Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites to Win Traffic (bloomberg.com) 55
Type a query into the Google search bar on a smartphone and there's a good chance the results will be dominated by advertising. From a report: That stems from a decision in 2015 to test a fourth ad, rather than three, at the top of search results. Some employees opposed the move at the time, saying it could reduce the quality of Google's responses, according to people familiar with the deliberations. But the company brushed aside those concerns because it was under pressure to meet Wall Street growth expectations, one of the people said. By 2016, the extra marketing slot was a regular feature. It's one of the many ways the search leader has altered how it presents results since its early days. Another example is the pre-packaged information Google often displays in a box at the top of a page, rather than sending users to other websites.
Phased in gradually over years, changes like these have gone largely unnoticed by legions of consumers who regularly turn to Google to call up information and hunt for bargains. The company says these changes support its mission to organize the world's information and make it useful and accessible to everyone. But to many web publishers and other businesses that have historically relied on the internet giant to send users to their sites, Google's subtle tweaks have siphoned off vital traffic and made it harder -- and costlier -- to reach customers online.
Phased in gradually over years, changes like these have gone largely unnoticed by legions of consumers who regularly turn to Google to call up information and hunt for bargains. The company says these changes support its mission to organize the world's information and make it useful and accessible to everyone. But to many web publishers and other businesses that have historically relied on the internet giant to send users to their sites, Google's subtle tweaks have siphoned off vital traffic and made it harder -- and costlier -- to reach customers online.
3rd Party Shopping Sites (Score:5, Insightful)
Google adding 1 or 2 more paid results is nothing compared to the hundreds of garbage "shopping sites" and resellers constantly trying to game the system.
Anyone actually use Google anymore? (Score:3)
Google adding 1 or 2 more paid results is nothing compared to the hundreds of garbage "shopping sites" and resellers constantly trying to game the system.
This is precisely why I don’t bother using google anymore - basically 98.99999% of my use of it resulted in pages and pages of garbage, unrelated results (usually because their stupid algorithm “helpfully” corrected my query into something I didn’t type in because it assumed it was a mistake). It’s become the most useless thing I’ve encountered.
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I want what I'm searching for, not what Google wants me to find. Google's searches are so biased toward selling things that they're useless for research.
.... or for search in general.
Re: Anyone actually use Google anymore? (Score:2)
If anything, for better or worse, google is great for things like if I want to order pizza. I search "pizza" and I get retaurants and take out menus close to me.
Obviously thats a bit creepy, and as much as I want to hate it, I cannot deny the convenience.
Where I dislike the algorithm is that it makes it hard to discover things off my beaten path.
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Apparently that is true, you can never consume enough to sate Googles targeted psychological manipulations that you must consume more.
When you stop to think how evil Google really is, consider they promote consumption to fill ego, mass consumption with no limit on consumption, they are the number one Corporation on the Planet, that cheers us all on to consume more, to buy more, to throw away more. Google the green corporation the number one cheerleader for burning out planet alive, now that's all sorts of
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Google adding 1 or 2 more paid results is nothing compared to the hundreds of garbage "shopping sites" and resellers constantly trying to game the system.
Imagine if one of those garbage sites somehow managed to always capture one of the top spots 100% of the time. That's a similar effect to adding an extra Google ad. That is, Google's effectiveness at capturing top spots is greater than the combined efforts of all the millions of "garbage" sites. Whether replacing the "garbage" site with a Google ad is an improvement depends on what one thinks of Google's ads.
Re: 3rd Party Shopping Sites (Score:2)
Except that, Google is actually showing me relevant and useful results.
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Yep.
If google returned as much garbage, and the noise-to-signal ratio had been this bad 10 years ago, it would be a "ever hear of that company" now.
Even the non-ads are mostly unrelated, and it's starting to *ignore* -"term".
TANSTAAFL (Score:4, Insightful)
it's free... but somehow they are paying for it.
Don't like it? Stop expecting services on the net to be free.
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Ok, I'll bite. Is there a subscription service that will provide similar services without ads. If it had a better privacy policy that would be great too. If not, what search engine does anyone recommend when on mobile?
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Startpage. DDG. There are probably others. Although they probably have (blocked) ads too.
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DuckDuckGo puts two easily-distinguished ads at the top of their search results, when they have a reasonable match - which, incidentally, doesn't seem to happen for many of my searches.
Google seems to place 3-4 ads at the top of *every* page, regardless of how well/poorly the ads match my search terms. And, in my experience, their results are no better than DDG's. They used to be better... I don't know if DDG is improving, Google is getting worse, or (as I suspect) both statements are true.
I wouldn't be sur
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And they ad results are terrible in Google anyway. Make a mistake and put in a typo, you'll still get ad results. "You Best Value for Ossified Chickens Here!"
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Quality ossified chicken? Sign me up!
Re: TANSTAAFL (Score:2)
Though an company bought itself into Startpage not long ago, and they are now in majority voting power on their board.
I have not yet consciously seen any effects of it.
But that puts the morals of the leaderhip clearly in the no-go zone.
Sad, because their results were better than those of DDG, which still wasn't good enough to fully replace Google, last time I checked.
(Sadly, with Startpage, I also noticed how much I'm still missing out, when I did happen to use Google.)
Why the hell is there no public open d
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Does DDG just using Bing as a back end?
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No, DGG does its own crawling. Startpage uses something else as a backend I believe.
