like previous commenters mentioned, each sale is a sale, and 30% to Apple. It does not matter what you sell. One step deeper and it does matter what you sell: it seems to incentivise spammy apps, why block these money makers?! It is all about money. Nothing else.
When we propose alternatives the answer is that they want to protect customers.
But they don’t protect their cash cow from massive daily influxes of scam apps. It’s better one million scam apps generating 50k per month and drowning my two or three apps for which I spent months of work than a few thousand quality apps from which everybody would profit.
Let’s be real it takes a special kind of mad developer to try to make a business that relies on the AppStore. First if you are unlucky you get rejected on day one or two. And if you aren’t and are wildly popular you risk Apple copying your business model.
Because deep down some people at Apple despise the App Store developers and think they can do much better. This has been at the core of Apple culture for ages.
Anyway we legit indie developers who care about our products get drowned in irrelevance. Who cares.
> Nearly every other platform has a search that when you search for "Mr Beast" on YouTube or "Elon Musk" on X they know you mean the popular one and not some 2-bit dork's fan page or parody that happens to have those words in the title/keywords.
Have you seen the Microsoft app store?
> Nearly every other platform has a search that when you search for "Mr Beast" on YouTube or "Elon Musk" on X they know you mean the popular one and not some 2-bit dork's fan page or parody that happens to have those words in the title/keywords.
Well, that's what you expect as a user and as a technology person, but as the TFA demonstrates, this doesn't apply to Google without an ad-blocker.
> when you search for "Mr Beast" on YouTube or "Elon Musk" on X they know you mean the popular one and not some 2-bit dork's fan page
Don't give them ideas
This is not my experience.
In fact, I just tried searching for "Microsoft Word" in the Mac App Store, and it was the first hit (with other Office apps coming next).
I did a search for "Instapaper" and again, first hit.
On my iPhone I did the same thing, there was a single sponsored app as the first item (and oddly completely unrelated), and the first app after that was the one I typed.
There's that saying about "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating." The apple and play stores are like that. They don't care what you buy as long as they get to control the choices you choose from.
> Does Apple do that on the App Store?
Yes they do. Their search already sucks in normal circumstances—I remember searching for “Pinboard” (the bookmarking service) and had to scroll by thirteen pinball (the game) apps before starting to see Pinboard apps—but you can type in the exact name of the app you want had have an ad for a competitor above it. Not only is it allowed, it’s encouraged.
They seem to have fixed that, at least for me all the top results are Pinboard clients or other products with Pinboard in the name.
With the ads it really feels like Apple is playing all sides, they almost always show the competitor first. When you search the competitor it's a different competitor at the top. You can keep going until you terminate at some app that presumably pays top dollar to appear as an ad for themselves right above their app in the search results. The only thing I'm surprised by is that they even allow people to put ads over their own first party apps
The ad slot is purely a revenue tool, not a discovery aid. It forces developers to pay just to defend their own branded search terms. App Store Search ads are a hidden increase in commissions that you either accept to pay by bidding on your own app's name, or omit at the expense of having competitors show on top of you all the time, stealing your revenue. It creates a significant drain on resources for indies, to the point that it's often no longer worth it to bother creating apps.
That's why Apple is now doing everything in their power to make app development easier, but that will more likely increase quantity and not necessarily quality, as it only deepens the ecosystem's problems by inviting more noise. The practical reality is, if you are not VC-backed and if you are not playing the heavy ad spend game, the App Store is more of a barrier than anything else.
I just tried this, searched for "Pinboard" and it was the first app after one sponsored app (that was oddly completely unrelated). Tried a couple of other things, like "Instapaper" "Unread" and they were the first hits after a single sponsored app.
When search is already unreliable, placing a competitor's ad above the exact match feels intentionally exploitative.
Learned that App Store does this too during a recent MFA rollout.
What really surprised me was that when instructed to install Google Authenticator, a significant portion of people (I'd estimate close to 50%) would search the exact name and then proceed to reach to install the sponsored top result with a completely different name until I stopped them.
Absolutely this. It is so disappointing that the big tech companies provide ANOTHER opportunity for less-skilled users to make a mistake.
And a mistake that might hurt them with security and certainly cost and functionality.
And in a core, security-sensitive function like "what third party apps should I have on my personal device?" This is not searching for fun memes on Reddit!
A lot of the MFA apps that Apple allows to appear above the official apps do work, but they have a $10/month subscription fee. The MS Authenticator clones have very similar icons and names
I rather suspect that this kind of thing constitutes the majority of shovelware on all the app stores, rather than outright malware. The latter gets you quickly ejected, but if your app is technically within the rules, it's just a steady trickle of $$$ from people who install it by mistake or because they just don't know better.
And you can't even point someone to a specific app without the App Store trying hard to redirect their attention to an alternative.
I would love to see trademark law changed to ban this practice. Google, etc should not be allowed to, in effect, charge money to avoid having one’s trademark become a search term for a competitor.
Paying for ad slots to raise brand awareness is one thing, but a search for a trademark should resolve first to a valid holder of that trademark.
Why would that happen? Participating large businesses are completely fine with the existing practice. Sure, someone can bid on your trademark, but you can also bid on theirs and probably don't want to lose that ability.
Fortunately laws aren’t limited to be exclusive to large business interests and, at least occasionally, can be drafted with intent to benefit consumers in a market.
Same thing happened to me. I wanted to get "Fit Notes" - a free and ad-free app. I searched for it and the first result is some adware/subscription-based crap. I skip over. I scroll down part the "Sponsored: Related to your search" section with a whole bunch of others. I am still seeing more paid/in-app-purchase/subscription-based apps.
At this point I thought that the app didn't exist for newer versions of Android.
It turned out that it was the second result, just above the "sponsored" one. It looked so much like a part of the first result that I just skipped over it.
In A/B tests the lack of clarity probably helped increase ad clicks. The metric they care about went up.
It’s why ads in gmail look increasingly like normal messages.
I usually use the app store in Fedora and am used to finding what I want and having it installed within secounds.
Occasionally, I help people with their Mac's, and it can easily take half an hour to get something installed (finding their password etc), and on iOS, there are ads that buries the real results.
Then I am reminded how spoiled I am in the Linux world! No ads and quick access to a large selection of open source and commercial programs, no accounts or logins!
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 application names in place of the type of data/work ("Excel file" being used to refer to a CSV).
…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?
Paying to parasitize the brand recognition and trust of a competitor has become the norm. he comparison to retail product squatting perfectly illustrates why this feels like an unfair infringement, not just aggressive marketing.
> Imaging if PepsiCo paid grocers to shelve cans of Pepsi right beside cans of Coke
I think that part is true? Inventory tag doesn’t matter too much here.
Better analogy would be putting Pepsi syrup into a Coke-branded fountain, maybe?
> Now browsers in general are associated with the firefox term.
Pardon? I’ve never heard a human call a browser “firefox” (as a generic term), or “chrome” for that matter (though people do assume you use Chrome by default now).
I just searched "Firefox" in the app store. The top result is Google Chrome with an Ad indicator (Google paid for higher placement). Second is Firefox.
Sometimes it's good to live in a region that no one cares about. I just searched for Firefox in the Android Play Store application, there were no ads, and the first result was Firefox.
I also don't get any ads in American and UK podcasts for the same reason (except for those read by the host, but there are few of those and they're easy to ignore).
On iOS App Store at least, my observation is they just show you a random irrelevant ad at the top if there’s no one specifically bidding for the term. Well that’s my assumption for why I get irrelevant <app with deep pocket> ads when I search for obscure terms. But maybe they don’t show an ad if there’s no bidder at all for garbage spots in <country>?
For me the first result was firefox, but it was a sponsored result, the second result was also firefox.
Can you tell us which region are you in? (Iceland?)
Does anyone publish a scorecard of search results vs Google region settings?
That's interesting. I wish it were more practical to use a dedicated VPN for some less-developed country just for my podcast client.
Podcasts are normally plain mp3 (or similar) files that get downloaded as-is off an rss feed, as far as I understand. I don’t think anyone gets extra ads outside the sponsored/host-read ones.
The big podcast networks like iHeart are able to dynamically splice ads into episodes, so they can be targeted based on geoIP or whatever other signals they have on you.
I want a self hosted proxy for podcasts that strips the ads and compresses the audio stream harder before my phone downloads it.
I listen to a lot of Stuff You Should Know and haven’t noticed. TIL I’m exempt from their targeted ads too!
Everyone posts to centralized RSS feeds these days. The company that owns the feed creates duplicates of the uploaded file, inserts ads into them, and serves a version of the file containing ads localized to the downloader's country.
If the same podcast is uploaded to Youtube through the uploader's official channel, it won't contain those ads and you're better off downloading that.
I mean Google payed Apple 20 Billion to be the default search engine…see: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-01/google-s-...
Same here.
I did the same and my first result was NordVPN, lmao.
> Amazon
Speaking of amazon... By god amazon search is horrid for this.
If you search for HP laptop you get a whole bunch of sponsored Lenovo's at the top of the page.
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, any search I make comes back with what looks like spray and pray SEO.
Maybe it's actually a hard problem to solve, or maybe the goal is "sell anything!" (including better placement the seller pays for) rather than "give the user what they want".
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/
Important addition: Geizhals for the entire EU [1], not just focused on Germany, Austria, or the UK.
[1] https://geizhals.eu/
Yeah. I kinda regret my comment 'cause it's not like I've stumbled into some discovery of human behavior no one else thought about. :)
I just felt a little tangy/pontificaty.
Ikea is different though: they only sell their own products so there's so earning incentives from paid product placement. Of course they want to improve their own sales but I feel that's a very different, less nefarious goal.
I think it's ultimately the same, though: they're not optimizing for you to get what you're looking for.
At the same time, I know it's a hard problem to solve. Users also aren't good at finding what they want either.
It's the "sell anything" goal, which is a direct result of the larger "growth at all costs" goal, the cancer that is enshittifying everything.
Searching for anything really on amazon is... an experience. 15 sponsored vs nothing of substance. And there is no way to know that a given, say, boardgame is not even available on Amazon.
In fact, the results are so bad that most of the time I go through Google.
Every Amazon product page has a unique identifying number within the URL that can be used to relocate that exact product again if it is still online later.
If you copy & save the whole URL it works as expected when you paste it into a browser next time, unless that page is gone for good.
But if you just read the ID number to somebody and they type it into the search box, the product will appear as a tile surrounded by a few related product tiles and the rest unrelated. Completely outnumbered, and intentionally crafted to make it easier to buy some other product besides the exact one desired.
And that's when you already know exactly what you want.
Only if you then click on the correct one will it take you back to the exact same product page.
I avoid using the Amazon app exactly because of this. Firefox with uBlock makes it a lot better, and you can still switch to the app after finding the product if that's better for finishing the purchase.
I’ve stopped using either the play/app store to search for apps. I search kagi and then click-through to the appropriate app store.
Sometimes it's not even close, I went to download the PAX Australia app and the top result was Revolut. I'd love to know the set of circumstances that the algorithm picked them to sponsor there.
I don't understand how no one's brought a racketeering suit against them.
> You wouldn't want someone looking for your website to find your competitor instead. For a small fee, I can make sure that doesn't happen.
Testing this with Aurora Store and the search terms actually give me the correct results. Another reason to use that over Google Play Store
> Does Apple do that on the App Store?
Yes. In fact, I often get sponsored stuff before Apple’s own apps, when I’m searching for the Apple app. I’ll also get things like games, when I’m looking for development or productivity apps. It’s crazy.
One of the things that I do, each morning, is take a long walk, listening to music.
I’m an Apple One subscriber, so there’s no limit to the music from the catalog. I don’t buy individual songs. It’s already been paid, so they aren’t selling me anything.
I use the “Discovery Station” playlist, which gives you random songs, based on your preferences.
It used to be quite good, but lately, it’s been stuffing weird pop songs into the playlist. These are ones that I’d never listen to, otherwise. I will tell Siri that I don’t like the songs, but they keep coming, anyway. I often dislike up to five songs in a row; at which time, the phone gives up on the station, and starts feeding me random songs from my library.
This renders the “Discovery Station” pretty much worthless.
It’s fairly obvious that the playlist has been corrupted by paid results.
Pandora has always done the best job of selecting relevant unknown music for me, but the limit on skips (even for paid accounts), makes it worthless. Undiscovered music is frequently obscure for a reason, so I can sometimes skip a majority of the selections. I’ve always been puzzled about why Pandora never got borged by Apple or Microsoft. They were excellent, a decade before the AI hype bubble was even a broken rubber on the drug store shelf.
It is same on PlayStore and AppStore.
You would be surprised to know Apple started this in AppStore before Google on PlayStore. I assume it is because Google wanted to be safe from Antitrust lawsuits (Follow Apple rather than going there first).
> Does Apple do that on the App Store?
I believe so - and it seems the devs know it happens, bevause I often see a paid ad for "Chrome" if I search "Chrome"
As a curiosity, this is a common strategy for advertising! But people still disagree whether it is the best investment. You can generally win on your own name with comparatively low bids, because it is obviously the most relevant search term, and relevance is often factored into the price you pay for ad placement. So you may choose to bid defensively, to stop competitors from advertising on your name. Even so, the obvious counter-argument is that the person searched for you _explicitly_ by name, so how likely are they to click on your competitor's ads? I don't have a ton of experience, so perhaps some orgs make the decision in a data-driven way, but I suspect most make the decision in a mostly faith-based way.
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 matters to the board, namely profit. Their metrics are in sales at best, but most likely just clicks.
I have never worked anywhere where it has been joined up. You wouldn't believe how much gets sold at a loss with customer acquisition costing more than the product. Imagine paying lots for the ad, some more for the hosting, some more for the affiliate marketing, then discounting the product and then free shipping, all with an outsourced warehouse that costs a fortune.
In regular retail you just don't have this level of waste since there is a different cost structure and growth is unlikely to be double digit.
Meanwhile, money is sucked out of the world and funnelled into ad tech. In the olden days adverts might support the local paper so the money stayed in the community.
> 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 ads are not the brightest on the team
lol, surprise! I run marketing for a small business, I am the guy buying the ads haha. I’m not offended at all, but am a bit surprised the engineer-vs-sales feud is still alive. Fwiw I also do product design! Can’t we all get along?
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.
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
> Does Apple do that on the App Store?
The iOS AppStore is just as bad. Even if your search term is the exact app name, they’ll show you random stuff first (maybe they’re hoping you buy before realizing it wasn’t what you were looking for). And since App Store contents are like 98% crap, the chances of randomly finding something worthwhile are miniscule.
Letting users do what they want to is just not a business model for these megacorps.
Results may vary:
Searches for Amazon, Temu, Shein - result in each being listed in the promotional panel and then as the first result.
For Firefox: Chrome is listed in the promotional panel and Firefox as the first result (below it).
The promotional panel has a different background colour and “Ad” badge, but is otherwise identical to other listings.
Two results fit on the screen: the promotional panel and the first listing. Diverging from Google is that the ad result is obvious and doesn’t push the search result out of view.
Apple is even worse. Try searching for Grok in the app store and it will be almost impossible to find due to some deal they have with OpenAI.
I just searched Grok and Grok is both the top ad and the first result. OpenAI is second.
Try searching for chrome using ma edge.
It basically intercepted said search and gave me an ad saying to keep using edge.
Thinking back it seems unbeleivable so I searched.
https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-wind...
Same on maps as well. That has actual annoying consequences where you end up at the wrong place.
The Santander bank does the same when you enter the address of a broker while doing a transfer. They show an ad for one of their investment funds
> Does Apple do that on the App Store?
Yes, this has been my experience, at least on mobile. Is this different for others?
So they are actually Ad Search engines.
The sponsored spot is appalling, I reported something that looked dodgy which appeared above the UK gov identity verification for passports and such app. When people search for a specific app, putting something else in front only makes me think you are untrustworthy scum, so my trust in the play store is fundamentally broken. There's a fundamental incompatibility between giving the right result for what was searched for and pushing promoted irrelevant results.
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 speaking English. And I occasionally got surprised seeing someone trying to find something online and spending minutes, if not hours to get to the right place.
Last couple of years I found it to be way, way harder. And it's noticeably getting worse almost on a daily basis right now.
