It's not just Google, I've noticed this across all the major ad platforms: Instagram, Twitter, FB, etc, have all cranked up the number of ads to prop up revenues.
I stopped using IG & Twitter largely because it went from having relatively few ads to where I started seeing an ad nearly every other post. The value of the platform proportionally declined significantly and I no longer bother using them.
Google is slowly becoming useless (even with an ad blocker) because you have to hack search terms in order to get useful results. For example, I append words like "wiki" or "reddit" to get results that aren't SEO'd. Search for something generic like "computer" and you can see an example of how hard it is to get information instead of ads.
It feels like ads are definitely a bubble, and I suspect the next big tech companies will not be ad based.
That is not the thesis of this article. In fact, the opposite. The article claims that despite the increase in advertising, for the given exemplar (hotel search), the ads actually make Google more useful compared to the ten-blue-link baseline.
You can divide searches into 1. Shopping searches where you want to buy something and 2. Non shopping searches. This article is about a type of shopping search.
Lots of us have little interest in doing shopping searches on Google--we search directly on Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Target or whatever.
With respect to non-shopping searches for a huge proportion of queries the top page of results are dominated either by shopping responses or fluff articles.
Wow, I'm not sure it ever occurred to me to use Google for shopping. In my head it's an information search engine that is better when you search an error string than DDG, but otherwise not worth the costs. If I want to buy something, I decide "oh, this will be better on Ali Express" or something. I think there's a few specific things I've tried to buy, but it really ends up just being a longcut to the place I was searching anyway.
And Google wants to know what you're searching to shop for, as its better for their ads business. They do seem to have trackers on most e-commerce websites, so they might know anyway.
The guidelines say "Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." IMO it's not useful or interesting to repeat the generic, endlessly belabored complaint that Google results are getting less relevant. It's much more interesting to discuss the article on its merits.
The response is related and non-tangential. The “endlessly belabored” argument that results are less relevant is an important discussion with many merits. It is true that there is value in shopping results and information results. However, there is a more optimal balance between the 2 that will improve the usefulness of the internet for many users.
Does this discussion have merit? It's hard for me to tell. Nobody provides any details. There are no exemplar queries where someone suggests a better result. Nobody is saying anything that isn't said in every other discussion where Google search results are even tangentially mentioned. You've got the classic DDG shoutout. The classic "Google used to be better" subthread. The classic "But if you type in specific terms" tree. And a nice tangent on tracking just for completeness sake.
You could copy and paste this thread into the comments of any other article about Google search in the past few months and it would be no less relevant. Only, you needn't bother, since this discussion gets rehashed every single time, so there's already a discussion with much the same points as this one, and much the same value, already there. That's a good sign that the discussion is lacking the nuance that I always hope to find here. But what's actually happening is a complete lack of engagement with what was ultimately a pretty interesting article.
> Does this discussion have merit? It's hard for me to tell.
In that case, why try to make a judgement? If you can't make a judgement but it irritates you, why not just spend your time on another page? Surely a discussion about the discussion is always going to be less useful and relevant than the discussion that organically develops out of the same topic.
If the heading is "Google search", asdfasgasdgasdg could just spend their time elsewhere.
The fact that fifty thousand people have already had their say doesn't mean that the next hundred people who want to have their say is a subset of the first, and thus may benefit. And, moreover, if people keep writing articles about related topics, related discussion is going to keep coming up.
And counterexample - every time I look up a hotel, I want to go to their actual homepage because I find the aggregators often intermingle pictures of the different room types and I want to see what the actual actual suite I'm booking looks like.
And Google buries the actual hotel homepage pretty deep, in my experience.
I've also found I could get the same deal or better when I book directly with the hotel. And when I check in, if I've booked with a third party booker, it's impossible to change the reservation at the hotel itself, and things that are normally free (like wifi or a ride to the airport) suddenly cost extra. Many hotels hate the outside bookers and either lose money on those bookings or don't make as much, and they're happy to split the booker's fee with the customer who books directly.
If people realized how much money of their hotel booking was going to Google and the OTAs, they would piss their pants. It is an excessive, useless, and largely avoidable tax.
* also note it’s driven substantial consolidation in the hotel industry, because big companies like Marriott can just rake in their direct bookings.
You'd think that by walking in or calling you could get the price around 10% below booking.com or Agoda, but it's almost never the case from my experience booking budget accommodation in Europe & Asia. Most of time they offer standard rate which is _higher_ than what you'd find on OTA.
What's fascinating to me is how Reddit is arguably at the tail end of "the pack" of major publishers. They struggle to monetize, yet possess one of the few remaining bastions of decent quality reviews depending on what you're looking for.
Arguably this is because there is still "full" organic reach possible, and the users govern the subreddits. If there were to be a major throttling of organic reach such that the only way to get prominent visibility on Reddit was to pay based on reach, or mods lost the ability to control and curate their communities, I wouldn't be surprised to see Reddit drop in quality and user base.
I've been doing this for years now, it works even better for niche products (or not massively produced). The last example was the Smarthalo, a friend of mine asked me what I thought about it as I'm into biking, I had seen some ads and their Kickstarter campaign but didn't give much thought, the only way I could find reliable user reviews was by appending "site:reddit.com" after my Google Search as the other user reviews would be from Amazon or other e-commerce websites that I really don't trust.
Yesterday I wanted to buy some inear headphones on Amazon and the user experience on the site itself is abysmal with countless no name China wares and suspect reviews.
A search on fitness related subreddits what people actually use and how (water damage through sweating seems common) was much more useful.
My point is they don't (or can't with the current setup) play games by restricting how many people see your post unless you pay up ala some other well-known sites.
Odd, I have only encountered clear SEO spam from smaller companies. It is very well disguised but just looking at a users history reveals that the review was spam.
Same. When I search for a product I always append reddit e.g. "what video card 4k 120hz reddit" because otherwise the search results are flooded with fake comparison pages spamming Amazon referral links
I do a lot of product research on Google, and in the past few months I have noticed a significant and worrying reduction in quality of search results for detailed queries, for two reasons.
Firstly, Google seems to be far more aggressive about using synonyms, and it's almost always done in a way that broadens a query. So, for example, if you search for a particular brand of some kind of product, the results that come up are often about such products in general (you can see which word got substituted, because they highlight the found keywords in bold).
Worse yet, it's also aggressively dropping specific words from the query (they show up stricken through under the result links). It used to be that it would do that when your search wouldn't even get a pageful of results - but now it gets to a ridiculous point where I make a two-word query, and the top result has one of those two dropped! And yet if you quote the word, forcing it to be there, there's no shortage of results for the more detailed query.
In practice, this means that most of my detailed Google queries end up quoting all or almost all words in them, because that's the only way I get results that I actually want, rather than a bunch of random vaguely related links. Even that doesn't seem to be 100% reliable, because it seems to sometimes ignore even the quoted words...
While I have no idea why this is going on, it's clearly not to improve search result quality. Which leaves only one hypothesis - that this is somehow related to advertising. I don't know if it's about paid search results, or preferentially treating websites that have Google ads on them, or just generally steering me towards online stores rather than e.g. forums (where the quote-forced detailed queries usually lead). But either way, this is worrying, because search has always been so fundamental to what Google is - and if that is being twisted so badly now, what can I expect from other products?
> Which leaves only one hypothesis - that this is somehow related to advertising.
Of course it is, they'll earn more if it takes you longer to search and you are more likely to click on one of the ads. I think it's as simple as that.
FWIW, in this case it might be better to use `site:reddit.com` for more accurate results. I tried your example and it narrowed down 264k results -> 12k results, although I'm not sure how much stock should be put into that figure because after reloading the first page it went down to 93k results. ‾\_(ツ)_/‾
For both searches, the first page was largely the same just in a different order. The big difference comes on the later pages of results.
Sure, but presumably you hone your senses as to which subs are trustworthy and which are not. For many classes of queries, there are some well-established subs already. Then it is a simple matter of parsing the comments, and the signal-to-noise ratio tends to be fairly decent for lots of things still.
They are. If you look at /r/suggestalaptop they already have people who suggesting laptops and link with Amazon referral links. I'm half convinced that they are just bots.
Problem with Instagram is that even "legitimate" posts are sponsored by companies paying influencers to soft peddle their stuff.
The overlap between the HN crowd and the crowd following influencers is probably minimal, but as far as a % of the platform, I'd wager most people are going through these soft ads unwittingly.
Apparently, Cristiano Ronaldo makes more from Instagram posts than what he makes from soccer.
Also, instagram is supposedly the platform with highest organic conversions & so I expect instagram come up with a way to monetize this off-platform Ad deals if not already.
Does any country have a law telling these influencers need to inform their followers about their sponsorship? Such laws exist for affiliate marketing.
"Does any country have a law telling these influencers need to inform their followers about their sponsorship? Such laws exist for affiliate marketing."
Now most are very careful and even "overdisclose" advertising as a result (they disclose even for products they mention that they are not paid for it).
Even on HN I've pleasantly told people to please disclose affiliate links (that I've only found out about because I click them and uBlock blocks the page from loading completely due to malicious amounts of tracking scripts) and people get upset about it.
I wish they would overdisclose here. It does not help that on social media, lots of people think adding "#sp" is enough.
A lot of his soccer salary is advertising money too. Some team revenue comes from ticket sales and merchandise sales but much more comes from TV rights which are funded by advertisements.
There's a couple handfuls of people I know personally who still use it as all-photo Facebook, and just post pictures of their dogs, or their kids, or their lunch.
Everything else is wall-to-wall hustling. Explicitly sponsored ads, business accounts promoting their stuff, meme pages that are hawking stuff in the comments, managed celebrity accounts, fitness models shilling supplements, and on and on and on.
Every purchase my fiance has made from an Instagram has been low quality Chinese junk. In a couple cases, we've found the exact SKU for sale on aliexpress for ~ 1/3 the price.
It's ridiculous when some of the Instagram ads are drop shipped from China at 4x the price of AliExpress. At least relocate the product to the US for faster shipping if you're going to charge more. The fluffy soft shiba inu pillows are advertised at like $30 on instagram with 2-3 week shipping and AliExpress has the same lead time and they're $8.
