Like many of you, I serve as IT support for family. Some of those family are beginning to slip cognitively, so I'd like to say: Fk google for doing this. You are confusing my relatives who cannot tell the difference between your ad-spam and actual links, and it is not an exaggeration to say that you are now taking advantage of old people.
I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock) and move them over to chatgpt when possible. If anyone has better ideas, I'm all ears.
OpenAI has even more VC money to pay back than Google ever did.
Practically all the large tech companies so far have turned to ads and monetizing users rather than charging enough to remain more neutral.
I suspect one day, when you ask ChatGPT "Can you give me a link to mid journey", you'll instead probabilistically get a link to whichever competitor paid OpenAI for the best placement.
Wait long enough and it seems like almost any company tries anything to increase its bottom line, but the main difference between ChatGPT and Google is at least ChatGPT attempts to give a paid option. Again, I don't think that'll stop them from ever getting to that point... but it'll go farther than "here's search, we pay for it via adtech".
Kagi is a similar boat - the product is what you pay for, not what they can get users to put up with.
> at least ChatGPT attempts to give a paid option. Again, I don't think that'll stop them...
Netflix also attempted to give a paid option, but now we have an "ad-supported" plan. I think that same logic of maximizing profit means that even if there are some people paying for ChatGPT, the amount of free money that is sitting on the table means that we will see "ad-supported" ChatGPT pretty soon once the low-hanging fruit for quality enhancement start to dry up, which is kind of already happening.
I'd say it's practically guaranteed. It would be wildly unprecedented to not follow up the amount of hype and fundraising in the LLM AI industry without a massive amount of enshittification following it.
Even if improvements continue for years we might already be near the peak of LLM usefulness because all of greedy and abusive dark patterns are sure to follow once the manic land grab settles down.
This is one of the reasons why I’m getting familiar with self-hosting. Local models are improving shockingly fast. I use Gemma3 27B for generating summaries of podcast transcripts, for instance.
1. The reason why ChatGPT is free despite being honestly very advanced, is that they want the general public to have an association of ChatGPT being "the default AI", just like Google is the default search engine and YouTube is the default video platform. Once they have this position they can throw as much garbage at the users as they want and nobody will care. This is why it doesn't really matter how much it costs now to capture the market, if the potential benefits are huge.
2. Once the market is captured and solidified, ads and enshittification ensue. If you're willing to put on your tin foil hat for a second, I'd tell you that as a matter of fact the technologies to integrate different services with ChatGPT are being developed right now, and once they're ready it's just a small step to make sure that ChatGPT prioritizes answers mentioning those integrated partners, which can easily be justified to users as legit quality-of-life improvements.
Maybe the answer is indeed to just buy a book and go touch some literal grass, and let the civilization drown in the sewer of disinformation it produces.
Creat your own family yahoo — a website you maintain that has links to the websites they commonly use like mail and bank. Set as home page and new tab page.
It’s a slight security risk since it shows where you have accounts.
If you are savvy, build your own search that just passes it to an LLM and returns as page.
Not Google related, but cognition and older relative relevant: The amount of predatory scamware targeted towards older adults on the app stores is infuriating. I have a family friend who is now in the early-mid stages of Alzheimer's, but is still able to live at home and enjoy her life. She gets confused and stressed out by the fake 'alert! all your photos will be deleted!!' ads that pop up when she does her adult coloring books or jigsaw puzzles on her ipad. Apple's recommended apps in this category are evil in this regard, every single one. I've had to disable $80/week 'security' subscriptions from her account more than once. It is shameful that this is allowed.
"Google (www.google.com) is a pure search engine - no weather, no news feed, no links to sponsors, no ads, no distractions, no portal litter. Nothing but a fast-loading search site. Reward them with a visit."
It's a very common story in industry. You start nimble, and disrupt bloated platforms. Then, as you grow, pressure grows and you also bloat. Then new company comes that brings nimble product and disrupt you.
Search, TV->internet video, newspapers->internet - all of them go through those cycles.
I think it's a mistake to think of these cycles as inevitable, and that it's guaranteed that some small fry will disrupt the current giants. Yes, they may have happened in the past, but large companies are much more cognizant of the cycles of disruption now than they were 30 or 40 years ago. Microsoft was a behemoth in the late 80s and they're currently number 2 market cap in the world. Many folks on this board may be too young to remember Netscape's boast of "The Browser is the OS" in the mid 90s - well, Netscape is long gone and Microsoft is still giant. Only 2 years ago you saw pronouncements that OpenAI was going to be the death knell for Google, and it was it seemed to be the kick in the pants that Google needed to get their AI story working. Facebook just basically bought all its nascent competition (Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.)
I think disrupting large players will be much harder than it was it the past.
I fully accept the heat death of the universe will eventually take down Microsoft, but I don't think that's what the comment I was responding to was really about.
You forgot the main source of pressure: you sell off equity in your company in exchange for cash. The buyers are buying the promise of future profits. At first, you still hold the vast majority of the voting rights, but over time you sell more and more and expectations rise and rise.
Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
Hence a page full of ads, and no reason to think things will ever change.
Don't worry. Our legislators around the world are hard working so this doesn't happen again, protecting us from harmful contents and cementing current industry leaders' position.
Wouldn't it be nice if some companies instead of ramping up ads for revenue passed along the value to consumers? Once they made their money back on the original investments convert to a lifestyle and provide a valuable product without squeezing every penny our of it and in the end killing it. One day maybe.
They did pass on a lot of value to consumers. They used their profits to grow, build Gmail, buy and grow YouTube, build Android.
Just running Google as-is without ads would have produced less value in the long run. Plus the SEO tide (which relied on DoubleClick ads that weren't yet owned by Google) began to rise and would've drowned Google Search much earlier if they hadn't grown.
Where I think Google took the bad (for consumers) turn was when they purchased DoubleClick and began to consolidate the entire ad business. Instead of losing money to SEO spammers, they began to make money. This put Google into a conflict of interest against their own users. Ever since then they've been piling onto that conflict of interest, draining more and more value from their products.