Recently I've tried perplexity and it was absolutely amazing. I know this may sound like a sales pitch, but I was really blown away by the user experience. Except it sometimes says "results cannot be found or I am not suppose to show them to you". Well, fair game, I wouldn't be able to find these results on google either.
I've seen a lot of change in the industry last 30 years, things we took for granted or thought would stay there forever. I genuinely think Google is finished as a search engine for the web. The only problem is that we don't have a solid contender yet. Perplexity is close tho.
Is Perplexity, as a business, sustainable? I'm skeptical of these "AI search is better than web search" claims. Not because it's not true, but because of how wildly subsidized these AI things are. Web search doesn't suck because it's an impossible problem, web search sucks because it has to be profitable, and the profitability comes from making it suck. That's not true today for AI tools, but it will be in a few years. What will stop AI tools from being sucked into the same ad-infested black hole once the free money runs out?
For this kind of thing I'm an LLM skeptic, but
People said the same thing you're saying about Google in the late 90s, early 2000s before their IPO (and immediately afterwards). There was a sense in which people didn't really think search -- which seemed more like a public utility -- could ever be profitable. Yahoo and AltaVista and Excite blanketed theirs in ads and junk. The search itself was seen merely as a draw into a "portal."
It's not inevitable that the same thing happen with services like Perplexity. But I do think things are going to get shaken up.
It seems like Google agrees at some level, because they seem to have just given up.
The big difference with Google monetizing in the 90’s is that they owned their platform, which gave them control to build out a search and ad network that scaled.
Perplexity uses frontier models under the hood, it doesn’t own all core aspects of its platform. They’re extremely dependent on frontier models and therefore reliant on underlying model pricing remaining sustainable.
Yeah I don't think Perplexity in particular is all that interesting.
But these days I do do a lot of 'research phase' stuff right in Claude Code. If looking at a technical issue, etc. I'll give it URLs and terms to search for and let it do some research for me. Mixed results.
Perplexity's CEO openly admits that their Comet browser offering is intended to track users for ads. So it seems they will head down the encrapify path soon enough.
Pro tip: get a free account and don't go pro. Their free account is bananas good atm "while supplies last"
> web search sucks because it has to be profitable, and the profitability comes from making it suck. That's not true today for AI tools, but it will be in a few years.
Many people pay to use _AI tools_, that already brings in revenue. I had chatgpt plus since very early days, which was 20$/month, I don't have it at the moment because my company provides pro plan to me (and every other engineer) which is probably around 200$/month/user.
Of course, serving a single inference on LLM's probably costs a lot more than a serving a single search on google, but they've already got a solid business model and they won't need intrusive adds _in a few years_ (if at all)
I'm skeptical that a significant number of people will be willing to pay cash money for these products when web search still exists for free, but we'll see!
It's not just Perplexity, it's any of the "deep research" offerings on the market really. And the reason why they work so well isn't because of any kind of secret sauce, it's because they have infinite patience to wade through all the bullshit and can thus brute force this without necessarily knowing the shortcuts. It's basically more of the same: https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/altoids-by-the-fistfu...
I find it's still not that difficult to have that "special power", but you have to adapt your tools. Before the only tool you needed was Google, now you need to know which one to use for each type of request.
I mostly juggle with Google, Kagi, and various LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity... but the differences matter less).
Try DuckDuck Go, it performs significantly better than Google for me
My experience with DuckDuckGo has been very mixed. I have to frequently resort to Google, especially for error messages where DDG returns zero results yet Google has indexed and finds a GitHub issue with that exact same text in it. The image searches are also really bad. I am sticking with using DDG but I have a shortcut ready in case I need Google and overall I'd really like something else considering it's a thin wrapper around Bing. I'll try out Kagi and see if it's worth paying
It only works well for mainstream search subjects. If something is slightly off the spotlight, it will often fail to find it even with exact name of the page/article in quotes in my experience.
do you have an example of such a query?
> I genuinely think Google is finished as a search engine for the web.
Google Search is garbage, but highly unlikely to be "finished". Millions of people still find it useful, and Google is adopting "AI" on the results page just like any other "AI" web search service. The reason the UX is not good is, first of all, subjective, and second of all, because Google is in the advertising business, and they've found it more profitable to corrupt their results page and deal with any negative feedback, than to deliver clean results like they did decades ago without the profit.
This is a carefully planned, tested, and executed design decision, just like anything they do on the SERP, and not some arbitrary sign that they don't know what they're doing anymore.
The possibility of a new player disrupting the dominance of a trillion-dollar corporation that has built a highly optimized index of the entire web over decades, by leveraging technology that requires vast resources to run, is highly unlikely. Not impossible, but highly unlikely. Google could improve the search UX tomorrow if they wanted to.
> The only problem is that we don't have a solid contender yet.
Sure we do. Kagi offers a much better UX, and I haven't had the need to rely on external results for nearly a year now. I haven't tried Perplexity, but I imagine it could be good as well, depending on the quality of its index.
But these are relatively niche services catering to an audience that cares about these things. The sad reality is that most people simply don't, and will use whatever search engine is set as default in their browser. Which is why being the default is worth paying millions, and is literally keeping companies like Mozilla alive.
This sounds correct to me. Cory Doctorow wrote explicitly about how Kagi uses Google's own index, but just presents the results in a more useful way, which validates everything that you're saying.
> In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google.
> The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/...
I think youre giving Google too much credit.
They did not expect the public to react to chatGPT the way they did and for OAI to capture mindset and marketshare of Internet Search Queries.
Google deliberately made search worse so users do multiple searches for each query so they can profit off showing more ads:
https://journalrecord.com/2025/02/20/is-google-making-search...
Right? Google is dog caca now. Myself and everyone I know keep getting sent to AI-written garbage nonsense slop websites, or for some reason, to the Hindustan Times
Jaja, dijo caca!
ontopic: This debacle started way earlier than when google decided that the "don't be evil" motto was to be removed, methinks.
I've completely stopped using Google since the ChatGPT search Chrome extension came out. That was, what, almost 2 years ago? More? It simply redirects URL-bar searches to ChatGPT (with the web search toggle active) instead of Google, nothing fancy.
I didn't explicitly decide to stop using Google, it just happened, I didn't need it anymore, just like I went from using StackOverflow daily to never opening it again. ChatGPT with search is just better (at least ChatGPT Plus). Granted, it is noticeably slower to get a first result, but end-to-end it's a much faster way to find your answer.
I don't disagree - yet their share price hit ATH this month.
That's how you know that our economy is not really working to the benefit of most of us - because all the numerous ways to profit by fucking people up, from dark patterns to mass layoffs, are rewarded financially.
Yeah for some reasons it ranks among the first newspaper any times I am looking for some US news. It feels like someone tweaked the algorithm for money.
oddly this "caca" felt more visceral to me that most "poop"'s or "shit"'s I've seen in a bit. summoned an image instantly. probably just surprise - good choice!
reminds me of a blackhat presentation of a web crawler
two young gentlemen introduced it as "caca", seemingly an acronym for sth, but they just couldn't help themselves and kept chuckling for next five minutes.
"Caca" is more kiki and "poop" is more bouba.
"Caca" means shit in a bunch of languages (at least as a term used with children, but not only, in Romanian, French, etc), that's probably the reason.
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?
> I didn't thought of that as a special power. I thought it was natural, like driving a car, or speaking English.
You’re clearly taking for granted any learnt skills which you have and projecting them to others. A substantial portion of the world population can’t speak English, and I suspect the grand majority of humans don’t know how to drive a car either.
I know you have to turn the wheel to turn the car and that I should keep to the right, but that doesn’t count as actually knowing how to properly operate a car.
I'm going to assume good faith on your part. OP is using analogy as a rhetorical device, using things in their own life that would be recognizable and transferable to others. When he says its like "speaking English", it is because he speaks English, but it can be understood that any non-English natives would insert their own mother tongue. 88% of European households and 92% of US households own at least one car. Driving, as something that once learned you take for granted since you do it pretty much daily, is something most people can related to. Even those that cant, are probably intimately familiar with those that do. It isn't something exotic and specialized, like airline pilot or submarine crewmember.
If I say "its like finding out someone ate the last of your favorite candy", it is meant to analogize a feeling of disappointment. If you personally don't like candy, I would expect that you have the ability to understand the meaning and intent and not focus on how the analogy doesn't perfectly align with your individual personal experiences and preferences. If you want to complain about how some cultures don't really eat candy, while others focus on collective sharing over individual ownership, I suppose you can.
OP clearly (to borrow your choice of word) wants to express that they thought people simply learn how to find information by simply using a search engine over time, just like you can become proficient in other activities by repeatedly doing them; and they gave some examples that many people here can relate to as such. I don't think OP wanted to offend anyone who doesn't know how to drive a car, or suggest that everybody should be able to.
So, yeah, things are not always that clear. That's why it's so useful to give people the benefit of a charitable interpretation of their words by default.
The examples OP chose are actually excellent: both of those activities require deliberate practice and years of training (education) and people who don't do either of those suck at them.
Think of the average person you know that had terrible results in middle school and high school or of the average driver, that thinks he's better than 80% of drivers out there.
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.
It absolutely is. I fear for the older generations and less tech minded people who google their bank, and get some random phishing site. Or similarly google what should be libre software and get some random malware on a site that looks 'close enough'.
Lets call it what it is, a cancer, one that literally enables countless bad actors and purely for a search engine's own profit. In theory theres a time and place for ads, but maliciously inline and disguised as the actual results people want arent it.
It's already happened to an elderly family member who was trying to troubleshoot a printer problem. The top results were 1-800 hotlines run by scammers looking to get remote access to their machine to "fix" the issue. Google has hordes of these companies padding their pockets and won't lift a finger to remove them.
As my parents get older, I worry more about this.
Are there any good, easy-to-understand resources for spotting and avoiding phishing scams and such things for non-tech audiences?
The only real difference that matters between a fake site and a real site is that the information on it is genuine, the form doesn't really factor into it. Which makes this a very tricky problem: You can't tell if the data is genuine before you have the genuine data.
Domain names is how you do this reliably. This is why everyone should use a password manager. It makes phishing much, much harder to do.
There are no best practices for domain names, there's nothing that can differentiate between NPM and a fraudster from hosting "npmjs.help".
It also doesn't help when you have to visit a new domain for the first time, which tends to be the case when looking up novel information.
If you're trying to do something for the first time with a big company, you usually know the domain name. Like Google is google.com. Or for something like your bank, it'll be printed on your credit card.
My parents were highly computer literate and taught me how to use them growing up. These days they can barely even send emails and spend 30-60 minutes looking for files that are either on their desktop, download folder or in Recent Documents menu in Word/Excel. At some point in the aging process computer skills are one of those things that seem to go.
I don't think they go at all, I think software development is just bad all around. Almost all software is really, really bad and we just put up with it or are used to it.
Most software does not value consistency or UX maintenance AT ALL.
What I mean is, a lot of those older programs arguably had much better user interfaces in terms of usability. More contrast, more text instead of glyphs, and often still simpler.
UI is like fashion, it changes because change is good. Not because those particular changes are good.
Compare Windows 11 and 7, or XP, or even in a lot of ways 95. What's the prettier experience? 11, I guess. But which one doesn't make me scream at the computer? Not 11.
But it's not just Microsoft, Apple does it too. We throw away literal YEARS of user understanding and memory for nothing. Users get tired over time. They can't keep up, nobody can, and it gets frustrating when things just get worse and worse over time.
Searching for official manufacturer manuals/user guides for appliances is also another goldmine for third-parties.
But they deserve it when the manufacturer has one of those enterprisey sites where you need to go through 10 searches to maybe reach your manual, when the 3rd party site just shows it directly.
Not really, and the third-party sites almost never show the PDF directly without first trying to harvest your email or phone number or subscribe you to spam, sometimes they try to steer you towards unaffiliated 800 numbers tricking you that those are associated with the manufacturer, sometimes they bundle the download of manufacturer's PDF with malware, browser cleaner app installers etc.
Sometimes the third-party sites are helpful and benign, sometimes they are merely spammers trying to upsell you, occasionally they are malicious.
Agreed, the manufacturer site behavior is also annoying.
Most web-usage is happening on mobile, and ad-blockers are less common there. So, younger generation is pretty much living through the ads constantly.
Yup. For reference, on Android your best bet is to install Firefox + uBlock Origin. On iOS, I believe Kagi's Orion has built-in content blockers but you can also install uBlock Origin [1].
[1] https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ublock-origin...
Brave is excellent on Android. I watch YouTube all the time with literally zero ads ever.
Brave is a series scam company.
On iOS, Safari has some basic ad blocking capabilities, and beyond that there's AdGuard.
As far as alternative browsers go, Vivaldi also has an integrated ad blocker.
What's odd is that the search engines, youtube, etc. get to claim the impartiality towards content applies to "impartiality" towards ads. I am younger, and I still almost got scammed trying to find a phone number to call a travel booking site. I called the number shown on Google, and they wanted to "verify my account" and triggered an email verification code. Only at the last minute did I realize it was an account takeover attempt. But that isn't Google perpetuating a crime?
Happened to my father who got routed through ads on his phone while booking flight tickets to some seedy website. He regretted it but thankfully got refunds initiated successfully because of issues with the flights themselves and a lot of back-and-forth. He resolved to only do critical monetary operations on his laptop where I've installed any and every possible adblocker.
The web is so hostile to the inform and the old. It takes one moment of weakness and there's someone ready and waiting with a scam.
My bank replaced it's banktown.com url with b-twn.com, I thought I was on a phishing site, but it's legitimate.
Not just the older generation. I can’t get my adult children to care about ad blockers.
It already happened to my friend, and they’re not so old. Some people typed WhatsApp to their search bar and was brought to a phishing site instead.
Oh wait it happened to me as well. Fortunately it was phishing a recruitment site and all they got is my CV.
You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid, or if you don't want to use search results from Bing's index, I've been very happy with Brave Search.
I agree about DDG, but I find Kagi worth paying for.
Unfortunately Kagi partners with Yandex https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
Why do we not like Yandex?
For me personally the issue is that some of my money would go to Yandex, and, by extension, to Russian government. I understand it is only a symbolic amount per user, but still, for me, this is unacceptable (I was a happy Kagi subscriber before I found out about this).
America is nearly as bad as Russia. Dollars paid to American companies are taxed and used to bomb children in Gaza. Are you boycotting all American companies?
From my point of view United States, all things considered, is not nearly as bad as Russia. I do not boycott all American companies but I do boycott some.
Also, funding Russia directly funds their WW3 in Ukraine. (As does Trump, but in a less efficient way.)
A very valuable service for its price.
Also translate.kagi.com is much better than Google’s one.
For translation, a good one is DeepL.
For translation, just pick your chatbot of choice. LLMs fail at many things, but as translators they are very good.
I used it until I found Kagi one.
there's also bing, which does not cost money to use.
I have been using Kagi for about a month now. Haven't had any desire during that time to go back to Google. Solid search engine!
Can you give some example queries where Kagi performs better than Google? I've tried it a few times and found it to be nothing special.
people say that but they often come back to Google ;)
I've just learnt to use ad blockers. the only time I disable it is when I look up the definition of something or the location of a place and the entire page goes blank because of some rules I've added to uBlock.
I haven't used Google (apart from their as-of-yet undefeated image search, the occasional hard link from a web page, and the two times I tried the Circle to Search feature) for at least five years now and I have zero interest in going back.
> people say that but they often come back to Google ;)
The thing is that Google is actively becoming more hostile and difficult to use. Not just Google Search, but really all their products.
They're becoming Facebook, slowly but surely. Something we might be forced to use now and again, but nobody actually likes.
The reality is that Google is such a poorly run company that they will destroy their own products, given enough time. Their competitors need to do nothing. Literally nothing.
> people say that but they often come back to Google ;)
It used to be the case.
One of my laptop is setup with default DDG and the rare times I switch back to google I'm disappointed by even worse results.
DuckDuckGo falls hard in quality when it comes to queries which are not in English. The only search engines who are good for those are Google and Kagi, in my opinion.
Duck Duck Go is consistently worse than Google Search in, see https://www.tumblr.com/ddgvsggl
It's solid, I use it 95% of the time, that 5% Google usually still disappoints.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=midjourney&ia=web -> Hmm, midjourney the AI thingy is not even there for me! Just https://www.midjourney.com which is not really clear on what it is. Midjourney is at Midjourney.online, which is not even on the first page. So Argualbly Google is still better. What a world.