It may seem like a problem in isolation, but only if you ignore the alternatives.
Do you remember television or radio? How much choice did you have over the ads there? You'd literally have to sit through mass-market beer ads for minutes at a time.
With Instagram, the ads and soft-ads are oftentimes quite targeted. I get ads about theatre plays, musicals and ballet in my city. I wouldn't have found out about them otherwise - I think it's great! You can actually select an ad and say 'don't show me this stuff anymore' and provide a reason. I get to no longer see ads I don't like! Phew, that's a killer feature!
If the people you follow on instagram are generic, you get generic ads. If you follow niche markets, you get niche ads that you may be glad to find out about. Internet ads have become a reflection of sorts, if you are bothered by the ads, maybe what you're really bothered by is unfulfilled potential that the ads are a reflection of.
I get a lot of ads from Boeing. They want to sell a military helicopter. No joke. I don’t think the targeting works all that well. (It’s Twitter, not insta though)
I too experience better ads on Instagram (relevant positions with local companies, software I actually guve a second look etc) than on Google (until this summer they were dead set on showing me ads for scammy dating sites whenever I disabled my ad blocker despite the fact that I put ib the effort to tell them multiple times it was irrelevant.)
> I stopped using IG & Twitter largely because it went from having relatively few ads to where I started seeing an ad nearly every other post.
The increase appears to be dramatic. I signed up for YouTube Premium long ago simply because I couldn't stand the occasional ad anymore. I recently was at a friend's, and I wanted to show him a particular cooking video that I liked, on his iPad. It was a 16-minute video and it was interrupted three times by an ad. mid-video. Unbearable.
The thing is, through Premium, I was actually looking forward to discovering new music with the YouTube Music app. Was I wrong. The recommendations are crap. They are repetitive to the point of nausea. I have a few hundred "liked" songs, but the recommendations are heavily skewed towards a few, mostly recently "liked" songs.
This has actually lead to me dreading marking a song as "liked", as it inevitably leads to this repetition and, much worse, to unending recommendations of the same artist's other songs, even if I "dislike" every. single. one. of. them.
I'm sorry, but paying money to YouTube/Google to get around their adds and garbage recommendations seems too much like rewarding them for bad behavior.
>As opposed to what? YouTube is supposed to just host videos for you for free?
I think there is a median point between this dichotomy where YouTube comes up with ways to collect revenue that don't depend on maintaining an adversarial relationship with their users.
If the ads make you feel like they're specifically there to make you hate them enough to pay, that's basically playing highwayman. You can't blame people for thinking that's distasteful. They could have less intrusive systems for advertising or just make it subscription only, patron/donation based like Wikipedia, or some hybrid of multiple models.
>If the ads make you feel like they're specifically there to make you hate them enough to pay
That's inherently subjective though. About the only way for a paid product to not make me feel that way would be to keep showing me ads after I pay up, which is not what we're after. On the other hand, people have claimed on HackerNews before that they just plain don't mind ads. Where do you draw the line that says that they're specifically there to make you pay up? It's intellectually dishonest to both complain about ads and complain when a company offers a reasonable alternative to those ads.
> They could have less intrusive systems for advertising or just make it subscription only, patron/donation based like Wikipedia, or some hybrid of multiple models.
They have that. Subscription only makes discoverability (YouTube's primary strength) far more difficult. AFAIK YouTube does offer paid channel subscriptions, but for whatever reason Patreon seems to have captured that market far better.
I agree with you. I'm totally fine with services charging subscriptions but not if the subscription is a way to turn advertising off. Push advertising is basically evil in my opinion and you don't get absolved from the evil you are doing by allowing people an out by paying to turn the ads off.
Unfortunately Spotify is near useless to me now as it is inundated with kids songs polluting my lists, and the occasional listen to a song outside of the norm for me somehow also does the same thing.
They REALLY need a way to easily say "exclude this genre entirely from my recommendations" or from specific auto-lists. I'd also love a way to reset the learning features or specify more clearly "only learn from these playlists."
It just bugs me that an entity with such a forte in data mining can err that much, to the point where they're losing a losing customer to the competition.
> Google is slowly becoming useless (even with an ad blocker) because you have to hack search terms in order to get useful results. For example, I append words like "wiki" or "reddit" to get results that aren't SEO'd. Search for something generic like "computer" and you can see an example of how hard it is to get information instead of ads.
When you say useless does that mean you think the gap between Google and (other engine of your choice) is narrowing ? Do you see yourself switching to say Bing for better search results anytime soon ?
> Search for something generic like "computer" and you can see an example of how hard it is to get information instead of ads.
I tried this. The wikipedia page for "computer" was the second result. Above that, oddly, a store page for "computers" at Best Buy. Above that, some suggested questions like "what is a computer?" ("A computer is a machine or device that performs processes, calculations and operations based on instructions provided by a software or hardware program.") And above that, at the top, several advertisements and a map of where the advertising locations are.
I don't understand what you think should come up in a search for the word "computer". I already know what a computer is, and I think it's safe to say that's true of almost everyone using the internet.
>Search for something generic like "computer" and you can see an example of how hard it is to get information instead of ads.
Panel for computer sales at top. A maps menu showing computer shops near me. A Bestbuy link. Another panel for computer sales. Walmart, amazon, newegg. A wiki. And another sales panel.
More damning. The only non-commerce related link is the one for Wikipedia. On DDG mobile, there is one Best Buy link and everything else is a site delivering some form of information on the topic.
I think lots of ad buys aren’t very smart. Companies seem to be pumping too much money into ads because they have money.
Last week I saw an SAP ad over a twitch stream showing on a wall monitor in an esports bar. That’s either the smartest targeted ad ever (3 out of our table were software types who would be involved in an SAP purchase decision), or just some campaign manager clicking a box that means “put my ad anywhere you want.” The next ad was for twix.
I think if we face a downturn where all of a sudden there’s not money and smart people are trying to spend on ads that have real return, these platforms will really get slammed. I’m not sure what multiplier it is. But I think their leverage in the “BS ad” domain will be more than 1x whatever the downturn is.
I get targeted ads all the time from big consulting companies. It's not about SAP purchasing decisions, they want people to pursue SAP as a career option. In my case, their targeting is right on the money - I just have a better job at the moment
I live in India and I get ads all the time for products and services that aren't even available in my country. Like real estate brokers in Texas and car dealerships in Ohio and property investments in Abu Dhabi. I'm not using a VPN and haven't mucked around with my location settings.
Some of the worst targeted ads I've ever seen are on Reddit and Imgur
On Facebook, spending 5 dollars on promoting a post in India/Pakistan will get you a ton of likes and comments (some of them not great). It's a very easy and cheap way to make your post/ad look more legit or popular, faking "social proof"
Startups can disrupt because the major public companies need to show growth for w-street. If there's no growth then the ask is on profits, which cause the company to start gutting teams.
meanwhile a startup can focus on building a great product, sometimes while not needing to be profitable.
Amazon.com took advantage of this, with Jeff Bezos famous quote of, "Your margin is my opportunity".
First I get a large map card with a couple of stores with computer in their names nearby. I don't know how useful that is since I don't have a real search intent.
Next I get the computer page for best buy (I am in the USA)
and the computer wikipedia article.
I have just tried duck duck go.
I just get a full page of computers on best buy, amazon, etc
I don't think the google results are any worse than the ddg ones here.
If anything, trying to match with a 2 nearby places which are partial matches (computer in their names) is relevant.
And at least it gives me the wikipedia article. On ddg, it can be seen on the right side widget or at the bottom of the second page
Huh, I'm realizing with your comment that I was doing that and not really aware of that. Now that I think about it, my information, depending on subject, typically comes from either reddit, wikipedia, or stackoverflow, and I just use google to find the exact page on those websites that I need.
I don't use IG, but I do both use Twitter and agree with you that the increased percentage of promoted material is a bummer. I would pay Twitter $3 to $4 per month to get a "premium" ad-free account. I wonder if they ever considered this, and what the economics would be.
Yeah, but there's a good chance the parent poster is worth more the $7.50 ARPU to Twitter. They can also probably increase their ARPU more than they can increase a hypothetical subscription cost, which is why these comments about ad-based companies providing a subscription service aren't actually these no-brainer ideas.
Now with that being said, it would be nice if companies cared more about having sustainable businesses with healthy, non-intrusive user experiences than revenue growth.
Since the original article is more about Google, I would like to say that while Google's paid gmail+office is a compelling product that I liked paying for until I realized that there was no way I could merge services bought with my "free" Google account with the paid account. I think this is a lesson for Twitter if they ever do offer a paid service: integrate well with the old free account or convert old account and history smoothly.
The general response to this seems to be that people who would pay for subscriptions are the highest value ad targets and worth significantly more than 3-4/m?
I'm worth literally zero to Twitter; I use an adblocker everywhere, and when that fails, not only do I never click on an ad, I purposefully scroll as quickly past them as I can.
I'd pay a couple bucks a month to remove that hassle.
Isn't that the idea? The Instagram ads are supposed to look like the posts you're looking at and hopefully your lizard brain stores the ad image as you scroll by.
I wonder to what extent this is a function of how one uses Instagram: ie, perhaps the parent comment's feed contains posts superficially similar to ads, while the composition of yours makes ads stand out in content and caption (my experience is closer to yours on Twitter and upon occasionally IG use).
Tangentially, I find IG's place in the social media panoply to be fascinating. It's the only service that everyone seems to feel positively about: it doesn't inspire the loathing that Facebook and Twitter does or the mockery that Snapchat does (even by their users).
But watching people use Instagram is the closest I see people coming to the popular addict/junkie metaphor and the stereotype of smartphones and social media turning us into slackjawed automatons in thrall to a colorful Skinner Box. It's really eerie.
I've bought several products as a result of Instagram ads. They are usually related to companies I follow or interests I have, like camping or some household goods. But I don't hate the ads. They are easy to scroll past and I don't have to engage with them. They don't seem too intrusive and sometimes they are interesting products to look at.