I feel like you'd need a new corporate structure or something, like the way an S-corp is different, but on steroids.
Because I agree, the forced obsession with "growth" at all costs, which seems necessary to operate a public company (at least in this century[1]), is imho the #1 reason why enshittification is unavoidable.
[1] I'd describe nearly all present-day corporations as fixated on quarterly results even at the expense of business viability. Something I truly don't understand is why big companies say, 75 years ago seem to have been so much less that way. If anyone has any theories I'd love to hear them.
I think there’s a middle ground between not making any money by not showing ads and plastering half the page with ads in a way that almost renders the product useless. I’m sure this was a result of a long list of promo packets that incrementally kept adding 0.01% increases to the ad impressions.
Google managed to dance the knife edge there for a lot longer than most though. AdWords made so much money in a fairly unobtrusive way, that they were able to scale it out without pissing a lot of people off. That and it was actually even sometimes useful.
They clearly decided to just say "fuck it" though. Sometime after Ruth Porat replaced Patrick Pichette and especially after Sundar took the helm (both happened while I worked there) but most especially in the last 3 years.
I remember being clever at school and showing off that if you typed "nukes" it would display an advert for ebay down the right-side. "Buy Nukes on EBay".
But like always they didn't stop once they were a bit profitable with a few ads, instead they got greedier and greedier and made their product worse once they captured most of the market, I have wonder if there can exist some variant of capitalism that punishes becoming a bit too greedy, like a soft ceiling (tied to the minimum wage) over which most of the profits go to taxes, and a hard one where all profits over that go to taxes plus mandatory social work by its owners/executives.
> instead they got greedier and greedier and made their product worse once they captured most of the market
I wouldn't necessarily put it that way because not Google, nor any company, has moral capacity. They don't have souls. What they do have are incentive structures, and those flip when the stock goes public.
Pre-IPO: the board is mostly founders and VCs holding paper wealth. Their shares aren't liquid, so the only way they get paid is by making the pie way bigger for some future exit. That means "grow, grow, grow." and that means playing nice with customers.
Post-IPO: the board is legally stuffed with "independent" directors, whose pay comes in RSUs tied to the stock price. Now the shares are instantly tradable, and shareholders who can bail in a quarter want to see results in a quarter. Directors translate that into exec comp, and suddenly management's job is "make the stock go up right now."
Some theorists point out the obvious hack: take away the hot potato. Slow the game down. Make shares harder to flip, make earnings less frequent. If you could only trade stock once a year, you'd actually care what the company looks like in a year. If they only reported results annually, you'd be forced to think in years, not quarters.
Upside: management can focus on products and customers instead of quarterly guidance theater. Downside: investors hate being locked up, and capital gets more expensive because people price in that illiquidity. Transparency drops, execs get more room to bullshit.
It's a tradeoff: you can have maximum liquidity and hyper-efficient capital markets, but then you get short-term brain damage. Or you can slow the game down, but then you're basically asking people to trust managers more and accept worse capital efficiency.
Nobody;s found the perfect middle yet. LTSE[1] tried, dual-class shares are a kludge, and otherwise we just live with the cycle: grow like crazy private, IPO, then spend the rest of your corporate life addicted to quarterly earnings.
AT&T eventually gave up and agreed to divest of the RBOCs because they didn't like their chances with the regulators. Imagine a Big Tech company having so little faith today in their ability to manipulate the government between lobbying, campaign contributions, and the most modern and economical play, stroking the President's ego.
The founders of the company still have a controlling stake in the business. External shareholders have little leverage.
Going public gave Google a lot of nearly-free money to grow, and it's how you've gotten both Gmail and Google+. But more importantly, it allowed them to offer much higher total comp packages by issuing more stock on the go. So I think they're prisoners of the stock market only insofar that if the stock stops going up, they're gonna have a harder time hiring and retaining talent.
So in a way, it's the employees holding the company hostage. They're simultaneously complaining about the innocence lost and stating their implicit preference for this outcome by demanding top-of-the-line comp.
If you want to be paid the same as at Microsoft or Facebook, you become Microsoft or Facebook.
That didn't last long till they added paid results but at least they highlighted the paid results from the organic results... Those were they days when they used to have the motto of not being Evil. Accordingly, now, they are.
Yeah, I remember the long slow fade-out of the colored boxes the ads occupied. They went from like, pastel orange and green boxes, to lighter boxes, to even lighter boxes, to no boxes at all with the word Ad in a little symbol, to the way it is today where you have "Sponsored" on a different line than the ad, and you have to scroll below the fold to even see the first organic result, if there even is one, and only 2-5 organic results are even shown by default. And also of course in the mix, the AI Overview made up from I assume a handful of the spammy results being thrown through the cheapest, smallest model possible and summarized.
Nope, there were no ads at the beginning. It was a big deal when they announced AdWords. And the ads were unobtrusive and often quite useful at the beginning.
Google was quite vocal about clearly marking ads, in contrast to Overture, Yahoo, and others who mixed ads into search results in the late 90s / early 2000s. I think the period when Google lightened, then entirely removed the colored background that made it easy to identify ads was an inflection point in their fall from being a company that genuinely focused on users towards becoming just another megacorp run by profit-maximizing MBAs.
No, they had no ads for several years. AdWords were introduced in 02000, at which point Google had existed (initially as google.stanford.edu) for four years, since 01996, which was 40% of the amount of time the Web had even existed. I started using Google in probably 01998, when people on Slashdot got excited about how much better their search quality was than AltaVista, but it probably wasn't until 01999 that I switched over completely—at first AltaVista still had better coverage.
Not at the very beginning. But when they first added ads, they were clearly marked in the top with a yellow background (and they didn't take over the whole page), and on the righthand column (and they were clearly marked as sponsored links).
I'd have to dredge it up but someone put up a site that showed the visual changes to ads over the past 15 years, and they've become more and more indistinguishable from organic search results, and they've taken over more of the page.
A great visual history of enshittification, and also how "growth at all costs" capitalism leads to that enshittification. Google was still taking in money hand over fist in the mid 00s when they had a few, clearly marked ads, but capitalism demands the line arcs upwards no matter what.