Btw, I search DDG from the Firefox bar, and that does not let me copy the URL anymore!!! Wtf. There is just the search term, like there is in the field below it!! Omg, now I have the same thing twice, and a useful thing has been lost.
> I search DDG from the Firefox bar, and that does not let me copy the URL anymore
Yeah, I just noticed too. Go to Settings->Search there's a checkbox just below the default search engine. Uncheck that. Should be something along the lines of "Show search terms in the address bar in search results" (sorry for any errors in the translation, my browser's language is not English).
Erm, I'm fairly confident Midjourney.com is what you're talking about?
https://www.midjourney.com/explore?tab=video_top
Midjourney.online doesn't show up on either platform for me on the first page.
> You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid
The only people who would say that are people who would be better off just asking ChatGPT.
Any nuanced search that isnt some encyclopedic fact is terrible on DDG.
I agree somewhat, but those searches are getting less and less good on Google though.
In my recent experience, I'm far better off asking ChatGPT or just using it through Bing/Copilot than what I used to do a decade ago, which was deep dives through 5 pages of long-tail search results.
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.
We can absolutely expect Google to be a gatekeeper for advertisements they run on their platform. These aren't just middlemen, they're scams.
We shouldn't just be used to Google being allowed to essentially run infinite scams. Remember, they directly profit off the scams.
Its like if I had a billboard and then let someone put an ad up that said "give me all your money and you'll live forever!"
Am I off the hook? Why, lil ole me? I just run the billboard!
You might then say, well, obviously looking at every ad you accept is far too onerous! Its not like a billboard, because the billboard owner must see all the ads!
Which then I would reply - why is Google entitled to a business model like that? If they can't reasonable run their business in an ethical way... Perhaps they shouldn't run it all.
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
Last time i had to get a visa through these kind of channels, it looked almost deliberate. Outright bribing is now frowned upon, so they make the visa process as frustrating and opaque as possible. So that people have to either waste several days at the embassy, or go through one of those visa agencies instead. You pay for a totally legit above-the-table service, but it is effectively a "socially accepted bribe". And the administrative problem magically disappears.
Yes, it's the same everywhere. In any country with byzantine and convoluted visa and immigration procedures (i.e. most of them) there's a thriving industry of people who will eat the turds for you for a fee.
>If you tried middle-manning any for-profit like that,
I think that is called affiliate marketing.
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 Origin [1]. You know, the one that allows companies to PAY to have their ads whitelisted.
This doesn't even cover browsing on a smartphone which unless you're running Android Firefox which supports browser extensions, you have very few options.
[1] Notice I said uBlock Origin and NOT uBlock.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
Because the average person looking for an adblocker searches for "adblock". And they're supposed to know the difference between uBlock and UBO?
> 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.
The FBI agrees with you: https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-b...
No, the previous admin's FBI did [0]. But then that alert page (on ic3.gov, Internet Crime Complaint Center) was taken down almost immediately after the 11/2024 election, before even the director was replaced. I genuinely expected this sort of basic alert should remain non-partisan.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241008235322/https://www.ic3.g...
(at minimum, a search for "ad blocker" on ic3.gov should turn up some authoritative and useful advice page, not a random jumble of articles and press releases)
Indeed. I got my credit card phished after buying tickets from an 'official' local museum website, it was the first result on Google. Later on I realized that all five top results were scam sites, the real one was 6th. They eventually fixed it.
Let's be more precise about what ads actually are, based on how the ad industry works today: malware
They always were. Remember IE toolbars? Java and Acrobat bundled software?
Yes, we called them adware and lumped them in with email worms.
We should go back to that.
Plus when you click on one, they show you more! So the risk snowballs
All of the ad links are broken by our firewall at work. People complain but eventually they learn to skip the ads. Absolutely a security risk, search ads are second only to phishing emails as a threat vector.
Absolutely. I cannot use anything online anymore without pihole + ublock
Adblockers are a safety risk of their own - you’re giving @gorhill admin-level access to your browser.
This is the entire argument for manifest V3. So, if we believe this argument, then modern chromium derivatives should be safe with the ad blockers that run on them.
V3 still allows for extensions that have full access to the content of your websites, and obviously adblockers need to be in this category to function at all.
You can check the source code.
I’ve started asking ChatGPT to give me the right link. I can’t imagine they won’t start embedding ads too but so far, it’s been pretty clean.
That seems risky because of hallucinations. Wouldn't Google+Adblock be a better call?
Having it hallucinate a valid url that is spoofing the site I’m looking for feels less likely than someone managing to game SEO. Eclipse is a good example: the first result in Google is eclipseide.org, not eclipse.org.
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.
"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.
Can you in principle sue people buying these ads for trademark infringement? (I realize in practice the answer is that it's not worth the game of whack-a-mole.)
Where is the trademark infringement? It's like honda buying an advert outside a VW dealership.
The trademark infringement is when their ad includes someone else's trademark.
Look at the screenshot in this post. All four of the ads at the top of the search results include the trademarked name "Midjourney" in the title of the ad.
This is more like putting up a giant sign outside of your Honda dealership saying "Best deals on new VWs!" but when you pull in they don't sell VWs, they sell their own competing products.
Some players circumvent this by creating "blog posts" where they compare/about multiple tools. Like it is a fair use but in reality is an ad in disguise.
Oh right. thats quite common! Pretty sneaky if you ask me
No, it's like searching for the location of a VW dealership on your phone and Google Maps taking you to an Honda one instead.
No, it’s more like a billboard saying, “looking for a Honda? ᶠᵒʳᵈˢ ᵃʳᵉ ᵇᵉᵗᵗᵉʳ ᵃⁿᵈ ʸᵒᵘ ᶜᵃⁿ ᵍᵉᵗ ᵗʰᵉᵐ here!
No, this is more like Honda putting a portal in front of the main door of the VW dealership that transports people into their showroom instead.
This is not allowed and the advertisers are on borrowed time: https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en
You can bid on competitor's keywords, but not use their trademarked name in the copy, especially not in a deliberately confusing way.
But I don't think Google moderates this very proactively.
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 days, so I directionally agree even though I can't reproduce this issue. Still, it's interesting to see how much our searches differ. I can't imagine what algorithm in Google decided to give me great results and you trash.
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 alternatives triggered.
This is kinda like Amazon retargeting you with alternative toasters after you just bought a new toaster. Most people think this is stupid. Well, the most likely cohort to buy a new toaster is a person that just bought one because they’re not satisfied with their purchase.
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.
they still have to pay to stock, ship, then return and restock the shitty one - then stock and ship the better one. Hard to imagine there’s profit in that.
IDK about most people but I rarely bother to return a cheap broken item. It's just not worth my time. I'd just grumble and replace it (but probably not from the same seller).
>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.
That's insane. Someone searching for something they've searched for in the past is looking for stability of the search results; they're trying to get back to where they've been before. If they wanted different results, they'd change the search query.
Is this the "logic" behind Google and Youtube search results being different each time a query is run?
> This is kinda like Amazon retargeting you with alternative toasters after you just bought a new toaster. Most people think this is stupid. Well, the most likely cohort to buy a new toaster is a person that just bought one because they’re not satisfied with their purchase.
I don't think that makes sense. The goal of Amazon can't be to have you unhappy with shopping on Amazon, if for no other reason that returns cost money.
Interesting hypothesis, but I am also a Midjourney user.
Let me try to answer in an ELI5 fashion:
You know how you can ask ChatGPT the same thing 3x in a row and get 3 completely different results? Google's basically the same and has been for a long time.
If you and me both ask for something hyper-specific, we'll see the same results. But the more generic the search term is, the more hyper-personalised it gets.
In some ways it makes sense, for example we shouldn't see the same thing when we search for "restaurants" as we're unlikely to be looking for restaurants on the other side of the world, in many other ways it's annoying and counter-productive.
I oversimplified. :) Main gist is that SERPs are personalized and based on your targeting profile which makes the results non-deterministic, as we're experiencing. Google is the only entity who will ever truly know.
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.
Yes, I see something similar for the query "Midjourney": 4 sponsored results from Deevid, Artlist.io, Lovart, Pollo AI (see the screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/ESM3xtJ)
Finally Midjourney. Unlike in the article I have never visited Midjourney.
It was number 1 when using the "Web" link, it was also the number 1 when I clicked "all"
Not sure why they get very different result.
Historically. If you are logged in you get better results. I got no ads when logged in. Not logged in I got 8 ad links in total before the real site.
Another repro:
https://imgur.com/a/ZNtA0rI
That's when you are not logged into Google, they will show some organic results before the ads.
I searched on DDG, first result was www.midjourney.com the second result was the Wikipedia article about midjourney.
That's pretty similar to what I see on Google
1. Actually website
2. Subreddit
3. Wikipedia
Same. On an android browser, not signed into any Google accounts. Got the legitimate result at the very top.
Just tried on my own on google, I get the Midjourney official site on 1 result, followed by Wikipedia about Midjourney. I am not a midjourney user.
Seriously, all I get is Midjourney links and links to midjourney official accounts on a number of other platforms
Going incognito, the first link is a sponsored ad for... midjourney
[flagged]
here's my repro: https://imgur.com/a/p0wBgWy
In a "private session" tab I'm getting on the first page:
- the official site - their subreddit - their Discord server - Wikipedia - Facebook - LinkedIn
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.
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%.
Kudos for Kagi. I stopped using Google and gladly pay Kagi for search to not show advertisements or junk.
If Kagi ever starts showing ads to me, a paying customer, I'll ditch it too. If I get the feeling that Kagi is selling my search history, I'll ditch it too.
Keep being awesome, Kagi CEO
This. Kagi is absolutely awesome.
I pay for Kagi so that I'm not being peddled ads or junk when I'm trying to be productive, as my ADHD-riddled brain can get easily distracted. It gets quite upsetting when I've wasted non-trivial amounts of time on those distractions that I subconsciously fall into.
I absolutely cannot use Google because of their seemingly endless attempts to distract me from what I'm searching for.
The final nail in the coffin was their actions to get rid of uBlock and other effective ad-blockers. It's a serious anti-pattern, and (I strongly argue) is effectively discrimination for those who struggle with ADHD.
I hope that Kagi can one day effectively filter out GenAI slop websites that look like legitimate content, but I can understand the significant technical challenges in such a feature.
Hey freediver,
I bought a kagi shirt in the initial batch, got it, and then after one wash it unraveled. Your support team was great and gave me a coupon for a replacement shirt, which I ordered, yet it never shipped. Could I get that shirt :D
Today is the day you find out whether you're the 1% of the 1%!
I give a shirt! Contact support@kagi.com until you get it.
We're finally going to find out if he gives a shirt!
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?
> Does Kagi have a better localized experience?
I'm in India and it works well. I can even search in Hindi and get good results.
The only thing that doesn't work are local points of interests (restaurants, hotels, local businesses, etc). I still have to use Google Maps to look these up. Then again, even Apple doesn't have good local results for PoIs in India, so I don't expect Kagi to get this right either.
That said, I often turn off localized results completely and just use the international results. Those tend to be more diverse and more useful, at least for the sort of searches I tend to do.
I really like Kagi for this reason, the ability to choose whether I want "international" results or localized to a country (and choose the country, sometimes it's not mine).
I agree that for very localized results (not at country level but city level), I still use Google instead.
I once had weird results with searching specifically in the Switzerland region, it didn't find an obviously Swiss site. IIRC it was solved it by switching back to international search. I'm using Kagi exclusively, and I don't remember having such trouble recently. Maybe they fixed it.
I just did a quick test: local search for a specific law term. Kagi, Google and DDG all found the roughly same relevant sites in the top five. Each has a different top result. Google's and DDG's are a private law company. Kagi's first is an official government site. (With a suspicious non-government domain, so I had to check, but yes it's prominently linked from the main government site.)
Might depend a bit on your desired experience. I find Google to be too aggressively localized, where (from Canada) I’ll search for (made up example) e.g. “Eiffel Tower” and instead of the results that I’d want to be #1 and #2 (wikipedia and toureiffel.paris), I’ll get (after a pile of ads) “JimBob’s Eiffel Towel Of French Fries”, “kid builds scale model of Eiffel Tower for local science fair” and some tour company offering Eiffel Tower tours.
Native Asian, bouncing between Taiwan and Japan. Kagi works quite well for these two locales. Even for gov docs, medical docs, and for some rather obscure Taiwanese language things.
Well, except for local shops and pois in Taiwan. Which is reasonable. Google map also sucks for less-populated Taiwanese areas. I kind of have to rely on my good old legs for that.
As a non-US-ian, yes, it does, for search.
There's also a handy country dropdown if you ever want to localize to somewhere else, although I rarely need this, since it's smart enough to eg. show "tokyo hotels" even if your country is somewhere else.
You'll still need Google Maps though.
Seems fine here in Australia, though I tend to use global results.
Works fine in AU settings too.
It's not as good as google at knowing where you are (gee I wonder why) but if I search Bahn Mi <my town> the results as good as google. Results for something niche like "Keycaps" are showing lots of local results too (or as local as you can get living outside a capital city in Australia).
I find Kagi pretty good - I'm UK based.
I upgraded my phone a few days back and when search defaulted back to Google I realised how worthwhile my subscription is.
It's not all perfect, for instance I would love to figure out how to stop all map searches sticking with them: sorry Google is just lightyears ahead there so I'd always prefer that. But generally they're about the right amount of customisability.
The killer feature for me is being able to bury sites so you never ever get results from them ever again and to slightly bump up/down results for particular reasons (your own, not due to someone else paying an ad placement fee!)
Yeah I’ve just set any search starting with !m to redirect to google maps. It’s in the custom search settings somewhere.
I also find Kagi good in the UK - it wasn’t amazing when I first subscribed but got a lot better quite fast. I do occasionally add “uk” to a search when shopping but I did that on Google too.
Just curious, are you wondering about location-specific results ("best restaurants"), country-specific results ("how to do my taxes"), or language-specific results ("pasos de división larga")?
I mostly search in Swedish when searching for Swedish topics and DDG is usually awful for that.
Yeah, location specific and country specific. Like if I'm looking for a product, I want results from local shops, not from eBay/Amazon/etc.
I'm in Singapore and Kagi is great. Been using it for a couple fo years now.
Works very well in the UK. Local news, government websites, etc.
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.
That’s my issue too, as a Brazilian. For anything more localized, Google is the only choice that has usable results. I leave DDG as my default engine and intentionally go to Google only when I need something that’s more “Brazilian context”.
...and pricing.
And we thank you for it! I've been a paying customer for about a year now and I can't remember the last time I purposefully used Google search.
Kagi is so good
And, relatedly, only 1% complain because they make complaining hard. This is why analytics driven decision making can backfire!
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.
Maybe another company will take over at time. Why does one company have to stay perfect and on top of game for eternity?
I love many of the companies I use and work with... but I'm always on the lookout for a backup plan if one gets greedy. Companies are not loyal to their consumers, we should never make the mistake of providing loyalty to corporations.
Kagi is great though, for now! :D
It's really us who have to change our mindset about companies. It's foolish to expect them to retain the quality or purported ideology they claimed to have when they were trying to win customers, after they reach a point where they can exploit and extract money and suppress choice and competition. A CEO will say anything now and might even mean it, but it's empty words really, and not even their choice in the long run.
We have to not get attached to companies, and not get the idea that they care or have feelings of good or evil. They are tools, like a hammer, or a stapler. A stapler isn't evil if it mashes up all the staples into a tangled mess. It's just broken. You don't mourn a broken stapler, eventually tools just wear out. You throw it out and get a new one. Corporations are the same, McKinsification / enshitification / etc are a part of their natural lifecycle, you should expect that and just switch to a different tool that actually works.
Observationally, Google search and Kagi are fundamentally different business models.
Google followed/trailblazed the "enshitification" arc of providing a free service that sees widespread adoption by the public, and then financially exploiting the widespread adoption by leveraging usage of the service to serve ads like in the screenshot.
Kagi is a subscription service you pay for and they generate their best effort at an ideal service for you using the money you gave them.