I do not notice Instagram ads for a simple reason that I am yet to see a single one. It probably has to do with whom I follow: a very limited number of people I personally know, no brands, no influencers, no company grams etc. As a software developer I sometimes wonder what are the thresholds or criteria in Instagram systems to show ads.
Spent the last couple days trying to gather information for an LDAP/AD/Samba project for a multi-tenant MSP setup. Literally the top 3 or 4 results of every query were from Jumpcloud and just pure, low-effort blog posts that you can just tell were SEO driven to get them on the top of every keyword to sell you a product that isn't even really the same thing.
I just discovered the "reddit"/"hackernews" trick while doing this for actual content I want to read.
As far as I'm concerned I will never recommend Jumpcloud or any other service I find doing this.
I made an Instagram account for the first time a few months ago, the first two weeks it had zero ads. It was just long enough to draw me in, if it had had that amount of ads when I signed up, I might have chosen a different platform to display my computer generated art.
On the plus side, it has been very cool chatting with people from all over the world doing the same things, and getting compliments (like, actual comments, not just likes).
I'm not seeing what you described at all. Google search results are still serving me quite well personally, at least for the information that I was looking for.
Google has recently launched one of its biggest updates (BERT) which should improve the understanding of your keywords tremendously. By utilizing the power of NLP (Natural Language Processing) technology, it will now be able to provide more relevant and accurate search results for everyone.
> I append words like "wiki" or "reddit" to get results that aren't SEO'd
I'm not sure what you expect. I mean, yeah. I have to put OSRS in any search for "murder mystery" to get the result I wanted. But that's not a huge deal.
Who searches for generic "computer" that isn't a 70 year old lady probably looking for a new computer. Google in that scenario is just serving up what they're most likely looking for.
And heck, it's not like the wikipedia link was that far down. It was under a couple of store links and then bam. Wiki for computers.
'Ads' are not a bubble, don't be silly. That's like saying that 'money' is a bubble because of the subprime crisis.
That said, yes, there is definitly a downward spiral where placing more ads drives your viewership away, which in turn lowers your revenue and makes you place more ads, which drives away viewership, etc.
This isn't really a problem with 'ads', this is a generic problem of management driving a thriving property into the ground in the name of short-term profit.
It's not becoming useless (what's better overall?) but increasingly more difficult to use. It's not the inflation of the content of the web causing it, it IS google (e.g. they make anyting that is > a few years old almost invisible). I don't know what is the endgame of this , though. There is clearly a failure of competition here, it is disheartening to use another engine and get the same results
"Search for something generic like "computer" and you can see an example of how hard it is to get information instead of ads"
I see ads panel for computers, followed by wiki, videos about computer, questions, map with computer shop and list of links related to computer terminology.
I don't use ad blocker. Still get relavent results.
I have been hearing people talk about google results becoming useless regularly but it never made sense to me until you mentioned the part about adding wiki and reddit to terms which I do all the time to get real information and not paid blog articles by people who just read the box of the product they are reviewing.
A friend who’s a translator told me he uses every kind of ad block, VPN, and language settings and it makes Google basically usable again.
I’ve noticed that I use Google a lot less now because all the ads and baloney stress me out. Turns out a lot of the stuff I used to search for isn’t that important.
Holy cow I thought you were exaggerating! Apart from a single Wikipedia article near the bottom every result for the search “computer” is an ad!! Not even a bad article full of SEO crap but a straight up ad!
I don't use IG so cannot comment. I do use Twitter. I haven't noticed significantly more ads but one thing I dislike about Twitter is that they make the ads appear like normal posts.
Fun fact, search result ads ignore “-term”. It is so infuriating trying to get away from some SEO bullshit only to have the first 5 results be ads for the thing you are explicitly trying to filter out.
I feel like Google is increasingly becoming useless as a general purpose search engine.
When I try to find information on a generic topic where I can't exactly tailor the query, the results are usually filled with low quality, SEO optimized promotional sites, clickbait articles/YT videos or aggregators. With some luck there is a good blog post with quality links on page 2 or 3.
Good results are now mostly restricted to areas where Google can utilize structured data sources (Maps/Business data, Wikipedia, ....).
This is extremely ironic, since Google originally rose to popularity because it was much better at "real" search than the competitors.
The interesting question is why!
Is Google just not able to compete with SEO tactics? Are they overly fixated on ML/"AI" techniques that don't work well in practice?
Or are regular search results allowed to become worse on purpose, in order to maximize ad revenue? It is something a near-monopoly could afford to do.
Originally, Google was very effective at looking at the interconnections of content people had put online and using that to infer which pages were most relevant. SEO tactics immediately started gaming this system to create false signals of relevance, but for many years Google did an impressive job of staying ahead of that game.
I think what finally killed their search quality is the fact that there's no longer a public human-curated network of websites to draw meaning from. Most content on the web is bulk-generated crap, personal blogs and websites are rare, and many passionate hobbyist communities are hidden from crawlers in places like closed Facebook groups.
I wonder what the next search engine algorithm will be... I've been thinking about up-votes/down-votes. And I could swear Google experimented with Random ranking a few years back, which gave very good results, but it was a bit annoying when you forget to bookmark a site, and not finding it when searching for it again the next day. But I'm thinking random plus voting, so if you find a good site, you upvote it, if you find spam you downvote it. If you want to find that good site again, you just check your upvote history. Random sorting give small interesting web sites a chance to get found. When doing a search you can use sliders to fine-tune the order using popularity (upvote/downvote ratio), last updated, first found, region, and a checkbox to only show links you haven't already clicked on, or haven't already voted on. And there could be an option to discover sites you would probably like, based on which links you have upvoted, and what people that upvote sites simlar to you also up-voted - but you have not yet clicked on. The problem with upvote bots have already been solved by social networks like Facebook, where using like-farms, follower-farms etc are not very effective. You should not be too baised on the votes though, or you would end up with echo-chamber loops like with Spotify and Youtube. The key is randomness! A random brute force-like algorithm is often just as good and sometimes better then a sophisticated system. It would be hard to game/cheat a random algorithm.
Google already has the equivalent of upvoting without requiring anything from the users.
If you click into a site and you don't return to your search, they consider that an upvote. If you continue clicking different search results they consider that a downvote for the site you visited.
Then that's not great, based on the way I (and, from observation, many others) use search results. I often middle-click (or control+click) several links which look promising, loading them in new tabs in the background. When I have a decent number, I then go visit the sites themselves.
In addition, the best Google searches result in finding the answer directly in the preview of the page from the search results. Unfortunately there's not a clear signal to Google which site preview provided the answer in this case, or even if none of them did and I just gave up searching.
In reality, I'm sure Google's determination of which site was relevant is much more sophisticated, likely involving some machine learning.
Since google's spying on you, you'd think they'd be able to link the page you're reading to the search that triggered it, and filter the analytics back to the search. But google won't use their spying to our benefit...
Yeah, I remember talking to a student over at our local college a few years back who had started doing that with a classmate. They called it Yet Another Hierarchical... something or other. Jerry, I think his name was. I probably should have joined them. It turned out to be quite an experience.
I'm building https://learnawesome.org for this. Started by collecting various awesome lists and then adding search, reviews, related items etc. For eg, when looking up a book, you can easily discover the TED talk or podcast given by the author which has the same ideas.
It's early days though. I imported around 10,000 MOOCs from various platforms and organized them by topics. The webapp is open-source so fixes/features are always welcome. :)
I remember dmoz! Nowadays any curated list would need to have the properties of (a) being publicly editable and (b) being prose, because for the time being it's sufficiently difficult for machines to write prose. Or at least, I assume so, since everything popular except wikipedia has been gamed.
That's the secret sauce behind decentralization. Damage from any one actor, including yourself, is limited both temporally and in scope. Each service would get a unique hash relevant only to them and giving them access to only their scope, and you would keep your private keys safe just like you would SSH keys, crypto wallet keys, or any other sensitive data. If you can't be bothered to do that, then a minor hit to your reputation is deserved from a philosophical standpoint, even if we work to make the system robust and resilient.
The idea is that it would take a long time and lots of effort to build a credible reputation.
Someone just beginning to use the internet would either need to slowly build reputation in the most open spaces, or get one or more people to vouch for them through an API.
I want to make it fiscally infeasible to run a mass persona farm.
I don't have proof but I'm sure the amount of votes on eg. reddit (or perhaps how long it was on the front page) has an effect on search results; see the Comcast swastika[0] and Trump showing up when searching 'Idiot'[1].
I don't think it actually has anything to do with upvotes, but is just an indirect effect since highly upvoted pages are generally more trafficked, and it's the high traffic that really matters.
I would agree with this if not for my recent experience with duckduckgo. While Google's search result quality has sharply deteriorated in recent months, duckduckgo's results have stayed flat for the most part, to the point where ddg's result quality is more often superior to Google. If it were a matter of SEO manipulation, wouldn't ddg's quality decline too?
And also, why doesn't DDG grow in market share if Google's results are worse?
My hypothesis is that Google's results aren't bad - they are actually serving a set of results which satisfies the laymen, and it's only the technical, highly niche users with whom the results don't align.
I'm surprised they haven't brought this in with an option so people can rate or at the least flag sites. Source users feedback directly which would probably help wipe out results like Pintrest that dominate so many searches but people find unhelpful.
It would be great if they had an option where they have the drop-down for cache to say something like 'dont show this domain' or something that would let people flag sites that dont seem to offer value against search terms
Also on the 'computer' search I was amazed how everything was now in a left column and how much blank space on the right there was: http://prntscr.com/pw5iav - is that mobile optimisation overtaking desktop experience?
What are the business reasons against this? I so wanted the ability to hide specific domains from Google search, that I installed an extension, and then it stopped working. Luckily I was able to find a Tampermonkey script that does the same job.