My memory says that wasn't such a big selling point. When Google first came out it blew all other search engines away in terms of result quality.
If, back then, Yahoo and Altavista were minimalist and Google was a garish nightmare of ads and flashing gifs and nested banners and affiliate buttons, I would still have happily used it for the results.
Google's search interface is still reasonably clean IMO. Nowhere near its minimal best. Yes there are ads and "sponsored results" and shopping frames and all that crap, but they really aren't everything that's wrong with Google Search.
Quality of results and inability to specify queries beyond vague suggestions are the worst things.
I don’t have an image to prove it, but I remember google making it a point and bragging of having clearly differentiated ads (in pale yellow I think?).
It was a big contrast and a signal of classy goodwill, back in the age of replicating popups and garish blinking text.
Exactly this. I remember when it was just a couple small links in a yellow banner you could scroll past. Same with YouTube, the ads used to just be a banner under or beside the video but didn't interfere with the main content.
Once the ads got invasive, I installed ublock and haven't looked back. I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about that.
Of course it was the quality of the search results thanks to the algorithm (Page Rank) that at the time was unmatched and amazingly resilient, compared to the competition, against the primitive SEO tactics of the day (key word spamming etc.).
However, the lean interface without blinkentags and ads was definitely a selling point. Also, IIRC, the guarantee that you'd only get sites that actually contained all the words in your search query (that feature is long gone, too, of course).
I guess it depends how you define "selling point" exactly.
The interface and speed were great, no doubt. Did you ever encounter another search engine that produced similar or better results that you otherwise would have used, but Google's interface sold you? I never did, so it wasn't a selling point for me.
For me at least, it wasn't that either. It was the quality of the results.
I would have put up with slow bloated adware Google results of early 2000s, compared to fast minimal sleek interface with results of Yahoo/Altavista/anything else I tried.
The results were good. I remember admitting that for many things I really could have used 'I'm Feeling Lucky' and bypass the SERP entirely, but I disliked relinquishing that much control, so I never made a habit of it. Today I don't think I could trust it much of the time.
I'm not sure what you are unclear about, but yes I was re-emphasizing my point for you.
There were lots of "differentiators" that did not really matter, including speed. The differentiator was result quality, not how or when they were presented.
I remember when Google Maps allowed you to enter "*" as the only search term, and you'd see every business in the area. Not just a portion of those who had paid for placement. Those were the days...
I knew larry and sergei socially when they were grad students. I completely believe that when they started that was a genuine sentiment. I wonder at what point they realized personally that that was gone
I'm old enough to remember when the web didn't exist ... and when I dumped Altavista and Ask Jeeves and co for the cool kids: Google.
I'm fucking livid. Well actually: mildly unimpressed. The cool kids rarely last as such and "do no evil" ended up behind a green tent and a single shot was heard.
Actually, I am slightly stressed over this whole thing.
With what kind of assurance that history won't repeat itself? If anything, the rate at which companies enshittify has increased. Instead of taking 10 years now it takes more like 3 (or less).
Life is change. Sometimes that’s worth fighting for and sometimes it’s worth fighting against. Is the current Google worth that battle for you? I’d rather see what comes next.
They do the same thing on the Play Store, for example I just searched for Firefox and the first result is a sponsored spot for Opera. Does Apple do that on the App Store?
A funnier example: searching for Amazon gives Temu as the first result. Searching for Temu gives Shein as the first result. Searching for Shein gives Shein as the first result! ...but only because they outbid everyone else for the ad spot on their own name, resulting in Double Shein: https://i.imgur.com/0buR8Hq.png
This is also true on Apple's app stores, to be fair. I didn't know this until I got a MacBook Pro recently and my assumption that Apple's controls would be tighter than Google's was proven quite wrong when I opened the Mac App Store for the first rime.
For all of those app stores, the current approach prints them money and lets them claim impartiality, while still allowing some control through acceptance rules, ToSes and automated security measures. All those things scale well. Any other approach I can think of ends up having corner cases that involve human support or interfacing with regulatory systems - and these things do not scale well.
I don't know if curation is really the problem. Nearly every other platform has a search that when you search for "Mr Beast" on YouTube or "Elon Musk" on X they know you mean the popular one and not some 2-bit dork's fan page or parody that happens to have those words in the title/keywords.
I think they just (A) have no idea what they're doing when it comes to search and (B) the scamware that fills all their App Stores makes Apple a ton of extra money compared to people finding the real apps which usually are monetized outside the app store due to Apple's absurd revshare.
There's that saying about "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating." The apple and play stores are like that. They don't care what you buy as long as they get to control the choices you choose from.
Yes they do. Their search already sucks in normal circumstances—I remember searching for “Pinboard” (the bookmarking service) and had to scroll by thirteen pinball (the game) apps before starting to see Pinboard apps—but you can type in the exact name of the app you want had have an ad for a competitor above it. Not only is it allowed, it’s encouraged.
Same thing happened to me. I wanted to get "Fit Notes" - a free and ad-free app. I searched for it and the first result is some adware/subscription-based crap. I skip over. I scroll down part the "Sponsored: Related to your search" section with a whole bunch of others. I am still seeing more paid/in-app-purchase/subscription-based apps.
At this point I thought that the app didn't exist for newer versions of Android.
It turned out that it was the second result, just above the "sponsored" one. It looked so much like a part of the first result that I just skipped over it.
I just searched "Firefox" in the app store. The top result is Google Chrome with an Ad indicator (Google paid for higher placement). Second is Firefox.
Sometimes it's good to live in a region that no one cares about. I just searched for Firefox in the Android Play Store application, there were no ads, and the first result was Firefox.
I also don't get any ads in American and UK podcasts for the same reason (except for those read by the host, but there are few of those and they're easy to ignore).
Podcasts are normally plain mp3 (or similar) files that get downloaded as-is off an rss feed, as far as I understand. I don’t think anyone gets extra ads outside the sponsored/host-read ones.
The big podcast networks like iHeart are able to dynamically splice ads into episodes, so they can be targeted based on geoIP or whatever other signals they have on you.