The Google model of providing a free service sort of requires that it be enshitified in order to close the circle on the business case. Reliance on VC money in this model is likely a further aggravating factor to aggressively exploit usage of the service once widespread adoption is achieved.
The Kagi model has an opposite pressure, where if it tries to exploit adoption of the service in a way that users don't appreciate, users will simply abandon their subscription, putting a core revenue stream the business has built itself around at risk.
Is it possible for Kagi or a business like that to become shitty? Sure, a new manager that misunderstands core realities can show up anywhere and ruin the business, or sagging business financials could require VC injection which then pressures further financial extractions from uses. But the structural pressures on a Kagi-style model certainly seem to steer it in the right direction when Google's structural model invariably steered it into something that becomes less pleasant than we all initially knew.
The real difference is market dominance. If Kagi was the dominant search engine used by 90% of all users, they could enshittify while still collecting subscription, and while that would lose them some users, it would still be profitable when everything is added up.
It's even worse for niches where there's some way to lock people in. E.g. look at streaming providers - everyone has either rolled out ads on paid plans or is planning to do so. Why? Because if you happen to have X as an exclusive in your catalog, then people who want to see X either have to suck it up or else figure out how to pirate it without getting caught.
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 customers).
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.
One possibility is becoming ad supported in the future, though.
"If the service is free, you are the product."
Kagi is unlikely to ever be as popular as Google. Free is always more popular.
Luckily popularity contest is not our goal. Just making a good service that serves the needs of those who appreciate it.
"How will you fight the inevitable slide that happens if you ever got on top?".
Don't get too greedy. There must be examples... 37Signals?
"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 above all else, but many big ones do. Ignoring what incentives (and disincentives) are put on a business drive it's behavior. If you want something contrary to those incentives, you need to change those pressures or you're doomed to be disappointed.
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.
Valve is arguably a good example
Valve is also of course a privately held company.
Maybe B corporations?
Outside of the tech world, Unilever is one of the worst mega-companies in basically everything they do.
Yet, their ANZ branch is certified since 2022: https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/find-a-b-corp/company/uni...
B Corp enshitified itself, trying to get bigger, instead of staying true to its (supposed) mission
For anyone else wondering, there's an extensive list on Wikipedia. Many of the entries are really significant, though this one stands out the most to me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unilever#Trade_in_Russia_amid_...
And we are very grateful
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Curious for context on your last comment, I clicked your username:
user created 10 minutes ago • karma: -1
Is this your 12th account, Mr. Green?
Yeah but you're now filling up Hackernews threads with advertising, so.... same evil?
When I search for "midjourney" without an adblocker a bunch of times, I'm getting:
- No ads, with correct midjourney.com as the top result, about half the time
- A legit ad for midjourney.com with the title "Your Imagination, Unlocked", the other half the time. It's the only ad, and the correct midjourney.com is also still directly below it as the first organic result
So both seem fine for me. I've never seen ads on Google with the kind of formatting shown by OP either.
Obviously everybody's search experience is different, based on geography, profile, who else is running ads for those keywords, Google runs different formatting experiences as A/B testing, etc.
I am highly suspicious tech markets do not see realistic average Google behavior for whatever reason. The pervasive belief in tech that Google Search is even passable suggests people in the Valley or even Austin aren't getting the experience most people do.
I recall a Googler once suggesting to me that Googlers seeing ads might look like ad fraud to advertisers, so I'm not positive Googlers dogfood how bad this is either.
> I recall a Googler once suggesting to me that Googlers seeing ads might look like ad fraud to advertisers, so I'm not positive Googlers dogfood how bad this is either.
I wonder what Google execs do - like I really have a hard time imagining them using Google search as it currently exists. Is there some kind of special internal flag that just gets rid of ads for their accounts?
I'd go as far to guess that the tech-literate people (who would be both less susceptible to clicking on enshitified links and more likely to report or discuss them) have, somewhere in their tracked-data-portfolio, a "don't serve too much garbage to this person, they aren't gullible and they'll tell people we're serving garbage" setting.
Apologies for the weird grammar.
It's certainly possible, and maybe not even maliciously: Advertisers are refining their targeting to get clicks, the best advertisers will only annoy people likely to click an ad. The problem with giant algorithmic platforms is often things go off the rails simply due to nobody at the helm understanding what the platform is doing anymore.
It's quite possible that the ads also got taken down, as they were against google ads' policies.
Tech companies routinely monitor social media like HN to take action.
You don't fall into any desirable demographic for targeting apparently, or you've never leaked enough info about you that would signify you as desirable.
In other words, nobody is bidding to reach your eyeballs specifically.
This could be a market inefficiency. OR, it could be you're actually a terrible lead for midjourney-type products, and the market is working correctly.
Were you logged in or logged out when you ran the searches?
Firefox on my phone I got midjourney.com as the first result
Weird
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.
I showed Kagi to my partner yesterday and she instantly became addicted to it.
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.
I'm old enough to remember when a big selling point of Google was that it didn't do this.
Had to dig up this link, 1999 review[0]:
"Google (www.google.com) is a pure search engine - no weather, no news feed, no links to sponsors, no ads, no distractions, no portal litter. Nothing but a fast-loading search site. Reward them with a visit."
[0] https://i.redd.it/uea6u7c4oje31.jpg
That didn't last long till they added paid results but at least they highlighted the paid results from the organic results... Those were they days when they used to have the motto of not being Evil. Accordingly, now, they are.
Yeah, I remember the long slow fade-out of the colored boxes the ads occupied. They went from like, pastel orange and green boxes, to lighter boxes, to even lighter boxes, to no boxes at all with the word Ad in a little symbol, to the way it is today where you have "Sponsored" on a different line than the ad, and you have to scroll below the fold to even see the first organic result, if there even is one, and only 2-5 organic results are even shown by default. And also of course in the mix, the AI Overview made up from I assume a handful of the spammy results being thrown through the cheapest, smallest model possible and summarized.
>they used to have the motto of not being Evil
They still do have it.
...at the very end of Google's Code of Conduct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil
How did they make any money at all without ads?
Because I was alive back then:
This was the venture funding "we're a startup era". And Google succeeded eventually.
But in that era making money didn't matter. It was just about grabbing market space. And oh boy did they succeed.
But all bills become due eventually. Stock holders start demanding continuing increasing profit and that eventually leads to the downfall of any good product.
> Stock holders start demanding continuing increasing profit and that eventually leads to the downfall of any good product.
Don't blame ordinary shareholders here! The original founders still hold a majority of decision making power (I think via super voting shares).
they didn't - hence the ads
It's a very common story in industry. You start nimble, and disrupt bloated platforms. Then, as you grow, pressure grows and you also bloat. Then new company comes that brings nimble product and disrupt you.
Search, TV->internet video, newspapers->internet - all of them go through those cycles.
You forgot the main source of pressure: you sell off equity in your company in exchange for cash. The buyers are buying the promise of future profits. At first, you still hold the vast majority of the voting rights, but over time you sell more and more and expectations rise and rise.
Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
Hence a page full of ads, and no reason to think things will ever change.
Is that the reason Steam is still loved by users? (not sure how long that’ll last tho)
I think the fact that Valve is still a private corp is a big part of it, yes. It allows for continued ownership by people who have meaningful beliefs of what it means to do something the Right Way and who run the business accordingly. This isn't to say that private corps are always "good" like that - the temptation to go for easy pickings and enshittify is always there. But some owners at least won't do that for various reasons, while a public company seems to always end up chasing short-term profits above everything else.
Google's original founders still hold the majority of votes.
> Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
Amazon's history shows that public shareholders can be very patient with cash being returned to them, or the company ever showing a profit at all. Tesla used to be in the same boat.
Shareholders are very forward looking. They just don't necessarily trust 'visionary managers' not be full of bullshit. Probably rightly so.
>purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
I see this constantly repeated in anti-capitalist/anti-corporate rhetoric, but on the other side, shareholder meetings, finance conferences, financial service talks, no one ever wants this. Maybe the 20 year old stock bros on discord pumping penny stocks, but no serious shareholder of any company with a name you might recognize.
It happens, there are cases of it, but overwhelmingly the vibe is "long term stable profit generation".
If shareholders didn't want it, then they wouldn't appoint (or keep in place) the top management that repeatedly and consistently makes those choices.
Look at the recent Microsoft layoffs. They purged the company of so much tech talent, and tanked morale for basically all the remaining workers. From any kind of long term perspective this is madness. Yet they were rewarded for it by the stock market.
Shareholders may not want it, but management usually does want to make it look like they had a great quarter.
I think it's a mistake to think of these cycles as inevitable, and that it's guaranteed that some small fry will disrupt the current giants. Yes, they may have happened in the past, but large companies are much more cognizant of the cycles of disruption now than they were 30 or 40 years ago. Microsoft was a behemoth in the late 80s and they're currently number 2 market cap in the world. Many folks on this board may be too young to remember Netscape's boast of "The Browser is the OS" in the mid 90s - well, Netscape is long gone and Microsoft is still giant. Only 2 years ago you saw pronouncements that OpenAI was going to be the death knell for Google, and it was it seemed to be the kick in the pants that Google needed to get their AI story working. Facebook just basically bought all its nascent competition (Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.)
I think disrupting large players will be much harder than it was it the past.
These cycles have been going on a lot longer than the last 40 years. Everything eventually dies.
Rome used to rule the world; sure it took about a thousand years, but it ultimately didn't last.
I fully accept the heat death of the universe will eventually take down Microsoft, but I don't think that's what the comment I was responding to was really about.
My point was that this cycle is not a recent thing, but has been present all throughout history. Bell labs fell. The hudson bay company fell. Arthur Andersen fell. All these were much more entrenched than microsoft is today. I'm not suggesting you have to wait for the heat death of the universe.
Don't worry. Our legislators around the world are hard working so this doesn't happen again, protecting us from harmful contents and cementing current industry leaders' position.
> protecting us from harmful contents
In Soviet Russia government protects harmful contents from us!
Used to be. Now the megacorp just buys the disrupting platform
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Can you imagine a more effective way to incentivise more people to start even more disrupting platforms? Can you image a more effective way to get investors to give money to these upstarts?
It's much easier to get your rabble-rousing startup to threaten disruption (and then be bought up as a precaution), than if you had to actually battle it out in the marketplace to the bitter end.
It's a bad thing for the rest of us, because it means that all those platforms don't actually disrupt anything at the end of the day, and we have to keep eating the same turds.
You get way more of these new platforms popping up. And some of the might not get bought up in time. (And the wealth of the incumbent ain't infinite, so there's a limit to how many they can buy up.)
Most revolutions are merely power transfers.
But sometimes the incumbent crushes the revolutionary.
And sometimes the incumbent hires or bribes the revolutionary.
And sometimes the incumbent guts the revolutionary and wears his face as a mask.
I think there’s a middle ground between not making any money by not showing ads and plastering half the page with ads in a way that almost renders the product useless. I’m sure this was a result of a long list of promo packets that incrementally kept adding 0.01% increases to the ad impressions.
Just one facet of what we call 'promotion oriented programming' (or promotion oriented design).
Google's promotion guidelines used to include that if you want to get a promotion on a technical track, you have to demonstrate a mastery of complexity. Cue the unnecessary complexity in some projects meant to get the author promoted.
(They might still include that requirement. I don't know. I haven't worked at Google in nearly a decade.)
Google managed to dance the knife edge there for a lot longer than most though. AdWords made so much money in a fairly unobtrusive way, that they were able to scale it out without pissing a lot of people off. That and it was actually even sometimes useful.
They clearly decided to just say "fuck it" though. Sometime after Ruth Porat replaced Patrick Pichette and especially after Sundar took the helm (both happened while I worked there) but most especially in the last 3 years.
Wouldn't it be nice if some companies instead of ramping up ads for revenue passed along the value to consumers? Once they made their money back on the original investments convert to a lifestyle and provide a valuable product without squeezing every penny our of it and in the end killing it. One day maybe.
They did pass on a lot of value to consumers. They used their profits to grow, build Gmail, buy and grow YouTube, build Android.
Just running Google as-is without ads would have produced less value in the long run. Plus the SEO tide (which relied on DoubleClick ads that weren't yet owned by Google) began to rise and would've drowned Google Search much earlier if they hadn't grown.
Where I think Google took the bad (for consumers) turn was when they purchased DoubleClick and began to consolidate the entire ad business. Instead of losing money to SEO spammers, they began to make money. This put Google into a conflict of interest against their own users. Ever since then they've been piling onto that conflict of interest, draining more and more value from their products.
I feel like you'd need a new corporate structure or something, like the way an S-corp is different, but on steroids.
Because I agree, the forced obsession with "growth" at all costs, which seems necessary to operate a public company (at least in this century[1]), is imho the #1 reason why enshittification is unavoidable.
[1] I'd describe nearly all present-day corporations as fixated on quarterly results even at the expense of business viability. Something I truly don't understand is why big companies say, 75 years ago seem to have been so much less that way. If anyone has any theories I'd love to hear them.
Google's customers are advertisers.
People overwhelmingly prefer ad-supported to subscription supported. Google would be a dramatically better service if everyone who used it paid. I really, really, cannot overstate that.
The internet sucks because users feel entitled to everything on it for free. They don't want ads and they don't want to pay subscriptions. uBlock origin, archive.is, and constant complaining about how the content sucks.
The internet is full of children with a naive understanding of how things work. The are so deluded that they even call on companies to simply provide them everything for free if they want to be "successful".
Google has almost $100 billion in cash reserves right now. Big tech together has over $1 trillion in cash - that's in the ballpark of the GDP of the top 20 countries.
The notion that Internet sucks because megacorps have to scrounge for cash doesn't pass the most basic smell test.
The problem is who wants to be CEO of that? How many people do you know are simultaneously voracious enough to want to be the CEO of something and also totally chill and down to just have a lifestyle business? How many people do you know would take a salary of $5 million/year and just keep working the same job? Pretty sure almost everyone I know would do that for maybe two years and then quit and retire. Companies doesn't want that. So that leaves us with the kind of people that would take that salary and keep at it. The reason CEOs are different kinds of people from the rest of us is that it stopped being about the money for them a long time ago. It's not not about the money, but after getting enough money for your own lifetime and several other people's, why keep working? Not everyone is cut out for it. Be the change you want to see in the world. Claw your way up to the c-suite and then run the company how you see fit. Just don't let that climb change you so that you no longer want to run it as a lifestyle business.
Well Google has been a very good example of not giving into that pressure for a very long time. Their landing page remained ad free for decades and their revenue came from sponsored links through ad-words which was a minimally invasive ad strategy which didn't show banners etc.
For values of decades close to one.
I've already grown to hate the very words "nimble" and "disrupt".
The term for this is “enshittification”
"Always two there are, the disrupted and the disruptor."
I remember being clever at school and showing off that if you typed "nukes" it would display an advert for ebay down the right-side. "Buy Nukes on EBay".
...and what did those eBay hits look like, back then? Real (books/films/tshirts/sings about nukes?), scam or unrelated?
They had plenty of success with the ads that didn't disrupt the main results until they decided that search results didn't matter and selling their users to malware was more profitable.
For many years they were very profitable, with great search results and good quality ads.
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 that go to taxes plus mandatory social work by its owners/executives.
> instead they got greedier and greedier and made their product worse once they captured most of the market
I wouldn't necessarily put it that way because not Google, nor any company, has moral capacity. They don't have souls. What they do have are incentive structures, and those flip when the stock goes public.
Pre-IPO: the board is mostly founders and VCs holding paper wealth. Their shares aren't liquid, so the only way they get paid is by making the pie way bigger for some future exit. That means "grow, grow, grow." and that means playing nice with customers.
Post-IPO: the board is legally stuffed with "independent" directors, whose pay comes in RSUs tied to the stock price. Now the shares are instantly tradable, and shareholders who can bail in a quarter want to see results in a quarter. Directors translate that into exec comp, and suddenly management's job is "make the stock go up right now."
Some theorists point out the obvious hack: take away the hot potato. Slow the game down. Make shares harder to flip, make earnings less frequent. If you could only trade stock once a year, you'd actually care what the company looks like in a year. If they only reported results annually, you'd be forced to think in years, not quarters.
Upside: management can focus on products and customers instead of quarterly guidance theater. Downside: investors hate being locked up, and capital gets more expensive because people price in that illiquidity. Transparency drops, execs get more room to bullshit.