What do I mean with “the threat of Facebook”? In the old days, before today’s large “social media” sites, people made their own web pages on places like GeoCities or on simpler social-media-like sites like LiveJournal, etc. Those sites all had content and linked to each other. This is the web which the Google search engine and its algorithm was meant to find things in, and it worked very nicely, as it took advantage of the links other people had made to your site as a proxy for relevance in search results for your site. People making small web pages about their favorite topics (with lots of links to other people’s pages, since information was hard to find) could slowly and easily transition into making larger and larger reference web sites with lots of information, thereby attracting lots of incoming links from others, which in turn enabled people to find the information using Google’s search engine.
Compare this to now. Firstly, people having a Facebook account have no place to simply place information, no incentive to simply make a web page about, say, tacos or model trains, because that’s not what Facebook is about. Facebook is about the here-and-now, and whatever is yesterday is forgotten. As I understand it, there is no real way, in Facebook, to make a continuously updated page with a fixed address for people to go to as a reference point about some subject, or at least people are not directed towards doing this as part of their online activity (as opposed to in the past, when it was basically the only thing which people could do). Secondly, this makes it so that people have no natural path going from using Facebook to creating a larger web site with information, and there are no smaller model train or taco Facebook “pages” which could have links to your larger site and thereby validate its relevance. Thirdly, even if this second point was false, Google could not use these Facebook pages, because Google cannot crawl them. These pages are all internal to Facebook, and Facebook has every incentive to not allow Google to crawl and search this information. Facebook would much rather people used their own site to search, and thereby gaining all of Google’s sources of income: User monitoring and advertising.
Facebook isn't the only one that killed it. Wikipedia did too, since there's a huge incentive to centralise all the information in one place. If you write one sentence in a wiki article, it'll be read by many, many more people than if you write ten pages on your own site. So now, if you want to write information that doesn't sit well in wikipedia, or express a perspective that is not mainstream enough to fit in wikipedia, then you can just do it in the facebook-hackernews-reddit "click and it's gone" osphere.
I'm increasingly of a mind to create an old school pre-blogging web page. That was the ideal of the web. I have enough content, it's just the time.
Google could penetrate all of that, if they wanted to.
When I search for a fairly specific thing and the first page of results don’t even include half the search terms, that indicates quite clearly they don’t give a fuck about anything other than ad revenue.
Google isn't "becoming" useless. Google, and every other search engine, has always been relatively useless at generic queries. The fact that they're building out structured experiences for some of these queries is helpful, but the ones they haven't built out structured experiences for aren't any worse than they used to be.
If you can form a sufficiently specific query, Google is still exceptionally good at returning useful information, with few ads or infoboxes or anything else other than organic search results. If your search terms are too generic, Google essentially gives up and just serves you ads instead.
I guess the question is: Is it harder now because of changes google made or harder now because of changes to the internet (There is so much more content now to search and filter).
Part of the problem is a huge part of that "content" is ultra SEO'd low quality copy pasted crap crammed with ads, specifically designed to harvest clicks from Google, and little else.
The best open source mailing list archive is unquestionably https://marc.info . yet when you search things that are open source relevant, you get https://nabble.com which goes as far as to fake being a forum and fills content from mailing lists, is nearly useless feature wise, and is crammed with all sorts of nasty obnoxious advertising.
marc.info doesn't even crack page 10 with typical queries, because they don't play the SEO optimization game, and doesn't run ads.
This is a great example of Google becoming totally useless.
The last time I remember this being mentioned on HN, a few days later marc.info was at the top of search results for mailing list type posts, but it seems whatever manual tweak they applied has since been invalidated by the Googletron...
Yes it is harder because of the death of the + operator and the insistence on aggressive stemming and autocorrecting that applies even when you “really” “mean” “what” “you” “say”.
They removed the + operator because they wanted people to be able to search "G+", "Google+" and "Google +" in addition to Google Plus. Interesting that they haven't reverted it yet, though, considering that Google Plus is now utterly defunct.
It is harder because of both, and the fact that so much of the more content is lower quality. In the past it was not just that you could build up an understanding of a subject but often that understanding came from high quality experts on the subject. Nowadays the understanding of a subject you can build up often comes from a content mill or something providing a lower quality overview of the subject.
Searches you do now on basically any subject you are not an expert in already give you the same subject matter level of expertise you can expect from a 5 minute segment on the nightly news, whereas before you could expect at least the quality of a 30 minute show hosted by James Burke.
Both? Google helped shape the internet by connecting customers to businesses. The internet helped shape Google because it’s Google’s primary data source.
By comparison to other search engines. Duckduckgo seems to give me better search results and is less influenced by advertisements and trends.
What finally pushed me away from Google was its incorrect assumption of equivalence between different terms. I'd search something like "printer scaling draftsight" and it would return results with "printer" "scaling" and "autocad" all in bold. Because autocad and draftsight are 2D CAD programs, and autocad is more popular, so suuurely that's what I wanted.
> Because autocad and draftsight are 2D CAD programs, and autocad is more popular, so suuurely that's what I wanted.
Yeah I've noticed this a lot in recent months/years. Have been finding myself putting most of the keywords of the query in quotation marks to get any kind of results relevant to my actual query. Like 'printer "scaling" "draftsight"' just so that G wouldn't make some stupid assumptions.
Unfortunately, DDG has a close relationships with the kgb's outlet yandex (and trying not to mention that anywhere unless asked directly), which is absolute showstopper for me
There is a useful edge case to this. In my case I was searching for a specific bit of content that had too few results in English so Google started returning results based on similar search terms in another language. It took a bunch of quotes and some specific strings to get into that state in the first place though.
Language is used to convey meaning. The difference between my wife and Google is that Google tries to interpret language in the lowest common denominator which leaves all people who try to use language properly feeling like they need to learn a new one just to be understood by their search engine.
I was not able to replicate your issues and did not notice any similar said results from my end. Have you tried searching under another account or with a different machine perhaps? Just for testing purposes.
Isn't that irrelevant as far as Google's usefulness is concerned?
The internet is always going to be in constant flux: SEO trickery, the rise and fall of sites which contain the most relevant data, context of the search (browser -> phone), etc.
Google's main job is to make it as easy as possible for a user to find what they want. For example, as a techie, 15 years ago that might have meant making sure to constantly index usenet and various mailing lists. Today most of that content is at StackExchange, Github, Reddit, etc.
And it's not just tech searches - everyone will have their own niche which Google once got right and often returned as the very first result (when was the last time you were confident in using the 'lucky' result?), and now, not only do they not return relevant results, whatever they do return is mixed with tons of ads and (probably) paid results that aren't marked as ads.
The fact that Google doesn't yet pay dividends while the MBAs there are apparently intent on destroying the company's main product as fast as they can, doesn't bode well for their share price going forward.
For some searches, it's as easy as tacking on an extra word, and seeing how different the results are. Especially true for blacklisted and censored Google searches, which for whatever reason don't seem to be wildcarded terms.
Try searching for just the name of a supposed whistleblower, then add another term, and get all the censored results. Even more true in the news tab, which initially returned -0- results.
For most intents and purposes, Google is the internet landscape. They are the dominant browser, search engine, email system, and mobile operating system.
Curious - do you allow them to track your browsing history and/or are you logged in or do you block and stay anonymous-ish?
I’m in the latter camp and wondering if their inferences are just getting better if they have more of your data. Still not willing to give it to them willingly to get better results, but it would at least explain a few things.
Not the person you originally asked, but I can share a relevant experience.
I definitely have concerns with the amount of data Google has about me and, in particular, the idea of Chrome monopolizing the browser landscape. As a result, a few months ago I tried switching to Firefox, complete with container tabs and scripts which removed Google analytics from everywhere. The difference in search results was very noticeable. Most notable was that my Google news feed (on my Android phone) and YouTube recommendations quickly became filled with generic junk, whereas before it was so relevant I would often find the answer to something I had been researching earlier mixed in with my news feed.
I ended up going back to Chrome, mostly due to battery issues with Firefox, however even if I hadn't switched back I think I would have voluntarily turned off all the anti-tracking stuff. It is a data privacy concern, and moreover I hate the idea of giving Google all this data, but the benefits for me were very palpable.
Do you feel that your queries now are approximately similar to those you used to get good results on?
I can see a world in which the parent comment is correct, and we've "dumbed down" our queries because it gets us good enough answers most of the time. For example, perhaps I used to google "halo game walkthrough OR tutorial" and now I would type "halo tips."
The results are more oriented to the bulk appeal, with the result that the long tail gets little attention. If I want what is high in the rankings, it is easy to get with minimal effort. If I want something niche, any specific queries are directed back to the general answer.
Froogle was once great because it used Google’s search algorithm and index to return the best results across the web. Putting a sku was like magic and extremely useful. I bought so much equipment, at a better price because of it.
Shopping.google.com was much less useful because it only returned advertisers. I was able to find better matches at lower prices by entering really precise searches and using organic results.
It’s harder to find things for sale through Google now than 10 years ago.
Not true. Recently I found myself using duckduckgo more. Partially because they added ddg.gg and it's not such a pain to type.... but mostly when I just can't find stuff on Google. That was never the case a few years ago, if I didn't find it on Google, I couldn't find it on any other search engine.
tbh, i think you are right in a certain sense. i think the search reflects what is going on online or perhaps what people are looking for online. i mean, i remember the days when searching for python would give you the snake on the front page! i was surprised the other day that it didn't anymore even though i never told google i meant the programming language... is it me or something?
I'm so glad to see others having this same opinion. I was just chatting with a friend about google search results and how, recently, they have become much worse than they used to be.
It seems that if you don't tailor your search terms perfectly all you get is ads, clickbait youtube videos, and review sites built to push a product.
Look at the DDG hockey stick graph. No other search provider has that sort of growth. It's not just you that's tired of poor search results from Google.
It's going to need to sustain that growth for a decade to be of any reasonable size. Google gets approximately the same number of search queries per day as DDG has in its entire lifetime (~11 years).
Edit: The problem in sustaining this growth isn't just marketing either. With increased traffic come increased server, maintenance, and engineering costs which may not be possible to support with untargeted ads as advertisers won't pay big money to show ads that have poor conversions.