Everyone posts to centralized RSS feeds these days. The company that owns the feed creates duplicates of the uploaded file, inserts ads into them, and serves a version of the file containing ads localized to the downloader's country.
If the same podcast is uploaded to Youtube through the uploader's official channel, it won't contain those ads and you're better off downloading that.
Sometimes it's not even close, I went to download the PAX Australia app and the top result was Revolut.
I'd love to know the set of circumstances that the algorithm picked them to sponsor there.
As a curiosity, this is a common strategy for advertising! But people still disagree whether it is the best investment. You can generally win on your own name with comparatively low bids, because it is obviously the most relevant search term, and relevance is often factored into the price you pay for ad placement. So you may choose to bid defensively, to stop competitors from advertising on your name. Even so, the obvious counter-argument is that the person searched for you _explicitly_ by name, so how likely are they to click on your competitor's ads? I don't have a ton of experience, so perhaps some orgs make the decision in a data-driven way, but I suspect most make the decision in a mostly faith-based way.
You would be surprised to know Apple started this in AppStore before Google on PlayStore. I assume it is because Google wanted to be safe from Antitrust lawsuits (Follow Apple rather than going there first).
Its sad but I think at this point its kind of a safety issue not to use an ad blocker. Those results are not clearly ads and I've clicked on fake links in the past when they were.
It absolutely is. I fear for the older generations and less tech minded people who google their bank, and get some random phishing site. Or similarly google what should be libre software and get some random malware on a site that looks 'close enough'.
Lets call it what it is, a cancer, one that literally enables countless bad actors and purely for a search engine's own profit.
In theory theres a time and place for ads, but maliciously inline and disguised as the actual results people want arent it.
It's already happened to an elderly family member who was trying to troubleshoot a printer problem. The top results were 1-800 hotlines run by scammers looking to get remote access to their machine to "fix" the issue. Google has hordes of these companies padding their pockets and won't lift a finger to remove them.
Yup. For reference, on Android your best bet is to install Firefox + uBlock Origin. On iOS, I believe Kagi's Orion has built-in content blockers but you can also install uBlock Origin [1].
You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid, or if you don't want to use search results from Bing's index, I've been very happy with Brave Search.
people say that but they often come back to Google ;)
I've just learnt to use ad blockers. the only time I disable it is when I look up the definition of something or the location of a place and the entire page goes blank because of some rules I've added to uBlock.
I agree somewhat, but those searches are getting less and less good on Google though.
In my recent experience, I'm far better off asking ChatGPT or just using it through Bing/Copilot than what I used to do a decade ago, which was deep dives through 5 pages of long-tail search results.
If you're trying to do anything in terms of official documents, there's a middleman charging more. I searched for "passport application" the other day and it was 4 ads of people offering this service.
My dad was trying to get an ESTA visa a couple years ago and ended up paying twice the actual price, because he can't discern what's the official site or not.
No, the previous admin's FBI did [0].
But then that alert page (on ic3.gov, Internet Crime Complaint Center) was taken down almost immediately after the 11/2024 election, before even the director was replaced. I genuinely expected this sort of basic alert should remain non-partisan.
Indeed. I got my credit card phished after buying tickets from an 'official' local museum website, it was the first result on Google. Later on I realized that all five top results were scam sites, the real one was 6th. They eventually fixed it.
Strong agree but unless it gets built-into the browser, the average net denizen simply won't do it. The number of times I've seen a friend of the family try to show me an article on their laptop while casually trying to shoot down the pop-up ads like they're playing a marketers version of Missile Command was astonishing.
And EVEN if they do install a blocker, 9 times out of 10 it'll be AdBlock Plus and not uBlock Origin [1]. You know, the one that allows companies to PAY to have their ads whitelisted.
This doesn't even cover browsing on a smartphone which unless you're running Android Firefox which supports browser extensions, you have very few options.
All of the ad links are broken by our firewall at work. People complain but eventually they learn to skip the ads. Absolutely a security risk, search ads are second only to phishing emails as a threat vector.
I bought a kagi shirt in the initial batch, got it, and then after one wash it unraveled. Your support team was great and gave me a coupon for a replacement shirt, which I ordered, yet it never shipped. Could I get that shirt :D
Kudos for Kagi. I stopped using Google and gladly pay Kagi for search to not show advertisements or junk.
If Kagi ever starts showing ads to me, a paying customer, I'll ditch it too. If I get the feeling that Kagi is selling my search history, I'll ditch it too.
How is Kagi for non-US folks? I've tried switching to DDG a while back but the experience for me, living outside the US, was not great. Sure, programming related searches were pretty good, but everything else was not.
I upgraded my phone a few days back and when search defaulted back to Google I realised how worthwhile my subscription is.
It's not all perfect, for instance I would love to figure out how to stop all map searches sticking with them: sorry Google is just lightyears ahead there so I'd always prefer that. But generally they're about the right amount of customisability.
The killer feature for me is being able to bury sites so you never ever get results from them ever again and to slightly bump up/down results for particular reasons (your own, not due to someone else paying an ad placement fee!)
It's not as good as google at knowing where you are (gee I wonder why) but if I search Bahn Mi <my town> the results as good as google. Results for something niche like "Keycaps" are showing lots of local results too (or as local as you can get living outside a capital city in Australia).
There's also a handy country dropdown if you ever want to localize to somewhere else, although I rarely need this, since it's smart enough to eg. show "tokyo hotels" even if your country is somewhere else.
That’s my issue too, as a Brazilian. For anything more localized, Google is the only choice that has usable results. I leave DDG as my default engine and intentionally go to Google only when I need something that’s more “Brazilian context”.
Just curious, are you wondering about location-specific results ("best restaurants"), country-specific results ("how to do my taxes"), or language-specific results ("pasos de división larga")?
How will you fight the inevitable slide that happens if you ever got on top? I’m convinced Google started with the absolute best of intentions before the money and greed turned them into a horror movie villain.
I love many of the companies I use and work with... but I'm always on the lookout for a backup plan if one gets greedy. Companies are not loyal to their consumers, we should never make the mistake of providing loyalty to corporations.