It's a tradeoff: you can have maximum liquidity and hyper-efficient capital markets, but then you get short-term brain damage. Or you can slow the game down, but then you're basically asking people to trust managers more and accept worse capital efficiency.
Nobody;s found the perfect middle yet. LTSE[1] tried, dual-class shares are a kludge, and otherwise we just live with the cycle: grow like crazy private, IPO, then spend the rest of your corporate life addicted to quarterly earnings.
1. https://ltse.com/
In the old days, companies were valued on their expected dividend. Share prices didn't move that much, and trading shares took time and had fees attached. You could speculate on share price moves, and people did, but the primary source of income from holding shares was dividends.
Now it's the other way around. The primary source of gains from owing shares is speculation on the share price. Dividends are mostly ignored.
The result of this is that share prices move not on "how well is the company likely to do?" but on "what do we think the share price will do in the next couple of months (at most) [0]?". It all becomes hype and rumour and speculation. Shareholders only care about the price, so boards are incentivised to only care about the price. And so on down. Generating hype about what the company is going to do becomes more important than actually doing it (I exaggerate, but not by much). This then leads to the short-term-ism that we see, and the hot potato effect.
I think the answer would be to tax speculative profits. If you sell something for more than you bought it for, the government takes a cut. Specifically remove this from income tax calculations, because they have way too many loopholes, and make it more like VAT/GST; a tax payable at the point of the transaction. This would reduce the profits from speculation, and hopefully move the emphasis back onto dividends and longer-term thinking.
[0] and obviously, for some privileged traders, the next couple of milliseconds
While the importance of dividends has waned, we should still mention buybacks and liquidation. They still exist and buybacks especially are an important part of delivering shareholder value. Apple is a great example of returning about 4 times more in buybacks than dividends.
How would you feel about tax-disadvantaging buybacks?
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 I don't think it's a place we want to go to. I suspect it'll be further concentration of capital into fewer hands. To the extreme, we end up with all the large companies doing this becoming effectively private, owned by a small group of folks rich enough to keep their holdings while everyone else sells out during the buybacks. That's not good.
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/06/computer-says-huh/
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.org/wiki/Stock_split might blow your mind.
> To the extreme, we end up with all the large companies doing this becoming effectively private, owned by a small group of folks rich enough to keep their holdings while everyone else sells out during the buybacks. That's not good.
You can tell your broker to automatically re-invest dividends for you.
Similarly, if you just don't sell when there's a buyback, you own more of the company afterwards. No one is forced to sell.
Btw, most companies (including Apple and Google) keep issuing shares to employees. Buying back some of them in the open market is just an indirect roundabout way of essentially handing employees cash.
> 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.
Thanks for the explanation.
How is any of that fraud? Fraud doesn't just mean you have to disagree with something someone does, but you have to have been lied to.
> 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.
Companies can and should adjust the incentives so that the effect of dividends and buybacks are the same for the executive. (They already adjust for share splits for example.)
> 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).
Before you buy any shares, you should check what management says about their plans. At least, if you have specific expectations.
Even if buybacks were outlawed, companies aren't guaranteed to pay dividends. It's perfectly legal to never make a profit, or to give all your excess money to charity. You just have to tell your shareholders.
> 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.
Yeah, that's a stupid objection.
The substantial first half of it would equally well apply to dividends. (And the whole point of giving money to companies as an investor is that eventually you are getting more back.)
The second half is just not how any of this works. Does he even know what a wash trade is? And what's 'artificial' about this?
I can tell why Mr. Docotorow is a sci-fi author and not a finance guy.
This is like listening to RFK talk about medicine.
By comparison, Neal Stephenson is much better about this stuff. His Baroque cycle is a treat.
Buybacks and dividends are financially equivalent. They give money from the company to shareholders. The incentives are exactly the same for all parties involved, too.
Their only material difference is in taxes. Yes, I am in favour of putting dividends and buy backs on the same tax footing, just in the name of simplicity. And while you are at it, also put dividends and interest payments on the same tax footing.
At the moment, many jurisdictions advantage interest payments, thus encourage financing companies with debt instead of equity. And then they awkwardly pair it with other rules that try to tell companies (especially financial companies like banks) not to use so much debt, not to be so levered.
> Some theorists point out the obvious hack: take away the hot potato. Slow the game down. Make shares harder to flip, make earnings less frequent. If you could only trade stock once a year, you'd actually care what the company looks like in a year. If they only reported results annually, you'd be forced to think in years, not quarters.
Google's original founders still hold the majority of voting rights.
Making trading less efficient wouldn't change anything here.
> It's a tradeoff: you can have maximum liquidity and hyper-efficient capital markets, but then you get short-term brain damage. Or you can slow the game down, but then you're basically asking people to trust managers more and accept worse capital efficiency.
No, your proposal wouldn't work at all.
A big problem is actually that most managers in most companies mostly work for themselves. It's called a 'principal/agent problem'.
Exactly as you say 'execs get more room to bullshit.'
Btw, there's private equity funds with very long capital lock-ups. Their effects on companies typically aren't loved by the people who voice similar concerns to yours.
Not all places even have minimum wage laws.
In any case, good luck designing your system in such a way that's (A) not trivial to bypass, and (B) doesn't gut the economy.
As a customer (and worker and investor) you have to vote with your feet and wallet to show the market what you want and don't want in your companies.
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
AT&T eventually gave up and agreed to divest of the RBOCs because they didn't like their chances with the regulators. Imagine a Big Tech company having so little faith today in their ability to manipulate the government between lobbying, campaign contributions, and the most modern and economical play, stroking the President's ego.
Biden's FTC chair tried her best, but it didn't go anywhere because she had no support and Trump put an end to it. But both sides amirite?
1999, $25 million investment: https://googlepress.blogspot.com/1999/06/google-receives-25-...
2000, launched ads: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ads
2001, profitable: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2001/aug/08/internetn...
The same way any tech company works now: use investor money to offer things for free or unrealistically cheap until you corner the market, and once your competitors are no longer relevant you start milking every buck you can.
They licensed the engine for a while. Yahoo Search was powered by Google, for example.
They didn't. That was the whole "Step 2 ???? Step 3 Profit" era.
Someone once asked Facebook the same thing.
It seems the only things certain in this industry are death, tax, ads, and graphics cards.
Volume.
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 stops going up, they're gonna have a harder time hiring and retaining talent.
In a way, it's the employees holding the company hostage. They're simultaneously complaining about innocence lost and stating their implicit preference for this outcome by demanding top-of-the-line comp.
If you want to be paid the same as at Microsoft or Facebook, you become Microsoft or Facebook.
>Going public gave Google a lot of nearly-free money to grow, and it's how you've gotten both Gmail
Gmail launched in April 2004, and the company went public in August 2004, so what you said is not literally true.
> and Google+
Thanks for the chuckle.
If they only had successful products, that would be a sign that they didn't innovate enough.
If you innovate manically, you get Google Wave and Google+ amongst good products.
(However, this doesn't work in the other direction: having a few duds doesn't prove that you are innovative.)
> 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.
Case in point: Valve
The problem is, some of us do have a habit of asking our search engine for the weather. And we ruin it for the rest of you.
I thought Google always had ads, but at first they were clearly marked and always relevant?
Edit: I stand corrected. Ads were added later, but when first introduced they were clearly marked. I got my history wrong.
Nope, there were no ads at the beginning. It was a big deal when they announced AdWords. And the ads were unobtrusive and often quite useful at the beginning.
Google was quite vocal about clearly marking ads, in contrast to Overture, Yahoo, and others who mixed ads into search results in the late 90s / early 2000s. I think the period when Google lightened, then entirely removed the colored background that made it easy to identify ads was an inflection point in their fall from being a company that genuinely focused on users towards becoming just another megacorp run by profit-maximizing MBAs.
No, they had no ads for several years. AdWords were introduced in 02000, at which point Google had existed (initially as google.stanford.edu) for four years, since 01996, which was 40% of the amount of time the Web had even existed. I started using Google in probably 01998, when people on Slashdot got excited about how much better their search quality was than AltaVista, but it probably wasn't until 01999 that I switched over completely—at first AltaVista still had better coverage.
Why the leading zeros on year numbers?
So that you ask yourself "Why the leading zeros on year numbers?"
If you like Brian Eno it engaged his curiosity also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_07003:_Bell_Studies_fo...
So you'd know that they're octal.
... With 8s and 9s in them?
Just for fun.
Nope. The slope has been slippery, but way back at the top of it there were zero ads on the page.
Not at the very beginning. But when they first added ads, they were clearly marked in the top with a yellow background (and they didn't take over the whole page), and on the righthand column (and they were clearly marked as sponsored links).
I'd have to dredge it up but someone put up a site that showed the visual changes to ads over the past 15 years, and they've become more and more indistinguishable from organic search results, and they've taken over more of the page.
A great visual history of enshittification, and also how "growth at all costs" capitalism leads to that enshittification. Google was still taking in money hand over fist in the mid 00s when they had a few, clearly marked ads, but capitalism demands the line arcs upwards no matter what.
My memory says that wasn't such a big selling point. When Google first came out it blew all other search engines away in terms of result quality.
If, back then, Yahoo and Altavista were minimalist and Google was a garish nightmare of ads and flashing gifs and nested banners and affiliate buttons, I would still have happily used it for the results.
Google's search interface is still reasonably clean IMO. Nowhere near its minimal best. Yes there are ads and "sponsored results" and shopping frames and all that crap, but they really aren't everything that's wrong with Google Search.
Quality of results and inability to specify queries beyond vague suggestions are the worst things.
I don’t have an image to prove it, but I remember google making it a point and bragging of having clearly differentiated ads (in pale yellow I think?).
It was a big contrast and a signal of classy goodwill, back in the age of replicating popups and garish blinking text.
Exactly this. I remember when it was just a couple small links in a yellow banner you could scroll past. Same with YouTube, the ads used to just be a banner under or beside the video but didn't interfere with the main content. Once the ads got invasive, I installed ublock and haven't looked back. I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about that.
For Google, the ads used to be on the right side. It was a big deal when they made you start scrolling past them.
Of course it was the quality of the search results thanks to the algorithm (Page Rank) that at the time was unmatched and amazingly resilient, compared to the competition, against the primitive SEO tactics of the day (key word spamming etc.).
However, the lean interface without blinkentags and ads was definitely a selling point. Also, IIRC, the guarantee that you'd only get sites that actually contained all the words in your search query (that feature is long gone, too, of course).
I guess it depends how you define "selling point" exactly.
The interface and speed were great, no doubt. Did you ever encounter another search engine that produced similar or better results that you otherwise would have used, but Google's interface sold you? I never did, so it wasn't a selling point for me.
There was a time when google's search web page was under 16kb.
Speed. Altavista, Dogpile, Metacrawler and the rest were slow, and Google felt instant.
For me at least, it wasn't that either. It was the quality of the results.
I would have put up with slow bloated adware Google results of early 2000s, compared to fast minimal sleek interface with results of Yahoo/Altavista/anything else I tried.
The results were good. I remember admitting that for many things I really could have used 'I'm Feeling Lucky' and bypass the SERP entirely, but I disliked relinquishing that much control, so I never made a habit of it. Today I don't think I could trust it much of the time.
Are you just re-emphasizing your point? I was trying to point out another differentiator that many people commented on at the time.
I'm not sure what you are unclear about, but yes I was re-emphasizing my point for you.
There were lots of "differentiators" that did not really matter, including speed. The differentiator was result quality, not how or when they were presented.
Yes. Altavista and Metacrawler worked really well. Google managed to be just a little bit leaner and faster still. They probably did start to have a bigger index at some point, though.
Yeah, the results were really that much better than any other engine. The fast minimalist design was also a selling point, though.
Straight from the horse's mouth:
> ..."we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
- "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page[1]
They weren't wrong!
[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Even when they first turned on ads, it was arguably a net win. I worked AdWords tech-support 2005-2008, and sat in on the “Ads Quality” core team meeting.
They basically had this big money dial, and rather than crank it to 11, they were fiercely protective of the core user experience.
They kept ads mostly to the side (unobtrusive), only served them on queries where there was a high probability of commercial intent, and only promoted ads above organic results if the predicted CTR was extremely high.
I remember being delighted more than once when the ad system surfaced the product I wanted when organic results did not.
Now…? You get all spam above the fold.
The Ads Quality PM back then was Nick Fox, who I just learned became SVP for ads and search last year. Which means he is at least indirectly responsible for the OP. Not entirely sure what to make of that.
Wasn’t that the era where all the big money ads were for strange diseases?
“Mesothelioma” had a $50+ cost-per-click for winning the ad auction.
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
I remember when Google Maps allowed you to enter "*" as the only search term, and you'd see every business in the area. Not just a portion of those who had paid for placement. Those were the days...
I also am old enough to remember when their motto was "Don't be evil."
Which has been doublespeak from day one.
I knew larry and sergei socially when they were grad students. I completely believe that when they started that was a genuine sentiment. I wonder at what point they realized personally that that was gone
Google's motto used to be 'Don't be evil'. They've since deleted the first two words.
Just the first word.
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)
lol, I meant a different search engine. This is awesome though, you’re definitely helping those kids out a lot. You should think about giving them sudo and making them manage the upgrade themselves too though, to push them into learning more. A 7yo might be able to handle that but 10+ definitely.
With what kind of assurance that history won't repeat itself? If anything, the rate at which companies enshittify has increased. Instead of taking 10 years now it takes more like 3 (or less).
Life is change. Sometimes that’s worth fighting for and sometimes it’s worth fighting against. Is the current Google worth that battle for you? I’d rather see what comes next.
Maybe there’s something else to support instead of enshittifying companies.
Google should be fearful for how easy it was to replace them entirely with Kagi, and how little I miss it.
And yet they always knew that ad-supported business is going mean enshittification. Kagi website has this epic quote from the original Google paper to drive the point home:
"The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
— The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998
WDYM "selling point"? It was us, users, who have always been sold.
Yes, things change. In fact, change is basically the only thing you can confidently predict.
There also has been a drastic change in YouTube search in the past year. It used to be that search would be logical, you search for a specific string and you can go through pages of videos that matchup to that. Now it at least feels like they have completely mixed that original search with a some sort of ranked preference of what they think I want to see. It’s a shame and an actual huge downgrade.
Try searching something and sorting results by most recent. If you then change the upload date filter (e.g. from 'this month' to 'last hour') you'll get completely different results...
YouTube search will also only show you maybe 10 videos relevant to your search terms and then just give you random videos it wants you to watch that have little or nothing to do with your original search.
Yes! This is exactly it and at least for me the change happened sometime in the last year. I often look at real estate online in Vietnam and a year ago I could scroll through pages of houses, now I get a handful of somewhat relevant videos and then it’s cirque videos. It’s wild how bad it is.
Reminds me of how they blew up the rabbit hole of next videos long ago. I remember long long ago, my favorite part was the next video queued up after watching a video. You would go down these wild rabbit holes of videos that got ever more specific. Now it’s the same issue with search a bunch of unrelated videos recommended for watching next.
Its like tiktok search but way less awful.
Whatever you search, doesn't matter, it's just people dancing.
You want a recipe for chickpea soup? How about people dancing instead is that good?
A similar thing happens when you search “Canada eTA” — a $7 (required) entry visa the government typically issues instantly. But on Google, several sponsored sites appear above the gov site, and charge $100+ for the same service but slower, and they do god knows what with your passport details and personal data.
There are tons of other examples like this. It’s very easy to get tricked by Google ads if you aren’t suspecting a scam.
There's no AI preview in that screenshot, so it's not everything that's wrong with Google Search.
Yeah, I was waiting for an actual 9 headed hydra of crap, featuring:
* a whole page of sponsored-yet-indistinguishable-from-organic results
* a confidently incorrect AI snippet
* the below-the-fold top organic results being all content spam
* the first actually relevant result from a reputable source being then paywalled with a "you ran out of stories for this month" overlay on a website I have never browsed in a year
* the 2nd actually relevant result prompting a "login with google" overlay with prefilled identity that gets clicked by accident 20% of the time
* all of the above in a Chrome browser, requiring a quadruple opt-out before allowing you to use GMail without also starting a browser-wide session to keep track of your every keystroke
* or alternatively an app based mobile interface where links can't be copied and pasted to prevent loss of tracking
* something with AMP
This is not even close to everything that is wrong, if anything it should be called "barely the tip of the iceberg of everything that is wrong".