I'm curious how untargetted they are - if I'm searching for python, how untargetted is a python book ad? I'd be more inclined to purchase that rather than a remarketing adroll targetted ad that's just spewing me the same item that I purchased 30 minutes ago
You, I, and most people posting here probably already know how to phrase searches with exactly the terms that are relevant. Most people in the world probably don't. I too dislike how Google performs worse for my queries now than it used to.
But I look at my non-technical relatives using Google and it's now magical how relevant the results are for vague queries regarding common information. Making precise queries for technical information work worse while vague queries for commonly referenced information work better is probably the right trade-off for a business that wants to make money. As much as I loath it for my own use cases.
I feel the same way. I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few years, and when I started, I was prepending !g to about half my searches. Now I find myself rarely using !g, and telling friends "try DDG" when they can't find results on Google.
Not surprisingly, Google is still better for shopping searches.
Yeah, I've been giving DDG a try for the last few weeks again. For "I want to look for keywords" I use DDG and find it does well. For "I want to search a structured database", Google still wins because of its above-the-fold no-article "this is what you're looking for" results.
Like, if I type a math formula or "what's the population of Alberta", the Google result is just the number, not a link to the result.
Or if I want to search for a product or local business.
I get the answer plus a ton of highly relevant links relating to population, StanCan sources, etc.
I think this is exactly what most users want: Show me the answer quickly without making wade through links - but provide me the links if I want to do more research on my own.
These featured snippets are great for Google, because they keep you on their search pages longer. But they're bad for the websites because they can completely lose your visit, even though they're the ones who created the content.
These snippets also take up more space on top of the page and along with more ads, it means fewer organic links are appearing on the first page.
I found that even DDG isn't that good. It especially doesn't work when trying the usual [query] + " reddit" part. It practically ignores the reddit part. I've found that I'm going back to using Google constantly now - which is frustrating. Most of the results I've been getting are very spammy SEO articles too with DDG. I wish it wasn't the case but for what I've tried - it just isn't working as I'd like.
Google is indeed the seed if its own "death" (being overly dramatic). The web has changed because of it and searching is now both annoying and irrelevant since websites have a lot less value now that everything is rigged.
They’ve become the ultimate rent seeker, which wants me to believe it is signaling their demise in the near-term, but it probably means the opposite, they have the ability to leverage their monopoly.
it really is kind of startling -- to quote old Hamlet - "oh, what a falling-off was there!"
90s web : content good, looks rubbish
2019 web : content rubbish, looks good
trying to help my kid with research reports &etc is a nasty chore these days -- for the amount of effort it takes to find a decent informative non-wikipedia page these days, may as well go to the physical library
One thing I've noticed myself doing is that when I (increasingly rarely) stumble across a good, high-useful-information density website on anything I have even a passing interest in (typically either some sort of obscure fora, or a personal blog/website), I carefully bookmark and tag it on the spot, because I'll never be able to find it again otherwise.
Old web was a mess of people making things as expression, excitment. I think it matters to feel being 'connected' to someone rather than parsing a rendered data structure.
I felt the same reading old encyclopedias, you can feel the author way of thinking a bit. It feels a bit more enjoyable.
An "accept our cookies" window blocker would be so incredible. I mean how are they even getting informed consent when I can't tell what's going to happen when I deny the request? I want to read an article, not judge whether you're trying to invade my privacy.
Firefox, please treat "can set cookies" as a permission and allow me to set it to "ask" by default, and allow it to be toggled by clicking on the site permissions lock box. The existing user interface does not give me any control.
I guess I'm getting old but I really miss the 90's web. Also, libraries are just rooms with computers these days, at least in my town. I miss 90's libraries more than I miss the 90's internet.
Bingo. There are still some websites which have a tenacious grip on the 90's style and are chock full of information. However, you aren't going to find them with G and the like.
I've been meaning to set up YaCy for a while and see if the P-t-P search structure works better for finding non-scroller web pages. I fear that I'll find those results also tainted by shills.
[edit: Forgot to mention Gigablast, which works fairly well. Definitely not for the faint of heart]
They started moving on from being a general purpose search engine years ago, when they started "knowing best". Round about the brand and recency updates, which must be 7 or 8 years ago, maybe more. No longer did you need to search "buy camera" rather than "camera" to show you wanted to spend money, it was now presumed. Your +term (broken with arrival of G+) or quoted "term" would be varied as much as optional terms.
Nearly all the changes since have been along those lines. Google thinks the only reason to use the net is to shop. The results you get, that are prioritised make some sense in that context.
It's just made it useless for all those times you don't want to book a hotel, buy a phone etc.
The ai incentive isn't searcher satisfaction, it's revenue maximization. The longer it takes you to find a good result the more likely you area to click an ad. The more often they show you adwords supported sites like ehow and YouTube the more likely you'll click an ad.
Consider the trend in ads for ad supported sites as an indicator.
The customer is the ad buyer. They want more of those. They have maximized product supply. They can't produce more product, they can only resell existing products by more ads in search results as a ratio plus more ads on the organic links.
There is no measurable financial incentive for them to show you organic results without adwords.
There's a loosey goosey replacement of words with synonyms. It took me three times to google how to turn off 'smart replies' from Signal on my Android phone. I kept getting, turn off word suggestion, autocorrect and so forth, and signal I had to make an additional effort to quote. Personalized search, they call it?
Google Scholar is still quite useful for general information, but it's also generally pretty dense and hard to parse so it will take a bit of work. The days of just having a question and being able to find an easy layman-level answer about it are gone (outside of Wikipedia).
There was an economics paper published recently making an argument that we have more to fear from shitty AI/robots than good ones and I think it's spot on. (In other words, they're good enough to justify firing the person who used to do the job, but they're objectively worse at the job. What ends up happening is aggregate wealth goes down because not only are the jobs gone, but the job itself is being done less efficiently than before.)
The point where Google (and Yelp and a bunch of other services) started to turn was when they stopped just being a thing you go to when you need them to being things that get in your face to anticipate your needs. They're bad at anticipating our needs in any way that's actually useful for us a lot of the time, so it ends up putting a lot of cognitive load on us to make sure the apps/services are working as intended. Instead of just using technology as a tool as we need it, we end up needing to babysit technology that's being fussy, opaque, and unpredictable. And babysitting is the best case scenario, in other cases it's being outright hostile.
And the quality of results there seems to have gone downhill now too. I can turn to Scholar to find a lost article, only to have to go through pages. Again, I think it's also geared towards the common and the popular at the expense of the detailed and the idiosyncratic - it's just using a different definition of common and popular.
Ten years ago, I gave up subject specific databases for Google Scholar. For most of that time, I was happy. Nowadays I wish I had access to a subject specific db.
As for paywalls: I sometimes find better results by adding filetype:pdf to the title of an article in DDG than I do in scholar. They're both completely hit and miss. I think they're trying to respect copyright more nowadays than before. Unfortunately, of all the unreasonable copyrights in the world, journals and academic books are the most unreasonable, since they're trying to get libraries to buy them.
They're aiming for the "80" part of the "80/20 rule", and in the process are really good at answering natural-language queries but very bad at keyword-ified queries. So many people use their service for answering otherwise basic questions that it's become a basic-question-answering system. I suspect also, under the hood, that when the user leaves the search page and never returns they consider that a successful serve and reinforce that sort of behavior more. Whereas I leave to search the same thing on other engines because Google became useless for my job, which requires specific answers to technical questions. So I think there might be some built-in positive-feedback loops that are reinforcing this sort of behavior. Either that or peoples' queries really are that boring, all the time.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but could it be that structured days is generally what people are looking for? It might feel like search results are low quality because... most of them are. Google has commoditized search and delivers extremely high quality results for specific types of data. Now, anything that doesn't fit into that box feels like it's relatively low quality.
> This is extremely ironic, since Google originally rose to popularity because it was much better at "real" search than the competitors.
Here's a thought I had while reading your comment...
what about a hybrid of HN/lobste.rs/reddit and old-school hierarchical lists. Basically, a place where people can upload websites and such that are relevant to a search term.
Say you wanted to know about "how to make bread". You would first check if this query is already defined, creating it if not. Then, you could comment/post links on the topic, and see other's links sorted by some hybrid of upvotes/downvotes and human moderation/curation. The point would less be about having a discussion, but more crowd-sourcing "what pages are most relevant to this query".
From the perspective of a user who doesn't participate, this looks like a hierarchically sorted collection of queries/topics and links relevant thereto, sorted by relevance.
usually I need to append "reddit" to the end of my search string in order to find something that is not blogspam or autogenerated-seo-optimized content
The funny moment of all this is how Google is becoming the type of search browser that existed in 2000. Altavista, webcrawler, yahoo, and others were the default search engines, but then they started to let advertisers override the search results to be inserted in the search results. Initially, the results were clearly delineated, but over time, they fell in and the note of it being an “ad” fell away.
To be fair, the internet is being conflated into a platform to drive people into walled gardens, and google is trying to deal with helping people into them.
I wondered how long it would take for the site to descend into the dark patterns that caused google to ascend.
Image Search has also been completely ruined by their push for ML based results without even checking if it's better.
Years ago I could Image Search a frame of a film and get the film title almost every time, now I get a generic "Street" or "Man" search term and then a bunch of photos that have streets in them with a similar color palette which are never from the film.
They've got so excited by the tech that they can identify an object or setting that they've forgotten just finding the same image elsewhere online and using the context of the web page would give a better answer.
Luckily, there's an alternative: images.yandex.com
It effortlessly does both reverse image search AND image objects search. Results are usually so good, it almost seems like Google decided to cripple their image search on purpose.
If there's one party I'd be even less comfortable sharing my data with than Google, it would be a Russian company. Not because I think Russians are evil or anything, but rather because there's even less accountability and oversight (if any at all) with what they do with that data than we have in the US/Europe.
That's specifically reverse image search, I find that image search itself has gotten much better at generic search terms.
I agree that the generic results on reverse search are annoying, but my guess is that it isn't replacing exact results, but rather giving you something when there would've been no results at all. If you search for an exact frame that does exist, it usually finds it correctly.