Observationally, Google search and Kagi are fundamentally different business models.
Google followed/trailblazed the "enshitification" arc of providing a free service that sees widespread adoption by the public, and then financially exploiting the widespread adoption by leveraging usage of the service to serve ads like in the screenshot.
Kagi is a subscription service you pay for and they generate their best effort at an ideal service for you using the money you gave them.
The Google model of providing a free service sort of requires that it be enshitified in order to close the circle on the business case. Reliance on VC money in this model is likely a further aggravating factor to aggressively exploit usage of the service once widespread adoption is achieved.
The Kagi model has an opposite pressure, where if it tries to exploit adoption of the service in a way that users don't appreciate, users will simply abandon their subscription, putting a core revenue stream the business has built itself around at risk.
Is it possible for Kagi or a business like that to become shitty? Sure, a new manager that misunderstands core realities can show up anywhere and ruin the business, or sagging business financials could require VC injection which then pressures further financial extractions from uses. But the structural pressures on a Kagi-style model certainly seem to steer it in the right direction when Google's structural model invariably steered it into something that becomes less pleasant than we all initially knew.
"Don't get greedy" and similar variations assumes intent rather than what I see as the reality of how companies operate within the US--not a failing of individual virtues. If you're a public company, your shareholders will want stock prices to go up and are more than happy to use their shares to vote for whoever is willing to make that happen.
This is, of course, an exaggeration. Not all shareholders value profits above all else, but many big ones do. Ignoring what incentives (and disincentives) are put on a business drive it's behavior. If you want something contrary to those incentives, you need to change those pressures or you're doomed to be disappointed.
It's really us who have to change our mindset about companies. It's foolish to expect them to retain the quality or purported ideology they claimed to have when they were trying to win customers, after they reach a point where they can exploit and extract money and suppress choice and competition. A CEO will say anything now and might even mean it, but it's empty words really, and not even their choice in the long run.
We have to not get attached to companies, and not get the idea that they care or have feelings of good or evil. They are tools, like a hammer, or a stapler. A stapler isn't evil if it mashes up all the staples into a tangled mess. It's just broken. You don't mourn a broken stapler, eventually tools just wear out. You throw it out and get a new one. Corporations are the same, McKinsification / enshitification / etc are a part of their natural lifecycle, you should expect that and just switch to a different tool that actually works.
Since they are subscription based and not ad based, their incentives are inherently aligned with customer preferences. This doesn't mean that they are immune from getting worse, or just becoming complacent, but it does at least make it less likely. Ad-supported companies succumbing to enshittification is virtually guaranteed thanks to the misalignment of basic incentives between the company and users (note: not customers).
There was a time when Google disallowed this. Google even asked us (Firefox team) to report ads squatting on our trademarks. Eventually they stopped caring and now it's in their ad sales pitchdeck just how effective trademark squatting can be.
I made the mistake of agreeing to undertaking that I would not use the trademarked brandname of one of my competitors' keyuwords in our Google ads bidding. Talking with a lawyer after the fact, I learnt that we can freely use the keywords but agreeing to the undertaking is a more serious and legally binding corporate promise. Now they are bidding on my brand names but we can't bid on them. So, I do agree Google search sucks, heh.
I'm not using an ad blocker; when I search for Midjourney on Google the real thing is my first result; I don't even see any sponsored content. Not sure what's happening for OP.
(Please don't read this as a defense of Google on the whole.)
Same here, though for me the second result is the Midjourney Discord rather than Reddit.
But I'm in Europe. Perhaps that affects results? I wouldn't be surprised if the Google experience were more ad-heavy in low-consumer-protection nations.
Mine has one sponsored link which is just a course for midjourney. But I don't doubt at all that the OP post is real. This stuff is all dynamically generated. There is probably even some AI deciding how many ads you'll put up with.
Ideally Google would offer some kind of ad free option, perhaps on a higher tier of the Google One plans.
odd, I also don't see any sponsored content any longer for any search whereas I definitely remember seeing what OP has for other searches. But I also now see a tab for AI mode next to ALL which is new... but I also switched to DDG a while ago
I’m still amazed that Kagi search results are basically on par with Google’s (and without the ads) in all my comparison tests that I’ve done. And Google has orders of magnitude more resources.
When I search for "midjourney" without an adblocker a bunch of times, I'm getting:
- No ads, with correct midjourney.com as the top result, about half the time
- A legit ad for midjourney.com with the title "Your Imagination, Unlocked", the other half the time. It's the only ad, and the correct midjourney.com is also still directly below it as the first organic result
So both seem fine for me. I've never seen ads on Google with the kind of formatting shown by OP either.
Obviously everybody's search experience is different, based on geography, profile, who else is running ads for those keywords, Google runs different formatting experiences as A/B testing, etc.
You don't fall into any desirable demographic for targeting apparently, or you've never leaked enough info about you that would signify you as desirable.
In other words, nobody is bidding to reach your eyeballs specifically.
This could be a market inefficiency. OR, it could be you're actually a terrible lead for midjourney-type products, and the market is working correctly.
I am highly suspicious tech markets do not see realistic average Google behavior for whatever reason. The pervasive belief in tech that Google Search is even passable suggests people in the Valley or even Austin aren't getting the experience most people do.
I recall a Googler once suggesting to me that Googlers seeing ads might look like ad fraud to advertisers, so I'm not positive Googlers dogfood how bad this is either.
I'd go as far to guess that the tech-literate people (who would be both less susceptible to clicking on enshitified links and more likely to report or discuss them) have, somewhere in their tracked-data-portfolio, a "don't serve too much garbage to this person, they aren't gullible and they'll tell people we're serving garbage" setting.
It's certainly possible, and maybe not even maliciously: Advertisers are refining their targeting to get clicks, the best advertisers will only annoy people likely to click an ad. The problem with giant algorithmic platforms is often things go off the rails simply due to nobody at the helm understanding what the platform is doing anymore.
Can anyone reproduce this? When I search "Midjourney", I get an ad for Midjourney (from Midjourney), followed by Midjourney, the site. After that, I get the Midjourney Discord, the Midjourney subreddit, the Midjourney Wikipedia page, and then (inexplicably), another Midjourney ad.