In their defense it does feature a bunch of other invisible things (lack of cached results, lack of direct links you can obtain with a right click, etc)
search: "coffee is mostly water"
"No, coffee is not mostly water. That appears to be a misconception based on a popular television show. Coffee is actually about 98% water."
> the pool of the Titanic is still full
No, the swimming pool on the Titanic is not full of water. The pool is empty due to the ship's sinking and the immense pressure at the depth where the Titanic lies. The pressure would crush any voids within the ship, and the base of the pool cracked as the ship sank, letting out the water.
Here's a more detailed explanation:
Pressure and Depth: The Titanic lies at a depth of 12,500 feet (3,800 meters). At this depth, the water pressure is immense, exerting thousands of pounds per square inch. This pressure would crush any enclosed spaces, including the swimming pool.
Sinking and Damage: The Titanic began to sink, the base of the pool cracked, and all the water escaped.
No Time to Refill: The crew was focused on evacuating passengers and didn't have time to refill the pool before the ship sank.
Deterioration: The ship has also deteriorated over time, further contributing to the loss of any remaining water in the pool.
- on the other hand -
> is the pool of the titanic still filled with water? why?
Yes, the swimming pool on the Titanic is still filled with water. It's thought that the pool was filled with water when the ship was contracted to be built, and that the contract to fill it didn't expire just because the ship sank. The pool is located far away from the main damage caused by the iceberg impact and is also separated by watertight doors from other areas of the ship.
While the exact reason for the pool remaining full is not definitively known, it's believed to be a combination of the ship's structural integrity in that area and the fact that the pool was designed to be watertight.
While the pool remains filled, it's worth noting that the Titanic's hull is deteriorating due to underwater bacteria, and the ship is predicted to collapse within the next few decades, potentially releasing the water from the pool.
Interesting. I did this google search and i get this:
"Yes, coffee is predominantly water , with a standard cup of brewed coffee being about 98% water and the remaining 1-2% being solids like caffeine and antioxidants. Because water forms the vast majority of coffee, its quality is crucial for a good cup and it contributes to your daily fluid intake"
Yeah, it was just a creative example of the type of awful AI responses search engines, including Google, give. It tends to contradict what you say, push everything towards useless and inoffensive "there are many complicated factors" analysis, and even contradict itself.
My favorite one thus far has been:
> was there a US president named Bob, Robert, or who went by either?
> No U.S. president has ever gone by Bob or Robert as their common or official name. The closest case is James A. Garfield (20th president), whose full name was James Abram Garfield — no Robert in there
Why is James A. Garfield the closest???? What metric are we using for this comparison, lol
"Yes, coffee is mostly water, with standard black coffee consisting of about 98% to 99% water..."
I'm not using an ad blocker; when I search for Midjourney on Google the real thing is my first result; I don't even see any sponsored content. Not sure what's happening for OP.
(Please don't read this as a defense of Google on the whole.)
Piggybacking on to provide a screenshot since I also see no sponsored content and Midjourney is my #1 result, well above the fold.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/Oxo4FJl.png
Same here, though for me the second result is the Midjourney Discord rather than Reddit.
But I'm in Europe. Perhaps that affects results? I wouldn't be surprised if the Google experience were more ad-heavy in low-consumer-protection nations.
This is exactly what I see with adblock turned on. When turned off, the first two results are ads.
I don't use any adblockers. The results are also the same for me whether I'm logged in or not.
I get the same results as Op, but on mobile, where there are 4 sponsors above the link. It’s about two screen scrolls to the real result.
When I search it I see the same thing as OP.
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/hlF6OoU
> I'm not using an ad blocker
How do you tolerate the web without an ad blocker?
I use an ad blocker on my personal machine, but corporate doesn't let me install random software and is mostly used for HN, so it's fine ;)
by buying everything that appears?
Mine has one sponsored link which is just a course for midjourney. But I don't doubt at all that the OP post is real. This stuff is all dynamically generated. There is probably even some AI deciding how many ads you'll put up with.
Ideally Google would offer some kind of ad free option, perhaps on a higher tier of the Google One plans.
With uBlock off, I get two sponsored ads, and the real site is nearly pushed below the fold: https://i.imgur.com/AkVbvSI.png
Geo targeting or other targeting signals play a role in this
odd, I also don't see any sponsored content any longer for any search whereas I definitely remember seeing what OP has for other searches. But I also now see a tab for AI mode next to ALL which is new... but I also switched to DDG a while ago
I was searching for a specific library for Python the other day, and Google kept pushing me to 'Top 10 Python Courses!' articles or giant comparison boxes for products I didn't need. It has decided that whenever I type a technical query, what I really want is to buy something or sign up for a newsletter.
The moment the algorithm switched from trying to understand 'what information does this user need?' to 'how can we make money off this user right now?' is the moment search broke for anyone doing actual development work. We're now filtering through commercial noise just to find the docs.
Relevant (800 comment!) 2024 HN discussion on how we got here with Google Search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
When I tried, I got the expected midjourney site first up. I'm logged in to Chrome in case that matters.
For comparison DDG gave me the site as third link, which only just made the bottom of the screen.
DDG often gives me useless Ebay links which remind me of the early days of search.
Perhaps these single data points are useless?
I haven't used google in years and didn't realize it was this bad. How are they able to keep their market position?
Market momentum probably. People "Google" things. People don't "Kagi" things or "DuckDuckGo" things.
I question why Instagram is so popular. I don't use it but my wife does and she constantly runs into errors and bugs. It's a multi billion dollar company and suffers from the sort of issues that beta software does.
They got to their position first, got the market share and then enshittifed from there.
I just started paying for Kagi. I'll use them as long as they stay ad free, which seems part of their core selling point.
ChatGPT is next: https://sources.news/p/openai-ads-leader-sam-altman-memo-sta...
That's not my experience at all: https://i.imgur.com/JXAJMNh.png
Searching for Midjourney finds Midjourney with direct links to sections of their website. uBlock Origin blocks ads. All is well.
They seem to classify users in a way that puts technically-proficient users in a separate class to regular users.
One class receives a more traditional experience.
The other receives whatever they're currently pushing. For example, my Dad's Gmail has a much higher "ad email" : "real email" ratio than mine. Also, the styling of an "ad email" line is far more subtle than what I receive.
I checked with my technical friends. They all receive similar experiences to what I do. But my parents and other people I help with their personal tech receive the ad-heavy version.
My conspiracy theory is that they're trying to detect journalists, lawmakers, regulators, and more, in an attempt to avoid being forced to push ads less aggressively.
Too bad I cannot zoom into the image in my phone. Even tapping on it does not enable me to really see it much larger.
Android Firefox and its various forks (I use Waterfox) have a setting that allows zoom on all sites.
I "open image in a new tab" and can then pinch to zoom in the new tab, too.
You can usually force enable zoom in browser accessibility settings.
Yep. Its a shit website, talking about a shittier website.
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.
> What has Google been doing all this time?
Making money hand over fist. Not to say that's necessarily related to quality or morality, it's just been their focus.
Mine looks slightly similar: my top result is the Wikipedia page for Midjourney.
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.
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?
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...
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.
Much appreciated! I shall investigate. :)
Serenity, thanks.
So what's crazy about this is that I remember, when I first joined Google in 2011, that they were particularly proud of how people would just stop using URLs and use Google to navigate. So people would type "amazon" to get to Amazon.com instead of actually typing out `amazon.com`, or using a bookmark or directory etc. And they wanted to keep search at a quality that would continue to get people to do that. And later the fear with mobile becoming ascendant was that people would stop using search in this way, etc.
But it looks like they just keep giving people more and more reason to... not do that.
These guys warned us about this sort of thing.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf
Appendix A. Page 18.
Lol hilarious to read that now. Damn.
For what it's worth, when you view a Google search results page, part of the page is populated by ads (results come from the Google Ads teams) and part of it by search results (results come from the Google Search team, and unaffected by anything to do with ads).
The post points out a problem with the fraction that is allocated to Ads, but pretty sure that's not "everything that's wrong with Google Search" (if true, it would actually be an endorsement of the quality of the organic search results, which I doubt is the intent).
Not really, its just a condemnation of the amalgamation which is unable to be perceived as different from the user - it shits on the organic search in their mind and anyone saying "well our search is still good!" is completely missing the point.
Remember that Goole is not a public service. It is a business.
It has two (or more) customers with different needs. For now, google needs to satisfy us (the users), but not delight.
I'll be honest....
I'm puzzled why OP did a web-search (i.e. used a business to find) 'midjourny' rather than simply entering the known URL.
How times change.
Do you bother to remember known URL's?
Is it midjourney.ai or midjourney.com?
Is my health plan oscar.com or oscarhealth.com?
Repeat ad infinitum.
I have better things to spend my brain power on remembering. Fortunately, my browser will autocomplete the URLs for sites I frequently use, but a lot of sites I want to visit for the first time.
Throw in the fact that known bad actors will purchase common typos of domains like this and potentially setup websites to fish for credentials or push malware and it's something best avoided.
It’s likely that Google has tested how many ads it can place in search results before users lose patience and turn elsewhere.
On paper, the approach makes sense: push profitability as far as possible. But in practice, it can leave customers feeling squeezed and resentful, much like the increasingly nickel‑and‑dimed atmosphere visitors now complain about in Las Vegas, and the proliferation of tip screens.
Yes its purely economics and profit maximizing behaviour from Google.
Marginal benefit vs Marginal cost.
It becomes even sadder when Google caters to political propaganda of any kind, from any party or country, if the price is right. I wish Google realized how much greater and more beneficial the product and company are to the people who use them than all of that. I am not naïve -I understand they need to profit- but perhaps they are focusing on short term gains while introducing this poor user experience, which will eventually lead to major losses.
Google searches days are numbered. But the older generation will probably use it for the rest of their lives.
Like broadcast TV.
Kagi is worth every penny.
If I may offer a devil's advocate perspective.
I just googled Toyota Highlander (my car) and the ad in the search results is "please consider the Honda Pilot."
Now it's unlikely that I am shopping for a midsized SUV and am not aware of the major competitors, but squinting that away for a second - if I am searching for a car I think I want and Google informs me of a perfectly viable alternative that might be cheaper or better in some other way that can have a huge positive impact on my life. So in this case I am obviously aware of Honda but an ad for one of the Korean or domestic makers I hadn't considered could be useful.
Similarly if I am Google midjourney as in the article because I heard that somewhere and Google positions for me potential cheaper/better alternatives as ads - that's not a terrible thing and you could say hits at the best usecase of an ad - making me aware of an alternative solution to a problem I have that's driving my search to begin with.
I obviously don't feel this way about the majority of ads I see but when it "hits right" it's really useful
Fair point, but I'd argue that "Google informed [you] of a perfectly viable alternative that might be cheaper" isn't what happened. What happened is "Google offered you Honda first, for no other reason than Honda paid them money to do so".
If you squint they may look like the same thing, but their subtle difference is important. One is a tool suggesting "Hey I see you're trying to do A, but I think B might also fit your needs", and the other is "You want A? Ok, I'll eventually point you towards A, but only after you consume this message from our sponsor."
Google's not genuinely thinking "Hey this will help the user more!" and building that into their tool - it's an ad platform that mimics being helpful, in the name of growing profits.
(That's fine for them to do btw; They're a company and they need to make money somehow.)
Okay, then show those ads to people who google “midsize SUV” or “AI image generator”, not people who google the specific product by brand name. Sending people who google “midjourney” to competitors’ websites makes as much sense as sending people who google “midsize SUV” to bicycle websites: the user already made their preference very clear.
> If I may offer a devil's advocate perspective.
The devil doesn't need advocates. https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3145446/the-devil-doesnt-ne...
There are clear and obvious ways to show advertisements without making those advertisements look like top search results. You know this. Google knows this. There's no reason for anyone to pretend otherwise.
Well, sure, one tries to live by the board game geeks bushido, but we're not all perfect.
Talk about a philosophy!
"I'm a neo marxist" , "Oh, I lean more towards @DragonsDream personally."
In my view a lot of this hinges on how well the results are identified as ads, and whether they’re vectors of fraud.
I’m not inherently opposed to ads that are relevant to a user’s search query, but I am opposed to watering down their visual differentiation until they look just like regular search results. Once upon a time Google put ads on a yellow background labelled “Ads”. Now they’re “Sponsored results” and they look mostly identical to the rest. This is simply not about providing interesting and relevant alternatives, but about tricking the user into clicking the ad so Google can charge the advertiser.
What I truly can’t abide, though, is the volume of fraudulent and malicious advertising circulating their network. Given Google’s $100 billion profit in 2024, the amount of fake/scam versions of real websites that they allow to appear in search ads, or deepfake Elon Musk bitcoin giveaways they allow in YouTube prerolls is a calculated choice, not an inability or lack of resources to prevent it. At the end of the day it would eat into their profit if they were to make it harder to post deceptive ads.
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 are not necessarily squatting. Such as if my product is an integration of the tool. Many brand names are just basic words. Many brand names are very similar in SMBs.
But you can't use another company's trademark in your headline or adtext. Using another companies name is asking to get your ads taken down and lead to an account ban.
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.
> You don't get to exclude every advertiser from any random search string just because you have a domain name with it.
To my understanding, Google keywords are already semantic. It's not that it shows ads because it can't tell that the string is a specific product name - it's showing ads because it determined that string to be referring to Midjourney (the entity in Google's knowledge graph).
> There are many reasons to bid on brand names that are not necessarily squatting.
Google is a leader in AI - I feel they could very easily filter out these blatantly misleading ad campaigns, while keeping "legitimate" ones, if they didn't have financial incentive to turn a blind eye and have more people fooled into clicking ads.
Google got misled by the term mid journey so, it put the result mid page :)
An interesting search term that, at least for me, always returns the four top results as sponsored is "web hosting": https://www.google.com/search?q=web+hosting
Also, searching for "netcup", I got two sponsored cloud services before seeing "https://www.netcup.com/": https://www.google.com/search?q=netcup
It is a business model problem, not Google’s problem. When it is easy to stand out by paying money, it will always become trash
My first result is midjourney.com. I so often see people criticizing Google search but I never see the negative with my own eyes. Whenever I search I get what I want or need.
Google Search must be highly personalized, and I don't know what I'm doing right but clearly my personalization is working.
Edit: Oh I realize now it's the sponsored results they're complaining about. Well that's just greedy. I mean, you haven't paid a cent for Google Search since 1998? And you just expect them to do everything for free.
I happen to not see the sponsored results right now, maybe because of uBlock, or chance, but even if I do see them I don't mind them at all. Poor Sundar Pichai has to keep the lights on somehow.
I have been using an ad blocker for a long time and K didn't even know there was the sponsored ads feature
Author has never ran startup on the internet. For past 15-20 years, if you have competitors you have to bid-buy top ad slot from Google. That’s hundreds or thousands of dollars monthly.
Midjourney don’t do that because they are doing good with new signups without it.
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 identified that users are most likely unable to type the full URL into a browser and uses this opportunity to display some advertising. As my retirement investment holds a small amount of ETFs that would own google shares, yay for me. Thank you for not typing .com
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.
I think people need to keep repeating this until they make sense of it.
- Google is in the business of selling online advertising.
- Google is in the business of selling online advertising.
- Google is in the business of selling online advertising.
- Google is in the business of selling online advertising.
...
The tech stuff? AH its just stuff they offer so they can do the above more efficiently and effectively.
Thats it. It seems many either cant see the truth or dont want it to be so.
You can try with https://www.google.com/search?q=midjurny
My superpower is mispealing even trivial words, Google autocorrect them, but most of the time there are no ads :)
The problem in the post is even worst with YouTube, because Google adds allow to show http://example.com/sale?utm=123456789&crap=987654321 as http://example.com This is not a problem in most business sites, but in YouTube it allows any user to impersonate the main page.
Look up "Hacker News". Some days this site isn't even on the front page.
At least it was on the first page. I just searched for Midjourney on the iPhone App Store. It put 2 other results first. Each result is about 2/3rds the height of the screen meaning the actual "midjourney" result was a screen and a half down, so off the screen.