Google Search for DIY project images: Get 90% Pinterest results that end up just linking to a random machine generated page with garbage text and a few tangentially related pictures.
Google Search for someones Instagram handle: Get one Instagram result and endless pages of sites that scrape Instagram and have the person's profile interspersed with ads.
Try Bing's image search. It's actually very good. Bigger previews, ability to easily download, smart ML-driven similarity search (you can even draw a rectangle of an image to find something similar to that area), better at suggesting related images, nicer UI overall. The mobile app is also much nicer than Google's when it comes to images.
I switched over to Bing a couple months ago because Google's image search now shows very tiny previews on the right side of the screen. They're often barely bigger than the image I click on. Been using Google since 1999, but I guess I look at images enough it pushed me over.
The founders of Google knew very well that this was what advertising did to a search engine (and then they did it anyway).
This is "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives" from their original paper about Google in 1998 [1]:
> Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
> Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
Two things surprised me about this article. First, I thought Yelp had an abysmal reputation. Threatening businesses with a poor review if they didn't buy an ad. Taking money for boosting a businesses rating. Was this all just FUD from its competitors?
And second, I find Amazon's product search to be almost complete crap. I can't count how many times I've moved back to Google to do a product search because I know the product is out there I just can't remember the name, Amazon comes up with nothing and google has it on the first page. Again, is this only me?
But the complaints are mostly that Yelp's policy is inconsistent. Its review filter removes good reviews and keep bad reviews, at times, and the customer service is terrible. And the ratings are subjective and mostly useless and still used everywhere on the site regardless.
The same applies to Google/YouTube, Amazon, etc. though, so I'd say you're just seeing the availability bias; there been a fair number of positive success stories about YouTube, Amazon, etc. posted on HN whereas business owners on Yelp are too small audience-wise to get a lot of traction.
The only real competitor to Yelp is Google; maybe Google boosted up negative news stories on Yelp but it could just as easily be the newspapers themselves fanning fake controversy.
A friend rented out her place to a tenant who was a total nightmare and then he went and made a yelp page for her as a person, because she's a real estate agent, defaming her on yelp (not for real estate business, but for being his landlord). So there's now a yelp page with her face on it and angry "reviews" from this tenant and his partner, and she has no way to remove it. Yelp refuses to do anything.
Amazon product search usually works for me but I often use google to make sure there isn't a better price somewhere else on the internet. So I end up repeating my search terms to Google anyway.
Can't businesses opt-out of Yelp by sending a cease and desist letter or eventually suing Yelp?
Restaurants can't opt-out because they would no longer be discoverable on the internet, but a real estate agent should be able to opt-out of Yelp and still be reasonably successful.
What exactly would Yelp be ceasing and desisting here? Surely things like the name, location and contact info for a business are public information that can be freely reproduced. Everything else on Yelp (primarily user reviews/photos) aren't the property of the business in the first place.
If anything I'd expect the example in GP's case to be a rare instance where even US defamation law might be helpful to the landlord. I don't see that extending to businesses in general though.
It doesn't sound to me like this is a problem? Someone had a poor experience with a landlord, and posted about it on Yelp.
Perhaps this was all the tenant being unreasonable, but that's not the sort of thing Yelp is going to be able to judge. This is how reviews work: over time you build up a picture out of a lot of unreliable data points.
I agree, the downfall of Yelp was its hard push for people to install the app, e.g. requiring an account to see all the reviews, requiring the app to see the photos. Why do that when I can get better results directly in my browser?
On top of that, once you install the app you get constant push notifications and the reviews are shit anyway.
There are plenty of places I love which have 3 stars and plenty I hate which are 5. Granted, Google and other crowdsourced review platforms have the same issues.
Personally, I've fallen back to critics reviews of restaurants. At least they have a reputation to uphold if they give a good review to a bad restaurant.
Tired of all this ads. I understand that some level of Ads is required (nothing's free!). But this becoming ridiculous (and I'm not talking about personal data mining). Instead of just whining about that, I decided to move away from this:
- My email/calendar/contacts on paid Fastmail.com account using my own domain. I don't want to deal with all the work required to maintain an email server: spam filtering, prevent being falsely flagged as a spam server, .... And I use an alias per account I have. For example: amazon@mydomain.com, hn@mydomain.com, ... So if my email got spammed/stolen, first I'll advise the site and I'll just create a new one (ex: amazon2@mydomain.com).
- Host my own federated servers like Matrix, Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfeed, ...
- Host my own Git "social server" with public and private repos.
- ...
I think we have to come back to what the Web/Internet was before: a federation of servers working together (ex: Usenet). When I talk about that to people, they don't understand. I then use a simple example of this: email servers. You can have an email account on any servers on the internet and send a message to anyone who have an email account on another server. You CAN'T do that with FB/Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp, ...
Big corps shoot themselves in the foot. People have limits and they are not that stupid. When you taste a new (old) way to exchange with other people without being flooded with Ads (Mastodon, Matrix, ... or simply emails), you can't come back.
Some people do have limits, but the crowd, on the opposite, is lazy and hypnotized. From their perspective, you're the one missing out all the fun and ease of digital life/world. It's you (a black sheep) who can't be reached via the most obvious communication channels (FB, WhatsApp, Viber, etc).
There's a saying that lotteries are a tax on people who are bad at math. Sounds like your thesis is that ads are a tax on people who don't know how to set up a server, and I agree.
I was about to set up my own domain with a paid email account too. My reason was privacy. But then I was wondering even if I have my own encrypted email service, does it defeat the purpose if the sender is using Gmail? Since Google would still scan that email and figure out things about me. Any advice? Thanks.
Google being evil, yet again. In fact, while I understand the frustration of Expedia and Trip Advisor, I think it is a bit more complicated.
I don't think so. I think that the hotels module may be useful, but it's also confusing. In particular, it breaks the user expectation that Google search will give you the best results from the open web, and not give you a "module", particularly not one with paid placement. That is, IMHO, Google is overstepping its bounds as a search engine by providing (even useful) modules. And I think this has a negative cognitive impact on users (in particular, it ruins their intuition about what they are seeing, who's paying for what, and why).
Only for people like us, technically inclined and on this forum and probably those who saw Google being born and innovate its way to the top of the market. Most of the people I know find google's results insanely useful. It's no longer a search engine or an app. You want to find out something? You "google" it. They do not distinguish it as "just" a search engine.
>it breaks the user expectation that Google search will give you the best results from the open web,
That expectation is no longer true. That probably died a decade ago when Android started gaining steam all over the world. And certainly not true for those who don't remember the world before smartphones or when gmail offering unlimited storage was "big" deal.
Users don't like it when you change context, the underlying assumption of the interaction. Usually they can't articulate what's bothering them. In this case, they are sub-consciously expecting "fair" results, e.g. something consistent with the "Google Bargain" back in the beginning, that Goog would give you great, fair, results, ranked by utility, and add only a few simple, mostly text ads that you are easy to tune out completely if you want to. The Bargain has changed in many significant ways over the years, and things like the Hotels Module certainly subvert the Bargain in a serious way, and I would argue it's unsettling to people (although I don't have hard data on that).
Not only for "find something". Google is everyone's launchpad, people google 'facebook' to go there, or really any question that the cumbersome mobile interface does not make easy to answer.
A year ago or so I was listening to podcasts on YouTube while falling asleep. I didn't mind an occasional ad. Then they ramped up the ads like crap. Easily every 5 minutes or so (the funniest ones were the "Troubles falling asleep?" ads that jolted me awake). I stopped almost completely ever since. The sad thing is that I would gladly pay for the service, but I'm not going to pay a company that uses my data AND my money. Plus I have to use it with an account at google. No thanks. I have no hopes for an ethical competitor to arise, there's simply no market for it.
YouTube premium costs 10$ a month. Anyone living in first world (while posting on hacker news) countries and spend hours a week on youtube shouldn't be complaining about ads on youtube.
How about complaining on behalf of all the people who can't afford $10 a month, like teenagers, people in lesser developed countries, etc? You're happy for them to be spammed with toxic advertising while people who are better off get an opt-out?
I'm consistently shocked how many people haven't installed uBlock Origin (a plugin for Firefox and Chrome). It takes about 3 seconds and you never hear or see an ad again.
mps-youtube is an excellent workaround for this (though it's limited by a per-day API limit that applies to all users of the app AFAICT).
The best feature is that you can compile a playlist, through search, manual selection, etc., and save that locally to disk. Then play through the selection(s) as you like.
You aren't limited to playback through mps-youtube, as you can also use other tools -- mpv with its '--ytdl' flag will play YouTube (and many other sites') content, including from a saved playlist of URLs (see above).
There's a lot of good and useful content on YouTube. The platform itself increasingly gets in the way of that. I also don't want to be personally tracked or have my history recorded, so I (all but) never make use of the service whilst logged in. Given that I've ceased logging in to Google at all since the fall of G+, that's pretty much a certainty.
As others have mentioned, using podcast apps directly is another excellent option, and one I've been increasingly making use of.
From an outside perspective, it’s not even just “generate profits”, but also morphed into “focus only on high-margin, high-revenue products and kill everything else”. Which makes perfect sense for shareholders, but pretty much turned Google into just another soulless BigCo.
The story is that, around the time Larry Page became CEO, he went to Jobs for advice, who gave him exactly this advice. Obviously Google never sunk as far as becoming Apple, but this fits the narrative of killing Google's soul to make it a little more like a place like Apple.
There is nothing similar to Apple’s business model to Google’s.
- Apple’s users are its customers. I give Apple money and they give me stuff. Google’s customers are advertisers and others trying to reach users.
- Apple is mostly concerned with its own platform and doesn’t have services across platforms with a few exceptions (iTunes on Windows, Apple Music on Android, Apple TV+ everywhere). Google wants to be ubiquitous.
Would you please elaborate what are the issues with Apple? From my limited perspective, they indeed focus on high margin products, and deliver them with a decent quality. I use a mid 2015 Macbook and an old iPhone 6S. Pretty reliable, both as hardware and as software. Given the 4+ years of continuous usage, they aren't even that expensive.