> was there a US president named Bob, Robert, or who went by either?
> No U.S. president has ever gone by Bob or Robert as their common or official name. The closest case is James A. Garfield (20th president), whose full name was James Abram Garfield — no Robert in there
Why is James A. Garfield the closest???? What metric are we using for this comparison, lol
I just got good first page hits and ranking for a search for "midjourney", but it looks like Midjourney is paying for 2 Sponsored spots on the first page, even though the user searched exactly for Midjourney's well-known brand name.
On a search for exactly this particular well-known and fairly unique brand name, I think probably midjourney.com should've been the first hit, as a freebie, without needing to buy ads. (Either that, or the second hit, and the Wikipedia entry as the first.)
(Incidentally, it felt a bit retro not to get the usual clutter of AI/infoboxes/etc. at the top of the page this time.)
This is how paid placements work, and it's in the app stores as well.
And yes, _most_ people will just click on one of those top 3 links, not realizing that they are not going where they might have hoped to go.
What's worse is that many people actually go to google to search for the website name they want. And the search engine will "help" them by popping up suggestions before the user might have completed typing .com. So now instead of searching for therealwebsite.com, they search for "therealwebsite". That of course will NOT show them the real website, it will show all the garbage.
I stopped using Google when it started discriminating against browsers without JS recently, and it looks like I'm not missing much. Is stuffing ads in your face this "better experience" that sites are always trying to beg you to enable JS for?
Incidentally, Bing's first two results for "midjourney" are the official site, followed by the Wikipedia page.
Same shit, different screenshot. The most irritating part is that other folks can't reliably reproduce results like those shown in the screenshot. Yet, I can think of countless examples of this happening to me. My guess is that it's highly beneficial to Google to barf out walls of poor-quality ads when it knows nothing about you. I can't be sure why, but there's a pattern.
When you look for my (somewhat obscure) company's app on the Play store, the first result is always a sponsored listing for some totally unrelated app.
About a year ago, I googled "silverfast" (film scanning program) on a fresh Windows installation not connected to me in any way, and I got several ads for scammy scanner software before the program I was looking for showed up.
When I watch youtube videos from obscure creators while logged out, I routinely get AI-generated ads for random stuff. The funniest one was deepfaked Chuck Norris emphatically telling me I should feed my dog carrots. Yet, when I watch a video from a big YouTube channel under the same conditions, I get ads from major household brands.
My guess is that there's three things happening. 1) More moneyed advertisers have more refined targeting constraints, that implicitly filter out ill-defined user profiles. 2) Google feels the need to do a better job of targeting for advertisers who pay them more. 3) In the absence of a well-defined user profile, Google shotguns a bunch of low-cost ads at you to try to build a profile. Just guesses.
Impressions to logged-in users bid higher than anonymous sessions. There's almost certainly higher tiers of demographics beyond that, not that you're allowed to know.
At least it was on the first page. I just searched for Midjourney on the iPhone App Store. It put 2 other results first. Each result is about 2/3rds the height of the screen meaning the actual "midjourney" result was a screen and a half down, so off the screen.
> I remember a company saying its most effective ads were search ads for their own name
I don't have the full context, but this is almost a tautology. Of course you get the highest click-through-rate and highest conversion for searches that are your own name. You usually also get a relatively cheap bid, because most search engines prefer to prioritize relevant results, and you will be very relevant for your own name. But you would have gotten most of those clicks and conversion _for free_ even if you didn't advertise on your name, because the searcher would see your organic result. Advertising on your own name is defensive, not offensive -- you protect customers that are already yours, you don't get new ones.
source: I run marketing for a small business, we advertise on our own name too, and of course it is also the most effective if you calculate it naively.
For what it's worth, when you view a Google search results page, part of the page is populated by ads (results come from the Google Ads teams) and part of it by search results (results come from the Google Search team, and unaffected by anything to do with ads).
The post points out a problem with the fraction that is allocated to Ads, but pretty sure that's not "everything that's wrong with Google Search" (if true, it would actually be an endorsement of the quality of the organic search results, which I doubt is the intent).
Not really, its just a condemnation of the amalgamation which is unable to be perceived as different from the user - it shits on the organic search in their mind and anyone saying "well our search is still good!" is completely missing the point.
People are really starting to notice the sharp decline of Google search. I blogged[0] of a very similar experience a few months ago.
I don't even mind the AI Overview (too much) but the search results themselves are noticeably worse. In my example, the best search result and the one that the AI summary is clearly based on is the 6th ranked result.
Is Google doing this deliberately to make the AI Overview seem better?
In an ideal world, Google would use AI to provide better search results. Something like: "Here are the results for your search term A, which was slightly ambiguous. I suggest added term B or C depending on what you meant". It seems like that is not going to happen.
I stopped using Google because I'd quickly search something, click the first link then, like Wiley Coyote, slowly realize I'd run straight off a cliff.
I can't believe that's what their standard is now.
On one hand, google forces users to surrender more and more person information for "advance security features" on other hand google allows malicious links to be the top 10 (sponsored) search results. .
There have been ads above the fold for about 20 years. I just did the search and the official Midjourney site is the first non-sponsored hit. You'll find this for most searches.
though I've noticed that they've dialed down the knobs a bit. It's still there, but far less blatant (probably due to the attention-grabbing BARD debacle)
Google Search jumped the shark years ago. It's the modern-day Yahoo at this point. Even Bing is a better experience, which is not a sentence I ever thought I would type a decade ago.
Hmm I just tried that search and Midjourney's site was at the top.
Regardless, at this point, I consider Google Search "legacy software." I rarely use it anymore. Google's AI mode or ChatGPT Thinking perform much more nuanced searches for me and surface the results I'm looking for much faster.