I just got good first page hits and ranking for a search for "midjourney", but it looks like Midjourney is paying for 2 Sponsored spots on the first page, even though the user searched exactly for Midjourney's well-known brand name.
https://i.imgur.com/u025ZaU.png
On a search for exactly this particular well-known and fairly unique brand name, I think probably midjourney.com should've been the first hit, as a freebie, without needing to buy ads. (Either that, or the second hit, and the Wikipedia entry as the first.)
(Incidentally, it felt a bit retro not to get the usual clutter of AI/infoboxes/etc. at the top of the page this time.)
I found it mildly amusing that when I googled for jlcpcb recently, pcbway showed up before them in the google results. I still don't really know if there is any meaningful difference between the two companies
I searched on my work browser, on my personal browser, on the phone (mobile + desktop page) and in all cases I use the link to midjourney.com first.
The spirit of the question I can subscribe to though: too many ads on top of the results these days.
While many see it as a problem, kagi.com sees it as an opportunity.
I use an ad blocker, so I don't worry about sponsored links for fake products appearing above genuine ones. Also, this isn't just a Google problem; Bing has it too. My issue with Google is that it includes YouTube results in the main search results even though there's a separate Videos tab.
We can have the plain old good Google search results page back on by default. It works by making the "Web" tab the default. Tested on Firefox and it works great. No extension needed. Instructions in the topmost comment of this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ctk95k/comment/l4...
I don't have a problem with this in general, I do have a problem when they deceive users, which happens often. If I search for Amazon and get Temu ad - that's OK. But often when I search for X they will show sponsored results that pretend to be that X. This is esp true with apps on their play store, which is something fairly new. I barely use Google Search these days so don't know how bad it is with search.
This is a pattern you see often. A product gets to a point where it's hard to grow revenue as the market expects, so the company does everything they can to squeeze more revenue.
It’s been like that for years. Just stop using it along with other Google-services, their products are unsafe dogshit, their earning model is to sell you and your privacy, not make great products.
I use several search engines (Brave, duckduck) to find stuff along with different AI-models (outside the browser, I disable the browser ones). This way I have at least some semblance of control of my information and no one company controls everything. Something like Google or Microsoft shouldn’t even exist.
I remember a company saying its most effective ads were search ads for their own name.. like what midjourney does
https://postimg.cc/8JwL9WFx
> I remember a company saying its most effective ads were search ads for their own name
I don't have the full context, but this is almost a tautology. Of course you get the highest click-through-rate and highest conversion for searches that are your own name. You usually also get a relatively cheap bid, because most search engines prefer to prioritize relevant results, and you will be very relevant for your own name. But you would have gotten most of those clicks and conversion _for free_ even if you didn't advertise on your name, because the searcher would see your organic result. Advertising on your own name is defensive, not offensive -- you protect customers that are already yours, you don't get new ones.
source: I run marketing for a small business, we advertise on our own name too, and of course it is also the most effective if you calculate it naively.
I stopped using Google because I'd quickly search something, click the first link then, like Wiley Coyote, slowly realize I'd run straight off a cliff.
I can't believe that's what their standard is now.
It's even worse on mobile. For some searches the first real, normal, webpage link can be two or three full page scrolls down from the top.
My key complaint (in addition to the one cited in TA) is that, if there is a wikipedia article related to what I'm searching for, I want that at the top of the results. Maybe above, or possibly right below, the link to midjourney.com. Maybe others don't see the value in that, but Google has had literally a quarter of a century to figure out what I want, and hasn't yet learned that.
This is why Kagi exists.
the sponsored results looks like you are in an ads experiment since this really isn't how it typically displays
Kagi. Worth every penny. Become the customer and it all gets better.
Use it long enough and you will subconsciously train yourself to ignore the first 2-3 results. I don't think it's wrong, it's just how ads work.
I wonder what this does to all the people that type even known URLs into Google instead of the location bar to go to that URL. You know, people like my parents.
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.
To be fair, DDG sometimes is just as bad.
For example, if I search for "anonbib"[1] it shows nothing but revenge porn links[2].
[1] https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/anon-ib-revenge-porn-site-se...
Turn on the adblocker if you don't want ads?
This is how my google search looks in chrome with ublock lite https://imgur.com/a/GrXP77y
Maybe some percentage of users will select a crap alternative product because they show an ad above your thing but I bet it's a minority.
I made the mistake of agreeing to undertaking that I would not use the trademarked brandname of one of my competitors' keyuwords in our Google ads bidding. Talking with a lawyer after the fact, I learnt that we can freely use the keywords but agreeing to the undertaking is a more serious and legally binding corporate promise. Now they are bidding on my brand names but we can't bid on them. So, I do agree Google search sucks, heh.
Why did you agree to this without it being mutual?
Possibly part of an agreement to avoid a lawsuit. I think Dropbox and Box had a similar arrangement, because their names are so similar and they do exactly the same things.
Ideally, searching once for 'midjourney' would mean getting the url to directly access it time and again (and, create a bookmark). Perhaps the issue is more on the business model, rather than the effectivness of search offered by Google.
What is search anyway (not being flippant!)? Its quite an odd 'thing' really these days.
I stopped using Google when it started discriminating against browsers without JS recently, and it looks like I'm not missing much. Is stuffing ads in your face this "better experience" that sites are always trying to beg you to enable JS for?
Incidentally, Bing's first two results for "midjourney" are the official site, followed by the Wikipedia page.
This makes me sad because I’m old enough to remember when I left Altavista/Lycos/Yahoo for Google because of the obnoxious sponsored search results.
If it's any consolation, these companies paying for ads on a competitor's brand name are probably paying through the nose to get clicks that only bounce. IF it's worth it at all, it's probably temporary. It's an indicator that market share is still up for grabs.
I see an opportunity for someone who can code. Make a website that tabulates search results for common terms. Listing the position of the desired search hit could be the ‘veracity score’ and allow users to assess the distortion field of each search engine
Probably not the first comment to this end, but I have been using Kagi for the last few months and it’s good. Past attempts to use other search engines didn’t last long because of search quality but Kagi is good enough as long as I don’t expect local results, which is a fine tradeoff.
I wouldn't characterize that as "everything" that's wrong. It is at least one thing.
How much of this is due to the awful mobile first design paradigms that infest a lot of web development these days?
Because 3-4 sponsored ads used to be always there.. but they used to be clearly marked as such and to the right side of the page previously..
It seems to me that there are many other things wrong with Google Search not depicted here.
If we could get circa 2010 Google back people would not waste nearly as much time with “AI”.
I liked the search results a lot better when the ads were on the side. You could see a competitor if that was of interest to you, but you didn't have to scroll when you wanted to just find what would likely be a top result.
I liked it better when these were off to the side, I hope the person who convinced Google to put them as part of the list looking like a search result got a $100 million raise.
I just tried the same search on DuckDuckGo.
Midjourney.com is second on the list. Not good. But better.
That is why I use my own domain index
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database
On one hand, google forces users to surrender more and more person information for "advance security features" on other hand google allows malicious links to be the top 10 (sponsored) search results. .
Just to nitpick on the example: When a trusted or frequently used webpage is bookmarked, search can be restricted to those bookmarks with `*` in Firefox and with `@bookmarks` in Chrome.
My dad stopped using Google like 20 years ago for exactly this reason. He was not happy when his relevant local small business was pushed off the first page by out-of-state providers of tenuously related services
Baidu did this in the past and quickly lost his credit and market in China.
Google Search jumped the shark years ago. It's the modern-day Yahoo at this point. Even Bing is a better experience, which is not a sentence I ever thought I would type a decade ago.
There have been ads above the fold for about 20 years. I just did the search and the official Midjourney site is the first non-sponsored hit. You'll find this for most searches.
20 years ago the ads appeared in a clearly marked and differently marked sidebar, away from the main content.
Google is not the old google.
Now it’s the sick man of the tech world languishing towards its death.
Out of that carcass, lots of new firms which will improve the open internet will likely emerge.
Locale plays a role, I think. Searching from Romania, none of these examples replicate. Amazon is first for Amazon, Midjourney first for Midjourney, etc.
This is how paid placements work, and it's in the app stores as well.
And yes, _most_ people will just click on one of those top 3 links, not realizing that they are not going where they might have hoped to go.
What's worse is that many people actually go to google to search for the website name they want. And the search engine will "help" them by popping up suggestions before the user might have completed typing .com. So now instead of searching for therealwebsite.com, they search for "therealwebsite". That of course will NOT show them the real website, it will show all the garbage.
youtube is worse. it usually gives you three matches, than some completely random sh** that does not match a single keyword you typed in.
That's not "everything"! Just wasted ~3 hours trying to set up an account, supervised by me, for my 8 year old daughter.
(1) There are some old rules for a user interface.
(2) Billions of people know these rules, implicitly, and right away and easily use sites that follow the rules.
(3) Google, and others, want a new, different, original, snappy, creative, user interface but in this effort set aside the old rules so that at most only the programmer understands the user interface and in a month he (she) won't be able to use it either.
Analogy: They are really good at making pancakes but now are trying to make Bouillabaisse and are getting only rotten sea food.
Uh, the user interface has a lot of cartoons in a popular, new style but one of their cartoons shows little girl and some of the underside of her skirt -- dumb de dumb-dumb. If they make a mistake like that, then they are sloppy or worse workers and, thus, no wonder the rest is awful. Time to short the stock?
We need Reader mode, but for search results.
People are really starting to notice the sharp decline of Google search. I blogged[0] of a very similar experience a few months ago.
I don't even mind the AI Overview (too much) but the search results themselves are noticeably worse. In my example, the best search result and the one that the AI summary is clearly based on is the 6th ranked result.
Is Google doing this deliberately to make the AI Overview seem better?
In an ideal world, Google would use AI to provide better search results. Something like: "Here are the results for your search term A, which was slightly ambiguous. I suggest added term B or C depending on what you meant". It seems like that is not going to happen.
[0] https://sheep.horse/2025/4/yo_google%2C_thanks_for_the_ai_ov...
Try searching for "FedEx phone number" and it's not even in the top 10 search results. Not sure if FedEx is using SEO or paying to suppress results, but I was shocked Google couldn't even return this basic search successfully. I remember when Google Search used to actually work and have useful results and something like "FedEx phone number" would have the 1-800 number in bold text for you to click and immediately use. Now I use ChatGPT for those type of questions--and get the results I expect.
Offtopic, but I hate websites that restrict zoom on mobile. I'm sure the image is very convincing, too bad I can barely read the text.
I find the Ads to be annoying, but the "ML Fairness" (re-calibrating demographic distributions of photos) to be more disturbing.
though I've noticed that they've dialed down the knobs a bit. It's still there, but far less blatant (probably due to the attention-grabbing BARD debacle)
sounds like a transient issue. I just tried [midjourney] and midjourney.com was the top ad and also the #1 result, dominating the page.
Could not reproduce.
You might be part of an experiment or have a rogue extension installed that is hijacking the results (it's happened to me).
I couldn't remember ever seeing anything this bad. So I tried this in my browser and the real midjourney was the first result. Then I remembered I'm using Brave as my default browser, and most people aren't. In all the years I've been using it I've never once regretted it, and every once in a while I get a little reminder like this about how bad ads are on the web. I don't know why it isn't a more popular browser choice.
they've become a shady, low quality search engine. Even Yandex returns midjourney.com as the first result.
Seems perfectly tailored to the product being sold and the customers paying for it
Product being search users. Customers being advertisers.
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 ensuring that never happens.
The real problem here is that we've ceded our democracy to corporations: blaming Google (or any individual corporation) is missing the real issue.
P.S. But, the good news is ... we can always take our democracy back.
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?
This is a completely valid (if perhaps fanciful) perspective; I’m not sure why it’s being downvoted.
I searched it on Bing and got the official midjourney site as #1 and a wikipedia article as #2.
Weird, I don't see those sponsored links. Maybe because I use ublock like a normal person.
Same shit, different screenshot. The most irritating part is that other folks can't reliably reproduce results like those shown in the screenshot. Yet, I can think of countless examples of this happening to me. My guess is that it's highly beneficial to Google to barf out walls of poor-quality ads when it knows nothing about you. I can't be sure why, but there's a pattern.
When you look for my (somewhat obscure) company's app on the Play store, the first result is always a sponsored listing for some totally unrelated app.
About a year ago, I googled "silverfast" (film scanning program) on a fresh Windows installation not connected to me in any way, and I got several ads for scammy scanner software before the program I was looking for showed up.
When I watch youtube videos from obscure creators while logged out, I routinely get AI-generated ads for random stuff. The funniest one was deepfaked Chuck Norris emphatically telling me I should feed my dog carrots. Yet, when I watch a video from a big YouTube channel under the same conditions, I get ads from major household brands.
My guess is that there's three things happening. 1) More moneyed advertisers have more refined targeting constraints, that implicitly filter out ill-defined user profiles. 2) Google feels the need to do a better job of targeting for advertisers who pay them more. 3) In the absence of a well-defined user profile, Google shotguns a bunch of low-cost ads at you to try to build a profile. Just guesses.
Impressions to logged-in users bid higher than anonymous sessions. There's almost certainly higher tiers of demographics beyond that, not that you're allowed to know.
They're pushing so hard on Gemini because they know the search days are limited.
Hmm I just tried that search and Midjourney's site was at the top.
Regardless, at this point, I consider Google Search "legacy software." I rarely use it anymore. Google's AI mode or ChatGPT Thinking perform much more nuanced searches for me and surface the results I'm looking for much faster.
I used to consider my Google-fu top notch, but even without Google Search "Classic" getting destroyed by SEO spam, it's still more work at the end of the day than AI models. I'm sure spam and irrelevance will be the eventual fate of these AI models too, but for now they're the new Google
Ask your doctor for a specific drug and he will reply, without disclosing his sponsorship money, about another drug that is just as good.
At least Google writes the word sponsored, the real world doesn't do that.
I think future app stores should offer users an ad control panel. Let us choose whether to see ads, what kinds we prefer like tools, games, or education, and even which recommendation algorithm we want to use.
Yahoo! did this as it died too
For the love of god please use (and pay for) Kagi.
I cannot possibly fathom how they stay afloat with just 50k+ users.
Juicylinks.ai helps rank your apps higher on LLM recommendations like AI SEO
Google's ad engine, also featuring search results somewhere on the page.
Google is unusable.
Google is an adtech company and not a search company so this is normal
It's not wrong, it's how Google evolved based on demand and literally on the industries it created and that everyone was happy to join.
SEO + AdWords = this
It apparently took everyone decades to notice this is where we were always headed.
Let them advertise themselves into oblivion.
that is bad, I think the even worse sin is putting sponsored apps above the app you really searched for so you end up clicking on the wrong one.
Far from everything
Can't wait till ChatGPT responses look like this
I'm going to grumble about the title. If you say "in one image" the you should just link to an image. If it isn't that self evident, then should title it as such.
Everything? That's not even half of it. I don't see any: * useless faq box * useless slop box * unrelated image gallery * hijacked business listing (with no support for recourse, of course)
Youtube videos that aren't related
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
This is like going into a butcher's shop and being surprised that they're pushing meat on you instead of flowers or textiles.
Google is an ad company. They're the ad company. They built a search engine to sell ads. They built a browser to sell ads. They built an e-mail provider to sell ads. They built a video streaming platform to sell ads. They built a worldwide street-level navigation system to sell ads. They built an operating system and computers, just to sell ads.
They showed you ads. They gave you what they sell.
You don't like meat? Stop going to the butcher shop. Don't sit here complaining that the butchers keep trying to sell you meat.
That's not everything that's wrong.
Like many of you, I serve as IT support for family. Some of those family are beginning to slip cognitively, so I'd like to say: Fk google for doing this. You are confusing my relatives who cannot tell the difference between your ad-spam and actual links, and it is not an exaggeration to say that you are now taking advantage of old people.
I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock) and move them over to chatgpt when possible. If anyone has better ideas, I'm all ears.
> move them over to ChatGPT
OpenAI has even more VC money to pay back than Google ever did.
Practically all the large tech companies so far have turned to ads and monetizing users rather than charging enough to remain more neutral.
I suspect one day, when you ask ChatGPT "Can you give me a link to mid journey", you'll instead probabilistically get a link to whichever competitor paid OpenAI for the best placement.