>Obviously Google never sunk as far as becoming Apple
I too would like to hear more about this idea. I have an iPhone but don't otherwise buy into Apple's ecosystem at all. Nonetheless, I would rank Apple ahead of Google in any favorability comparison that I can think of.
Many people seem to complain about the low quality Google search but don't often offer any better alternatives. I can't help but feel like sometimes the quality of the Google search results reflect the quality of the web in general: stocked with a whole lot of spam content that people actually consume.
In my experience, DDG search results are worse, not better, and people who say otherwise are mental or lying.
I discovered the other day that DDG uses Bing for image searching because without safe searching enabled it randomly returns tons of pornography for innocuous searches like "filled torus".
Doesn't DDG rely pretty heavily on Bing period? I am under the impression that they are returning (maybe slightly augmented) Bing results for pretty much everything.
We start over with a new web. Let's take what we learned from the current one and just start with a straight-up application platform.
Create a virtual architecture, what would traditionally have been called a Virtual Machine before the term was overloaded, comprised of a simple instruction set and memory mapped devices (ideally simple enough that you could write an interpreter for it in an afternoon). Write an LLVM backend for it. Sandbox it by default so that it isn't even allowed to pull data from anywhere other than the same socket it came in on without permissions, or play sound, or anything an advertiser thinks is a good idea. Don't over-complicate the rendering by forcing some kind of automated re-flow crap, just provide the relevant display metrics directly to the program (resolution, px density, viewing distance, orientation, etc.) and let it choose how to best represent itself.
With travel booking it's hard to have sympathy for anyone, I don't really care if "evil" Google defeats or buys up the other brand. I pretty much feel ripped off no matter what service I use.
I also call up the hotel directly most of the time to see if I can get a better rate or room, often works.
With air travel I want the one with the best grid to win, if I have to launch a new search every time I try a new date or nearby airport it's a no-go for me.
I have no idea why people would ever choose to deal with a middleman than the merchant directly, especially when they have their bank as the arbiters in disputes since they're paying with credit cards.
Because the middleman can be significantly cheaper.
This is for straightforward business reasons: if you're visiting a hotel's site directly, you clearly already have a strong interest in it, and are less likely to be comparing by prices.
Whereas if you're advertising rates on an aggregator, you're competing much more strongly on price, and are forced to provide discounts.
And for a significant number of people, it never occurs to them to check an aggregator to save money.
When traveling, I'm almost always saving 30-50% off the prices listed on hotels/lodging on their sites simply by using one of the aggregators. (Discounts tend to especially skyrocket when booking day-before.)
The hotel brands I stay at (Hyatt/Hilton/Marriott/etc) offer the cheapest pricing directly on their website, with best price guarantees giving discounts or free nights if another website offers it for cheaper. I've never seen it cheaper anywhere else though, so I'm pretty sure they have their computer systems configured not to allow it to happen.
And I reserve a cancelable price so that I can always see if they lowered the price before the cancelation deadline, sometimes yes, sometimes not.
Even if I wasn't staying at a brand that offered a best price guarantee, I would still contact them and offer them the chance to win business directly by being lower than the aggregator and avoid paying commission.
Yes, that's been my experience too with the big business hotels.
I'm talking mainly about everything else that isn't a humongous chain, which is actually the vast majority of properties in most cities -- boutique hotels, small hotels, 4-unit guesthouses, generally with 15 rooms or fewer. (Just my personal preference as to where I like to stay.) The difference between "list" price and aggregator price can be enormous -- usually because I'm booking the last room. (The actual last room, not a fake one -- the property disappears from the listings after I do.)
And maybe it would be the "morally" right thing to do to contact them directly and get them to match the price, but it's not worth the hassle and risk to me -- being put on hold for 10 minutes, dealing with someone on the phone for whom English isn't often their first language (when traveling abroad), time zone differences when nobody's at the front desk, risking the room disappearing while waiting for an e-mail reply, and above all the chances of a date or price or other mix-up when transacted verbally.
If I do it through the aggregator, I lock in the room instantly, with instant e-mail confirmation that all the details are correct. Zero worries, zero mixups.
There is no moral imperative to contact the merchant directly, it's the merchant's choice to use a middleman if they want the benefits of price discrimination or marketing power.
However, I assume I would be better taken care of by the merchant if I contact them directly rather then go through an agent, although I can see if you are going to a very small merchant who needs the agent more, then you may get better service from the agent.
I haven't experienced that when dealing with any major US airline/hotel/car rental brand. They all have their own websites.
If not, I can usually email the merchant and work something out that avoids them paying a middleman. With one merchant in a developing country, I even hashed it out over WhatsApp! But I always like to communicate directly with the person or organization providing me the product or service.
Online air travel UX has been a dumpster fire since the very first booking sites 20 years ago. The major players mostly share the same flaws and try to mitigate them in the same crappy ways. It’s almost as if there is a single query system underlying them all, and their UIs are merely similar-looking wrappers around that same old clunky system :)
Thankfully Google hasn't killed [ITA Matrix][0] yet. They bought the company to make Google flights, but their original site is so much better, even if it's a bit slow.
To book flights you find from them, use the free [bookwithmatrix.com][1]
I like the UI it provides to find the solution for the problem "I want to travel from near City A to near City B some time around November, and I don't want to spend too much." Specifically, I like the "calendar of lowest fares" view.
I also like the ease of inputting advanced search parameters.
If you're going to use it to make a list of flights Google Flights is usually better.
> This seems like unequivocally a good thing, no? Booking knows it can’t depend on the Google channel, that its future is best secured by innovating and building a customer experience that convinces users to go to Booking directly. That is competition working to the benefit of customers!
This is my impression too. I avoid Expedia like the plague. I only use TripAdvisor to read the forums. Booking doesn't even rely on SEO. They don't have a forum or don't make content. Booking has lots of dark patterns when booking but it just works and it has lots of choices at pretty good prices. The experience and the convenience is why I was booking at Booking.com in the last 5-6 years. I don't even use Airbnb. Booking has apartments too.
Expedia and TripAdvisors are similar to tourist traps in the touristic hot spots. They leveraged their SEO positions to grab whatever money they can get. Now that Google has figured out they can get some of that money, they got in. It's very easy, just move the juice to the partners and charge them money for that.
Expedia/TripAdvisor/Traditional-travel-agencies will need to turn their businesses around otherwise they are going the way of Thomas Cook.
I find it really refreshing how Ben reflects on his past writings and admits when he was wrong than explains why his initial thinking was false. Really makes him a powerful thinker and writer.
Apple has to be mulling an entry into search. Apple Search would be the default search engine for iPhone users, the majority of whom conduct almost all searches on their phone.
Being the one aggregator to rule them all has so many advantages. Google can extract outsized profits from almost every single industry because people are too myopic/lazy/indifferent to go directly to the source.
Apple could change the game. It could use its war chest to build a search engine as good or better than Google. It would forsake some profit because Apple Search would, through deep iOS integration, improvement of Siri, and bolstering of upcoming AR offerings, create ever greater lock-in to the Apple ecosystem. Furthermore, Apple's entry would give bargaining power back to content providers, galvanizing content creation on the margins.
There is an iron rule in business: competition will eventually erode profits. It's not a matter of if, but when. Will it be in 5 years, 10, 30, or 50?. GE used to be a seemingly unflappable industrial powerhouse. Look at it now. Google can stay way ahead of the competition if it continues to leapfrog on AI, but as soon as it becomes more iterative, or if the government decides that it's a monopoly, its decline would be non-linear. Apple faces another dilemma with a similar outcome. If some technological shift or government intervention opens up the App Store and iMessage to all mobile hardware, profits would drop precipitously. The only antidote is massive R&D and innovation.
Swipe down on the home screen and type some stuff, and you get “Siri suggested websites”. It also answers basic questions and gives previews of relevant parts of the sites.
"Siri suggested websites" (the thing I mentioned in my first post) are not from other search engines, they're from Apple's.
Same goes for the "Siri suggested website" when you type some terms into Safari. The top website on the autocomplete list is selected by Apple's search engine.
Ah, my apologies for the misunderstanding. I was not aware of this. My point still stands, since relatively few people treat Spotlight as a discrete search engine. Its layout and features are not conducive to anything but the most elementary research. Moreover, it is not accessible through web browsers.
Yeah, my post was definitely intended in a sort of "it's crazy but it's true" way, because yeah, Apple has gone through insane amounts of engineering effort to create a working search engine that crawls the entire web and does a decent job of selecting top websites, but you can't use it anywhere except in a few chosen UI elements inside iOS/macOS. The whole thing is hidden in plain sight.
The fact that they went through all that trouble makes me even more convinced that they're considering a bigger entry into search. They're dipping their toes in the water.
Google Search becomes less and less usable/desirable. The pressure for growth by Wall Street and the lack of profitable products besides Search would be the existential threat to Google Search.
Well, it would be in theory. The problem is mobile. Since both major OS are tightly controlled by Google and Apple, Google Search won't be challenged by any alternative. Apple won't give their search profits away to push DDG or any other company, and Google wouldn't even think about that.
Any search engine that wants to cut into Google's market share has to start on the desktop web, buy the iOS integration for billions and would need to develop an alternative to Android, or call on regulators to force Google into showing a selection screen as they did to Microsoft.
On a bigger picture, it is concerning that all big tech is now growing by squeezing their existing assets as opposed to by gaining more users. For example, Microsoft Windows used to cost me $20/yr in licensing cost, no wait coasts $100/yr. Similarly number of ads in FB, Twitter and Google has gone up by 5X. All these stunning quarterly results are mainly coming from squeeze. I wonder how long this can go on.
The quality of a product is subjective, but I dont see any example in this article of big tech squeezing out a competitor with an inferior product.
Yelp (despite the glossy profile in buzzfeed news) has not really advanced the product in a long time. Their site was always extremely frustrating, forcing you into using the app. And they were super slow to add things like delivery.