I used to consider my Google-fu top notch, but even without Google Search "Classic" getting destroyed by SEO spam, it's still more work at the end of the day than AI models. I'm sure spam and irrelevance will be the eventual fate of these AI models too, but for now they're the new Google
So what's crazy about this is that I remember, when I first joined Google in 2011, that they were particularly proud of how people would just stop using URLs and use Google to navigate. So people would type "amazon" to get to Amazon.com instead of actually typing out `amazon.com`, or using a bookmark or directory etc. And they wanted to keep search at a quality that would continue to get people to do that. And later the fear with mobile becoming ascendant was that people would stop using search in this way, etc.
But it looks like they just keep giving people more and more reason to... not do that.
With udm14 and ublock origin on Firefox my first link is the official midjourney.com, then the subreddit, then the official discord, then wikipedia, then the offical Facebook page. That is just about perfect and covers what most people would want.
No ads. No LLM BS. While the experience google is pushing is terrible, the underlying tech still works in cases like this.
from a new customer perspective who just heard about midjourney, search may be a good spot to find alternate products. what google needs to know is if it is a navigational search and unless it keeps a long history, it may not know that. the simpler answer may be that companies who know you use a product like the one they make may just be willing to spend a bunch and google may be willing to add friction for the $.
My dad stopped using Google like 20 years ago for exactly this reason. He was not happy when his relevant local small business was pushed off the first page by out-of-state providers of tenuously related services
I don't have a problem with this in general, I do have a problem when they deceive users, which happens often. If I search for Amazon and get Temu ad - that's OK. But often when I search for X they will show sponsored results that pretend to be that X. This is esp true with apps on their play store, which is something fairly new. I barely use Google Search these days so don't know how bad it is with search.
This is a pattern you see often. A product gets to a point where it's hard to grow revenue as the market expects, so the company does everything they can to squeeze more revenue.
Try searching for "FedEx phone number" and it's not even in the top 10 search results. Not sure if FedEx is using SEO or paying to suppress results, but I was shocked Google couldn't even return this basic search successfully. I remember when Google Search used to actually work and have useful results and something like "FedEx phone number" would have the 1-800 number in bold text for you to click and immediately use. Now I use ChatGPT for those type of questions--and get the results I expect.
That's not "everything"! Just wasted ~3 hours trying to set up an account, supervised by me, for my 8 year old daughter.
(1) There are some old rules for a user interface.
(2) Billions of people know these rules, implicitly, and right away and easily use sites that follow the rules.
(3) Google, and others, want a new, different, original, snappy, creative, user interface but in this effort set aside the old rules so that at most only the programmer understands the user interface and in a month he (she) won't be able to use it either.
Analogy: They are really good at making pancakes but now are trying to make Bouillabaisse and are getting only rotten sea food.
Uh, the user interface has a lot of cartoons in a popular, new style but one of their cartoons shows little girl and some of the underside of her skirt -- dumb de dumb-dumb. If they make a mistake like that, then they are sloppy or worse workers and, thus, no wonder the rest is awful. Time to short the stock?
Every time this comes up, I don’t understand what the alternative is supposed to be.
X (Midjourney in this case) may/not be trademarked in the user’s country - so what makes X so special that Google/others should rank this one over others? Does this mean X owns the keyword and other related searches on Google forever? That sounds worse than domain squatting!
Speaking of, quite often, X.com is already registered, so companies buy getX.com or just non-.com TLDs. Now which one is the right result for searches for X? The pre existing one or the new company? What if they’re in different industries?
Almost all SaaS companies have multiple comparison pages or blogs/articles/etc that mention and compare themselves with competitors - specifically for SEO to show up in those searches. Should this also be banned?
I could go on, but I just don’t see a situation where Google can solve this satisfactorily for everyone, without becoming opinionated and picking/choosing/preferring one competitor over the other. As such, they’ve gone for the easiest model we have in modern day capitalism - put it up for auction and let the market figure it out!
The issue you're describing is ranking results or ranking between promoted/ad content.
The problem more at hand is unless you're paying big bucks, they can and will place content that at best is another competitor, or at worst is genuinely trying to harm your users.
Ads being inline and as close in appearance to regular results as google can legally get away with is the problem. There are heavily misaligned incentives at play, ones that enable a lot of malware and phishing attempts.
Can we be honest here? This isn't (really) Google's fault, because ANY company in the same position would do the same. It's our fault, for letting them.
We could pass a law preventing this nonsense tomorrow, and Google would have no choice in the matter. However, "we the people" don't have strong advocates fighting for us, while Google has both (very strong) legal and political contributions (ie. bribery) teams ensuring that never happens.
The real problem here is that we've ceded our democracy to corporations: blaming Google (or any individual corporation) is missing the real issue.
P.S. But, the good news is ... we can always take our democracy back.
> I typed in Midjourney to search for Midjourney because I wanted to use Midjourney.
For one thing, the author could have just gone right to midjourney.com instead of going through an intermediate. Additionally, when I tried typing midjourney into google, midjourney.com was the first result. This is on mobile Firefox, with no extensions installed.
Thanks for the anecdote, but everyone’s advertising experience is different — that’s the whole point of targeted advertising. It doesn’t invalidate the OP’s point, though.
FWIW, I just used the Google app on iOS and got one ad (for artlist.io) before the midjourney.com link. A lot of people use Google this way to get to a named website, btw.
Like many of you, I serve as IT support for family. Some of those family are beginning to slip cognitively, so I'd like to say: Fk google for doing this. You are confusing my relatives who cannot tell the difference between your ad-spam and actual links, and it is not an exaggeration to say that you are now taking advantage of old people.
I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock) and move them over to chatgpt when possible. If anyone has better ideas, I'm all ears.
> move them over to ChatGPT
OpenAI has even more VC money to pay back than Google ever did.
Practically all the large tech companies so far have turned to ads and monetizing users rather than charging enough to remain more neutral.
I suspect one day, when you ask ChatGPT "Can you give me a link to mid journey", you'll instead probabilistically get a link to whichever competitor paid OpenAI for the best placement.
Wait long enough and it seems like almost any company tries anything to increase its bottom line, but the main difference between ChatGPT and Google is at least ChatGPT attempts to give a paid option. Again, I don't think that'll stop them from ever getting to that point... but it'll go farther than "here's search, we pay for it via adtech".