Or give you results that are completely unrelated and even try to convince you that what you’re trying to search doesn’t exist.
Studied with a guy from old Soviet Union, they were educated in a way that every modern invention had a Soviet inventor.
ChatGPT can create an individualized reality and truth for everyone depending on which advertiser’s target demographic they fit in.
Like how americans are convinced they invented the telephone because the patent office said so?
Curious, I asked Grok:
> Is there controversy over the true inventor of the telephone?Yes, there is controversy over the true inventor of the telephone. While Alexander Graham Bell is widely credited, several inventors and researchers argue for recognition based on their contributions:
> Antonio Meucci: An Italian inventor who filed a patent caveat for a "voice communication apparatus" in 1871, five years before Bell's patent. Meucci's device, the "teletrofono," could transmit voice over a wire. Due to financial hardship, Meucci couldn't renew his caveat, and Bell was granted the patent in 1876. In 2002, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution (H.Res. 269) recognizing Meucci's contributions, stating he demonstrated a working device earlier, though it didn't officially credit him as the inventor. Some still argue Meucci deserves primary credit.
> Elisha Gray: An American engineer who filed a patent caveat for a telephone-like device on the same day as Bell, February 14, 1876. Bell's patent was filed hours earlier, leading to disputes. Some claim Bell may have had access to Gray’s ideas through patent office connections, though no definitive evidence supports this. Gray later challenged Bell’s patent but lost in court.
> Philipp Reis: A German inventor who developed a device called the "Reis telephone" in 1861, capable of transmitting music and some speech. While it was less practical for clear voice communication, some argue it was a precursor to the telephone.
Just like how the history is written by the victorious, every nation tends to accept certain truths as their truth.
exclusions apply, ask your doctor if the truth is right for you.
Ok I'm curious. Who's the real inventor
Antonio Meucci invented the Teletrofono around 1849 and filed a patent for it in 1871. I know this mostly because it was a big deal in a Soprano's episode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_telephone might be a good starting point.
See my reply to parent. Reply to sibling: Whoa, I've seen the Sopranos 3 times and never caught that reference.
And by the downvotes it seems they also get really touchy if it's pointed out…
Wait long enough and it seems like almost any company tries anything to increase its bottom line, but the main difference between ChatGPT and Google is at least ChatGPT attempts to give a paid option. Again, I don't think that'll stop them from ever getting to that point... but it'll go farther than "here's search, we pay for it via adtech".
Kagi is a similar boat - the product is what you pay for, not what they can get users to put up with.
> at least ChatGPT attempts to give a paid option. Again, I don't think that'll stop them...
Netflix also attempted to give a paid option, but now we have an "ad-supported" plan. I think that same logic of maximizing profit means that even if there are some people paying for ChatGPT, the amount of free money that is sitting on the table means that we will see "ad-supported" ChatGPT pretty soon once the low-hanging fruit for quality enhancement start to dry up, which is kind of already happening.
I think the coexistence of ad supported plans is orthogonal to the above. E.g. Netflix still has an ad free plan, regardless of the other plans, but Google gives you no option.
Google's YouTube has an ad free plan, at least.
"And now let's introduce this video's Sponsor, SpywareVPN"
Yeah, sure, "ad-free plan". As long as you don't watch (what feels like) the majority of videos on the platform.
I pay for premium, but I'd gladly pay 4x as much if Youtube also required creators to mark sponsored segments and let them all get skipped automatically if you paid for youtube "double premium double ad free" or whatever.
The premium plan actually gives you a little button to fast forward sponsor segments. (Not sure, if that's also on the free plan?)
You are right, that you still need to hit that button. It would be need to trigger it automatically. As far as I can tell, creators already tag the relevant segments as sponsored for other legal reasons.
> As far as I can tell, creators already tag the relevant segments as sponsored for other legal reasons.
From what I've seen, the timeline usually doesn't call out exact sponsor segments and the only tagging applies to the entire video.
Wait, what VPNs are you accusing of being spyware?
It’s funny, in the late 90s and early 00s, respectable companies had no ads on their websites.
Now it seems like they all do!
1. The reason why ChatGPT is free despite being honestly very advanced, is that they want the general public to have an association of ChatGPT being "the default AI", just like Google is the default search engine and YouTube is the default video platform. Once they have this position they can throw as much garbage at the users as they want and nobody will care. This is why it doesn't really matter how much it costs now to capture the market, if the potential benefits are huge.
2. Once the market is captured and solidified, ads and enshittification ensue. If you're willing to put on your tin foil hat for a second, I'd tell you that as a matter of fact the technologies to integrate different services with ChatGPT are being developed right now, and once they're ready it's just a small step to make sure that ChatGPT prioritizes answers mentioning those integrated partners, which can easily be justified to users as legit quality-of-life improvements.
Maybe the answer is indeed to just buy a book and go touch some literal grass, and let the civilization drown in the sewer of disinformation it produces.
Books, zero watts per token.
You do know how paper is made?
Just imagine all the gigawatts cooked to just serve ads via LLMs
How's that different to all the time and effort spent on making television shows so that they can direct your attention to the next beer commercial, which also took lots of time and effort to make?
maybe, but there was a time when google was the best alternative too.
I'd say it's practically guaranteed. It would be wildly unprecedented to not follow up the amount of hype and fundraising in the LLM AI industry without a massive amount of enshittification following it.
Even if improvements continue for years we might already be near the peak of LLM usefulness because all of greedy and abusive dark patterns are sure to follow once the manic land grab settles down.
This is one of the reasons why I’m getting familiar with self-hosting. Local models are improving shockingly fast. I use Gemma3 27B for generating summaries of podcast transcripts, for instance.
> OpenAI has even more VC money to pay back than Google ever did.
Sure, so move them off OpenAI, once they start paying back?
In hindsight, we should have known this would happen eventually. At this point, we have to be actively be against free services. Every time its just a ticking time bomb. There's literally no incentive for them to be an actual good service, just good enough that you tolerate it and not consider other options, but shit enough that they can extract value out of you.
Yeah agree 100% - this is why I’m a happy kagi customer
It’s kind of cool being treated like a customer
New feature releases aren’t about ad placement or SEO or personalization / tracking
Instead, their product updates are targeted at me - cool nifty features that I can immediately try out
Like kagi or not, just the feeling of having devs care about my actual personal experience is a breath of fresh air
I know not everyone is an fortunate, but I’d happily spend on other software of this caliber
I recently signed up for an annual subscription to Kagi on their Starter plan and I couldn't agree more. Search quality with them has been great so far, and I realize their small web search and exploration features too.
I've been slowly working to find other paid services as alternatives to the free ones that I'm currently using (next big one was shifting away from Gmail and onto a personal domain for mail using Fastmail). Migrated away from Notion and using Obsidian with Syncthing running on my unRAID server at home. Generally just trying to find alternatives that aren't in the data mining and user lock in sphere and more about maintaining a positive user experience without taking advantage of their users and their data.
That’s awesome
Be sure to try the assistant if you haven’t and browse the settings page for all the things you can do, again if you haven’t
It’s my default on my phone through their extension it works well
I’ve contacted their support in the past and they always give me real answers to questions about he product or suggestions
Gl!
This. Please can we go back to the days where I simply pay for services or items instead of being trapped inside a maze of buy now pay later, credits, coupons, bonuses, gifts, tiers, etc
I am sure there have never been such a time, but I long for it anyway.
> At this point, we have to be actively be against free services.
Nah, GCC is free, Linux is free, Debian is free. What we need to be against is free stuff provided by for-profit entities, because the love of money is the root of all evil.
Linux is free as-in freedom. Linux is not zero-cost: it has taken tens of billions of dollars of investment from thousands of organisations over three decades - and countless volunteer hours - to make it what it is today; that the wider community gets Linux security patches and feature updates for free is a side-effect of the GPL license coupled with the low marginal cost of reproducing software once-written. I’m here to remind people that the bulk of Linux’ codebase was not written for free as an act of charity.
What I’m saying is that, hypothetically, if the entire business-world suddenly ditched Linux overnight and went back to IBM and Burrows like it’s the 1960s again again (and let’s pretend Android isn’t a thing either) then no-one would be funding significant Linux dev/eng work, and as much as we value the hacker-spirit of unpaid community/volunteer projects, I feel it isn’t enough to keep Linux viable and secure (especially in high-visibility, high-exposure scenarios like desktops and internet-facing services).
They said service, not software.
Much of Linux is provided by for-profit entities.
Which doesn't matter, precisely because those entities have no ownership over Linux and thus no ability to enshittify the product.
Eh, I heard lots of complaints from the Xen folks that the prevalence of RedHat in the kernel development community leads to double standards that makes their favourite product (KVM) get nicer and quicker reviews than the Xen related changes.
(I used to work with the Xen folks.)
Kagi, as others have mentioned. Google search is dead.
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Kagi is quite good, its clean, simple, and not much money.
Not Google related, but cognition and older relative relevant: The amount of predatory scamware targeted towards older adults on the app stores is infuriating. I have a family friend who is now in the early-mid stages of Alzheimer's, but is still able to live at home and enjoy her life. She gets confused and stressed out by the fake 'alert! all your photos will be deleted!!' ads that pop up when she does her adult coloring books or jigsaw puzzles on her ipad. Apple's recommended apps in this category are evil in this regard, every single one. I've had to disable $80/week 'security' subscriptions from her account more than once. It is shameful that this is allowed.
Buy them a Kagi membership and switch them to that.
A lot of people want to complain but don't want to pay (not saying that is OP, just generally)
to be fair, I had a Kagi subscription for a year, but I recently cancelled it (mainly because I'm not working now and need to cut monthly expenses). I'll probably rejoin eventually, but I can understand why people cut these things out or won't do it. Recurring monthly expenses can be hard.
My parents hate technology but they love their little KDE thinkpad.
> I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock)
I guess they are all on Firefox.
This is a real risk. I know of someone who got phished with a fake number for Apple Support (the fake number was promoted and appeared at the top of the search results). Apparently they do this with banking phone numbers as well.
So inatead of being scammed, theyll be emotionally manipulTed.
Bizzaro solution. Sign them up to kagi.
Network wide ad blockers like PiHole are also quite useful but they can cause some confusion from the client side because things just break for no apparent reason.
I pay for Kagi for search, my family uses Kagi. I pay for NextDNS to block ads, all of my family's devices use NextDNS. I pay for credits on OpenRouter and host an OpenWebUI instance, all of my family's AI is private. I pay for the news - The Economist, the WSJ, FT, NewScientist, etc. Lies are free, the truth is behind a paywall.
The only thing money can't buy, yet, is a phone network free of robocalls.
I gotchu fam: https://tincan.kids/
It’s a phone, it’s a network, it has no robocalls!
I know, I know.
Dude not to mention their ai assistant is top notch
Happy customer here as well
Kagi is a better alternative.
I just use duckduckgo and turn off the ads in search settings
>and move them over to chatgpt when possible
That's a huge mistake.
Creat your own family yahoo — a website you maintain that has links to the websites they commonly use like mail and bank. Set as home page and new tab page.
It’s a slight security risk since it shows where you have accounts.
If you are savvy, build your own search that just passes it to an LLM and returns as page.
Maybe that’s business opportunity for some to create and manage trusted personal portals for family members.
Kagi search.
kagi ftw
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Who uses google in 2025. That is bizarre.
from a new customer perspective who just heard about midjourney, search may be a good spot to find alternate products. what google needs to know is if it is a navigational search and unless it keeps a long history, it may not know that. the simpler answer may be that companies who know you use a product like the one they make may just be willing to spend a bunch and google may be willing to add friction for the $.
Maybe Midjourney let its brand namespace become too diluted with copycats and also-rans and coasted on their initial work instead of putting in the effort to maintain the space. Maybe a lot of ppl searching for things that are like Midjourney are causing the competitors (who are obviously making efforts to invade the keyword) to be listed alongside. Maybe there's actually way more variables in the mix with OP's search/account/profile (however prolific or not it is). It's just not that clear cut and google is still has massive utility.
Another day another weak substack submitted by ....
The fact that people continue to willingly subject themselves to the internet without using an adblocker is insane to me.
Google has turned into altavista
I remember 37signals paying for an ad saying "We dont want to pay for this ad" or something to combat this for their keywords.
I think it was DHH or Jason who shared this somewhere in social media.
Edit: Yep! It was Jason - https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016
Late to the party here but I made a browser extension that helps with this called Cat Search. It categorizes the search results and allows you to vote on them so you can ignore/downvote/banish the results you don't want
not only that, google now has like 10 AI apps, like literally I lost count.
> have enough backlinks
Doesn't link
I will never use Gemini for this reason. The enshittification of Search is so treacherously disgraceful and user-hostile, that I have no faith that the same fate won't occur with Gemini as well.
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 companies buy getX.com or just non-.com TLDs. Now which one is the right result for searches for X? The pre existing one or the new company? What if they’re in different industries?
Almost all SaaS companies have multiple comparison pages or blogs/articles/etc that mention and compare themselves with competitors - specifically for SEO to show up in those searches. Should this also be banned?
I could go on, but I just don’t see a situation where Google can solve this satisfactorily for everyone, without becoming opinionated and picking/choosing/preferring one competitor over the other. As such, they’ve gone for the easiest model we have in modern day capitalism - put it up for auction and let the market figure it out!
The issue you're describing is ranking results or ranking between promoted/ad content.
The problem more at hand is unless you're paying big bucks, they can and will place content that at best is another competitor, or at worst is genuinely trying to harm your users. Ads being inline and as close in appearance to regular results as google can legally get away with is the problem. There are heavily misaligned incentives at play, ones that enable a lot of malware and phishing attempts.
No, I’m definitely not talking about ranking - that’s downstream of my point.
I’m talking about the “simple” solution that everyone alludes to but can’t seem to explain how it would feasibly work.
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.
Yes, I understand that you/others think this is an already solved problem - my point was that as time passes and the world grows, it no longer is - they can’t exactly solve it satisfactorily for all.
I don't think it was ever a "solved and done" problem, but at least Google kept putting tremendous efforts to lead the arms race and bring a decent solution for most people. It wasn't perfect for everyone of course.
I think they could still keep up if it was a priority to them. It's complicated, but they have a lot of the best minds of our generation after all.
I’m acutely aware that any topic related to Google Ads invites the blind fury of HN. I don’t want to excuse their shitty behavior, but I also dislike the illogical and irrational posts and threads that pop up about this topic on a monthly basis and make it to #1!
However, if you are to make this argument - please note that for OP and all the commenters in this post who tested this, all of them got the official Midjourney page as search result #1. Unsure why we’re discussing this at all then?
With udm14 and ublock origin on Firefox my first link is the official midjourney.com, then the subreddit, then the official discord, then wikipedia, then the offical Facebook page. That is just about perfect and covers what most people would want.
No ads. No LLM BS. While the experience google is pushing is terrible, the underlying tech still works in cases like this.
Regular google + unlock origin gives me the same results
Google frequently ignores entire words in a search query or gives thematically similar but utterly irrelevant results.
Everything that is wrong about bullshit webpages that are SoMe optimized: I could not zoom because eyeballs so I couldn't see what was in the image.
But daaaaamn. I could see that footer all the time. Lucky I was not able to zoom.
smiles in UBO
UBO works on startpage and ecosia as well and increases traffic counts for less invasive search engines
Imagine seeing ads.
Install an ad blocker.
Wait till you see ads in ChatGPT.
Or even worse; you don't see explicit ads, but rather ads are used to influence the results.
ublock origin
Uh, midjourney is the first result on my google. Thanks to the magic of adblock.
Seriously is this the level of HN discussion nowadays?
Enshittification really should be upgraded to a fourth law of thermodynamics.
>using google
lol :^)
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Thanks for the anecdote, but everyone’s advertising experience is different — that’s the whole point of targeted advertising. It doesn’t invalidate the OP’s point, though.
FWIW, I just used the Google app on iOS and got one ad (for artlist.io) before the midjourney.com link. A lot of people use Google this way to get to a named website, btw.
Impossible to know beforehand if it’s midjourney.com , midjourney.ai, getmidjourney.io or some such other idiocy - search engines exist for a reason.
Also - well-known that ad, sorry, search engines might well give two people different results for the same query.