In comparison Google Maps is a search engine for the physical world. They’ve done all sorts of complex things like using street view to correctly place a business on the map, adding duplex for making reservations. Even for reviews, I trust the reviews from the meal delivery apps a lot more as they are based on real orders. If I want a detailed review, sites like Eater and local blogs are more useful (and are ranked higher than yelp now). These are all areas Yelp could have invested in, instead they kept the product largely the same.
Likewise with Expedia, their website uses every dark pattern in the book, and they got completely blindsided by Booking.com with a superior agency business model (that also means it makes more sense to go straight to their website).
I used to use yelp for reviews, now i use google. Likewise I used to use google for products, now I use Amazon. Flights and hotels I’m mostly using google. In all cases it’s because the product is better.
This is by far the most compelling pitch I have heard Yelp give for itself: “The big companies are full of spam and misinformation, while we take the time to get reviews right.” It is hard not wonder just how much more popular Yelp’s product might be if this message were spread as stridently as its anti-Google arguments.
If only it were that simple. Yelp does not personally review reviews. Nobody from Yelp has ever called me to make sure I got my review right and I wasn't being unreasonable. Ensuring that reviews aren't spam is an algorithmic problem. Yes Yelp has some features which provide hints to the algorithm but at the end of the day it's about ML. For every upvote from a fellow reviewer on Yelp, Google has 100 other data points on me as a reviewer. So who is going to get the algo right, Yelp, or Google?
My personal experience has been that 4.2 stars on Google means the meal will be good, 5 stars on Yelp means it's a trendy trap with bad food and worse service which I will not enjoy.
I like the Booking.com approach of focusing on their product and website so that users come to it directly (I must say though that there are many things I don't like about their site, like all the "1 last room at this price book quickly!!"). Yelp shot itself in the foot by not letting mobile users read reviews without downloading the app. It's not worth most people to download the app for it.
For travel I usually go to Kayak directly. Their site is simple and useful. But I must admit that seeing all the options on a map is pretty useful and I often use the hotel module in Maps. For me Maps is the best product Google ever made since their initial search engine.
> This is by far the most compelling pitch I have heard Yelp give for itself: “The big companies are full of spam and misinformation, while we take the time to get reviews right.” It is hard not wonder just how much more popular Yelp’s product might be if this message were spread as stridently as its anti-Google arguments.
Probably because the blowback would be louder than the message. The heresay I've heard is that they hide the good reviews if you don't pay them, and hide the bad reviews if you do.
The first and most obvious way that Google showed users more ads was by literally inserting more ads into mobile search results
So if it wasn’t already clear why Google never allowed any type of content blocking framework in Chrome for mobile and iOS has had it for five years, it should be clear now.
So Google pays Apple a reported $8 billion a year to be the default search engine while Apple still builds in a framework to block those very ads.
This article doesn’t seem to directly address the overarching reason Google is sidestepping irrelevancy - the increasing value of data and AI analysis of it.
As data becomes even more valuable than oil [1], few orgs are as well positioned to capitalize on it than Google. With their massive trove of user activity since almost the dawn of the Internet age, combined with the purchase of Deep Mind, the kind of business and strategic intelligence Google can deduct will be invaluable.
Being more effective at selling ads, as the article addresses, is just the start of it.
When I click on the product ratings of some of the PLAs on Google, I am redirected to the landing page. But actually I am supposed to be redirected to a page aggregating the ratings from different sources hosted by Google.
I think Google might be suffering from revenue pressure since navigating users to the advertisers' landing page will let the advertiser pay Google directly. And obviously it will harm the user experience since the ratings are actually aggregated from different sellers and will be incomplete on the landing page while the user wants to see all the ratings and reviews when he clicks on them.
A major antitrust issue is that too much competition is annoying for users. I'm not going to check every airline carrier when booking a flight, I will use an aggregator. Same thing for hotels, restaurants, etc.
Look at the current streaming environment: it's becoming highly fragmented and I predict when the dust settles there will only be 3 major players, there's only so much content an individual can consume and is willing to pay. Google's role as the aggregator for queries will be incredibly difficult to disrupt as long as there is some friction to using another service.
It's still very cumbersome to type a search on mobile, and having to type a url first or launch another app is almost half a minute more. That alone drives people to google. The rest is just google taking advantage of users that have fallen in its trap. IMHO, if these major companies like expedia stopped going after mobile aggressively , that might inconvenience users enough so that they would switch to use a desktop for their travel searches of deals, where they have much more control
>In this case the unique product is demand — users. And this is where I am tempted to defend Google: at the end of the day, the company has the dominant position in its value chain largely by providing a better product.
This is the gist of it; Google, despite all the ads, and SEO spam, and other unscrupulous crap, still has the best tech. I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine, atleast on desktop, but I still have to swithc to google 1/5ths of my critical info searches.
I thought the quote from the Yelp CEO was interesting. I mean, if Yelp was actually more skilled at helping the customer find the relevant data than Google, then that would be a compelling reason to use Yelp. But is his claim accurate? Is Google search optimizing for attention?
It's hard to see how that could be, honestly. Nobody browses search result pages for fun. Whether they're succeeding or not, it's hard to picture Google optimizing result pages for anything other than "get the user on to their most relevant (and/or lucrative) destination as absolutely quickly as we can manage."
If I were Yelp, I would not try Stratechery's arguments here. What they should be saying is, "Google's search results for restaurants are crap. If you use us, your valuable time and money will be better spent than if you trust Google." Honestly, this is what I always worry about first when I look at online reviews. Is it honest and is it an accurate predictor of how I will feel if I choose this product? I have to confess, Yelp has not done a much better job engendering that trust in me than Google has. Not that I trust either very much, especially about restaurants. But if Yelp were able to crack that nut, I would be hugely grateful, and a loyal fan for life.
Oof. I mistakenly shorted Yelp before their earnings release expecting the same results, but they ended up jumping 15%. Not that they've performed well YTD.
If you really want ad free, non-capitalism polluted search results, why don't you ask the government to make better one? And we all know it's not the answer
A side note: for anyone not aware (or confused by Silicon Valley tradition on constantly rewriting origin stories), TripAdvisor started in the dot com bubble as a B2B site. They clearly stated their business model was to provide reviews to other sites. Only that after the bubble burst, TripAdvisor had none left. They then basically invented modern SEO: long descriptive URLs, pages pulled out of a db with keyword variations in mind, constantly refreshing content with user submissions, and, the killer, buying links to influence Google’s naive ranking methods (which quickly evolved this to buying entire sites for their SEO potential). The billion dollar public valuation is entirely the result of a decade long SEO play.
(Source: was in online travel related business at the time. Was the first to buy links form Matt at SeatGuru, later acquired by TripAdvisor)
Tripadvisor's problem isn't SEO, it's Tripadvisor.
They used to have a clean, easy to use site that was useful. As they've optimized and metricized the site to death, it's impossible to use. Harder to use == shittier reviews == lower visits.
Then they started engaging with you afterward. I was on vacation and looked for a restaurant near some I-95 town, and ended up getting spam emails about "Rate your stay in Stony Creek, VA!", "how was McDonald's in Lumberton, NC". Then I stopped using the app.
Personally I find booking .com and related sites to be so aggressive and downright manipulative (“40 people are viewing this right now!” “Your dates are super popular, 70% of hotels in this city are sold out!” Showing 5 hotels that are sold out first in order to make you feel desperate to find and book anything!) that I hate using it even though they often have the best prices. So I will do my hotel searches elsewhere and the only go to booking .com once I’ve already made a decision, to check it they have a lower price. See also agoda, trip .com, etc
At some point I gave up. It just stopped being worth it for me to save $10 here or $20 there for how much of a navigation PITA these sites are. I just stick to Kayak for booking most things now. It's simple, clean, and straight-forward and they do their best to de-bullshittify the manipulative fees that some airline portals use to artificially make the fare seem low.
Maybe I'm kidding myself but I just tune that all out. In the end I read some reviews, look at what we have (and pictures), and check the price. I've generally had good results which is why I still use them.
Buy a guidebook on Amazon. It’s worth it before a significant trip and saves time compared to sifting through dreck on the Web.
But if you’re in town for business and you happen to have a few extra minutes and you think “hey, what is there to see around here,” TripAdvisor works well enough.
TripAdvisor pivoted to booking on their site as the main revenue generator for some years now. But their SEO is still king to drive visits and they have very advances tools in that area.
This isn't accurate; they've been separate companies for years now. It's kind of a winding history but the TLDR is TripAdvisor started out as an independent startup. Was purchased by a large holding company, which also owned the Expedia brand (acquired from Microsoft). They then mashed all their travel companies together and spun the resulting behemoth out as "Expedia". A little later, Expedia split TripAdvisor back off into an independent company once again so it could focus on being an OTA.
So it's true they were linked at one time, but that's no longer the case. They're distinct businesses with no formal connection.
(Disclosure: I work for TripAdvisor as an engineer, though I wasn't present when all of that went on)
> By increasing the shard integrity check rate, we potentially moved failures that were going to be found in the future into Q3. While discovering potential problems earlier is a good thing, it is possible that the hard drive failures recorded in Q3 could then be artificially high as future failures were dragged forward into the quarter. Given that our Annualized Failure Rate calculation is based on Drive Days and Drive Failures, potentially moving up some number of failures into Q3 could cause an artificial spike in the Q3 Annualized Failure Rates. This is what we will be monitoring over the coming quarters.
Wouldn't survival analysis on interval-censored data handle this problem automatically? All of your observations of failure presumably are actually interval data, where all you know is that the drive failed sometime in between the last good check and the first bad check. Then it doesn't matter if some time periods have large intervals and others have small intervals, that just affects the precision of estimates.
I stopped using IG & Twitter largely because it went from having relatively few ads to where I started seeing an ad nearly every other post. The value of the platform proportionally declined significantly and I no longer bother using them.
Google is slowly becoming useless (even with an ad blocker) because you have to hack search terms in order to get useful results. For example, I append words like "wiki" or "reddit" to get results that aren't SEO'd. Search for something generic like "computer" and you can see an example of how hard it is to get information instead of ads.
It feels like ads are definitely a bubble, and I suspect the next big tech companies will not be ad based.