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Dogpile? (Score:2)
So Google is going the route of Alta vista and Overture and cramming ads? Lovely.
Re: TANSTAAFL (Score:2)
Of course there is such a thing as a free lunch.
It's literally what we call profit! As opposed to the part of the income you worked for, that is hence not free. Unless you did not work for it, but hired "employees". As opposed to managing the company. Unless you hired people for that too. Then it's free luch, all day, every day. And the only cost is the ocassional shouting at "your" managers, to tell them what kind of lunch you want.
Yeah, but you still had to Work Hard (TM) to get there!
Unless some inventor
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Re: TANSTAAFL (Score:2)
> This is the cost you pay for a "free" service like google search
This is a gradual change to meet expectations that are not part of the customer product relationship. It is about larger margins, per the story. You also imply this is the only way to provide search (for some value of what search and product and paid listings means) which is doubly incorrect from a purely practical stance ie there are topical search engines for.most kinds of content that are ad free Your cynicism is an overrated substitute
Ad platform (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ad platform (Score:5, Informative)
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Uh, on day 1 they were google.stanford.edu... no ads back then!
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Apt description (Score:2)
Your comment reminds me of this HN comment [ycombinator.com] describing Oracle, and could be adapted for Google as:
"Google is the #1 advertising firm in the world. Strangely, they seem to have a search engine side business."
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If Google stops providing people with useful search results, people will stop using Google - which will cost Google ad revenue.
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Yes - but not till next quarter, by which time the decision makers will have shorted the stock
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Google used to have a "church and state" separation between content and ads. When they were the best, they didn't have any ads at all because they were a Stanford University research project.
Selling on the public market was the big mistake. The founders got money, but they lost control of the pages they were serving. Ads now insist their way in.
Sounds like an opportunity. (Score:2)
That stems from a decision in 2015 to test a fourth ad, rather than three, at the top of search results.
That sounds like an opportunity for browser plugin makers: A plugin, or feature on ad/script blockers like noscript and adblock, to suppress the initial advertisement "search results".
Once that's deployed enough to hurt we can have a nice arms race ...
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Ghostery already does that.
Re:Sounds like an opportunity. (Score:4, Informative)
That stems from a decision in 2015 to test a fourth ad, rather than three, at the top of search results.
That sounds like an opportunity for browser plugin makers: A plugin, or feature on ad/script blockers like noscript and adblock, to suppress the initial advertisement "search results".
Once that's deployed enough to hurt we can have a nice arms race ...
Yes - it's been in ad blockers like AdBlock and uBlock Origin for years now. I don't see any "AD" listings in my searches with this plugin enabled.
(Not to say that the search results themselves are not manipulated, but it does get rid of the ADs, so when I search for something about Postgres, I don't get a bunch of Oracle and MSSQL ads listed first).
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We already have it on Android. It's called Firefox + the uBlock Origin extension.
I'm genuinely puzzled surprised this is the first mention of Firefox for Android here. All these people professing to hate ads, and by implication saying this is somehow Google's fault. It's not - it's their choice. Anybody who chooses to run a
dominated by advertising (Score:3, Insightful)
UGH! For years!
And now it hardly matters if you enclose terms in quotes. All sorts of totally unrelated garbage comes up.
Works great though if you wanna pick out which movie to watch. It's a giant Peoples Magazine
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I've found tha, at least recently, you have to deliberately prefix the quotes with a plus, then *remove* the garbage by doing a minus and quoted term--even for single words. Repeatedly filter until you get something besides ads or unrelated garbage.
"Growth" (Score:4, Insightful)
Is not a good thing, if you're so fat you're filling the room all by yourself.
Let alone exponential growth.
Especially if things you need to survive are in the same room.
In nature, only two things grow exponentially: Deadly pathogens and explosions.
Which one are you the breeding ground / detonator for, Wall Street?
I want to sue Wall Street for conscious and deliberate mass-murder, as a result of this on a global scale. Apart from large-scale organized Ponzi scheme fraud and theft.
You use mobile pages? (Score:1)
And it's so clean (Score:2)
I remember when Google launched. Compared to the messes that were Dog Pile, Lycos, Alta Vista and Yahoo, amongst others, Google was like a breath of fresh air. Looks like the rot in Google is surfacing now for all to see. Oh, well, it was fun while it lasted.
How to tell Valid results from Ads or junk (Score:1)
here the whole problem with the USA (Score:1)
WTF Who is running the show?
The business is not snotty nosed hedgers [betting against] in order to make $10,000 a day to support their trophy wife.
Welcome to the United Corporations and Churches of America [UCCA was USA]
Where the real product is the stock and
The true customer is the stock holder.
In gawd we trust
All others pay foreign loan shark interest.
Life is too short to have to deal with ad slingers.
I went elsewhere years ago, Sta
I left because of the extra ads (Score:1)
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Bing is rather ad-laden too, but at least their reward points output $5 in gift cards ever few months to me.
I don't "see" adverts. (Score:2)
Adverts in YouTube let me go and get a drink. Adverts in Google just make me scroll down - I don't think about it. It's a reflex. Adverts in apps on my phone don't even get focused on. I just do not read the content of ads. I never have to think about ignoring them, it's a reflex.
I imagine an eye movement tracker would show me look at the "AD" tag in google and then look down to the next item. If enough people did this, things might change...
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Obligatory DDG post (Score:2)
There are other search engines.
For instance, https://duckduckgo.com/ [duckduckgo.com]