Kagi is a similar boat - the product is what you pay for, not what they can get users to put up with.
> at least ChatGPT attempts to give a paid option. Again, I don't think that'll stop them...
Netflix also attempted to give a paid option, but now we have an "ad-supported" plan. I think that same logic of maximizing profit means that even if there are some people paying for ChatGPT, the amount of free money that is sitting on the table means that we will see "ad-supported" ChatGPT pretty soon once the low-hanging fruit for quality enhancement start to dry up, which is kind of already happening.
Or give you results that are completely unrelated and even try to convince you that what you’re trying to search doesn’t exist.
Studied with a guy from old Soviet Union, they were educated in a way that every modern invention had a Soviet inventor.
ChatGPT can create an individualized reality and truth for everyone depending on which advertiser’s target demographic they fit in.
Just imagine all the gigawatts cooked to just serve ads via LLMs
maybe, but there was a time when google was the best alternative too.
I'd say it's practically guaranteed. It would be wildly unprecedented to not follow up the amount of hype and fundraising in the LLM AI industry without a massive amount of enshittification following it.
Even if improvements continue for years we might already be near the peak of LLM usefulness because all of greedy and abusive dark patterns are sure to follow once the manic land grab settles down.
This is one of the reasons why I’m getting familiar with self-hosting. Local models are improving shockingly fast. I use Gemma3 27B for generating summaries of podcast transcripts, for instance.
1. The reason why ChatGPT is free despite being honestly very advanced, is that they want the general public to have an association of ChatGPT being "the default AI", just like Google is the default search engine and YouTube is the default video platform. Once they have this position they can throw as much garbage at the users as they want and nobody will care. This is why it doesn't really matter how much it costs now to capture the market, if the potential benefits are huge.
2. Once the market is captured and solidified, ads and enshittification ensue. If you're willing to put on your tin foil hat for a second, I'd tell you that as a matter of fact the technologies to integrate different services with ChatGPT are being developed right now, and once they're ready it's just a small step to make sure that ChatGPT prioritizes answers mentioning those integrated partners, which can easily be justified to users as legit quality-of-life improvements.
Maybe the answer is indeed to just buy a book and go touch some literal grass, and let the civilization drown in the sewer of disinformation it produces.
Kagi, as others have mentioned. Google search is dead.
Kagi is quite good, its clean, simple, and not much money.
Creat your own family yahoo — a website you maintain that has links to the websites they commonly use like mail and bank. Set as home page and new tab page.
It’s a slight security risk since it shows where you have accounts.
If you are savvy, build your own search that just passes it to an LLM and returns as page.
My parents hate technology but they love their little KDE thinkpad.
Not Google related, but cognition and older relative relevant: The amount of predatory scamware targeted towards older adults on the app stores is infuriating. I have a family friend who is now in the early-mid stages of Alzheimer's, but is still able to live at home and enjoy her life. She gets confused and stressed out by the fake 'alert! all your photos will be deleted!!' ads that pop up when she does her adult coloring books or jigsaw puzzles on her ipad. Apple's recommended apps in this category are evil in this regard, every single one. I've had to disable $80/week 'security' subscriptions from her account more than once. It is shameful that this is allowed.
So inatead of being scammed, theyll be emotionally manipulTed.
Bizzaro solution. Sign them up to kagi.
Buy them a Kagi membership and switch them to that.
A lot of people want to complain but don't want to pay (not saying that is OP, just generally)
Kagi search.
> I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock)
I guess they are all on Firefox.
kagi ftw
Who uses google in 2025. That is bizarre.
I'm old enough to remember when a big selling point of Google was that it didn't do this.
Had to dig up this link, 1999 review[0]:
"Google (www.google.com) is a pure search engine - no weather, no news feed, no links to sponsors, no ads, no distractions, no portal litter. Nothing but a fast-loading search site. Reward them with a visit."
[0] https://i.redd.it/uea6u7c4oje31.jpg
How did they make any money at all without ads?
they didn't - hence the ads
It's a very common story in industry. You start nimble, and disrupt bloated platforms. Then, as you grow, pressure grows and you also bloat. Then new company comes that brings nimble product and disrupt you.
Search, TV->internet video, newspapers->internet - all of them go through those cycles.
I think it's a mistake to think of these cycles as inevitable, and that it's guaranteed that some small fry will disrupt the current giants. Yes, they may have happened in the past, but large companies are much more cognizant of the cycles of disruption now than they were 30 or 40 years ago. Microsoft was a behemoth in the late 80s and they're currently number 2 market cap in the world. Many folks on this board may be too young to remember Netscape's boast of "The Browser is the OS" in the mid 90s - well, Netscape is long gone and Microsoft is still giant. Only 2 years ago you saw pronouncements that OpenAI was going to be the death knell for Google, and it was it seemed to be the kick in the pants that Google needed to get their AI story working. Facebook just basically bought all its nascent competition (Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.)
I think disrupting large players will be much harder than it was it the past.
These cycles have been going on a lot longer than the last 40 years. Everything eventually dies.
Rome used to rule the world; sure it took about a thousand years, but it ultimately didn't last.
I fully accept the heat death of the universe will eventually take down Microsoft, but I don't think that's what the comment I was responding to was really about.
You forgot the main source of pressure: you sell off equity in your company in exchange for cash. The buyers are buying the promise of future profits. At first, you still hold the vast majority of the voting rights, but over time you sell more and more and expectations rise and rise.
Eventually you are an organization whose purpose is to return cash to shareholders in the near term.
Hence a page full of ads, and no reason to think things will ever change.
Don't worry. Our legislators around the world are hard working so this doesn't happen again, protecting us from harmful contents and cementing current industry leaders' position.
> protecting us from harmful contents
In Soviet Russia government protects harmful contents from us!
Used to be. Now the megacorp just buys the disrupting platform
Wouldn't it be nice if some companies instead of ramping up ads for revenue passed along the value to consumers? Once they made their money back on the original investments convert to a lifestyle and provide a valuable product without squeezing every penny our of it and in the end killing it. One day maybe.
They did pass on a lot of value to consumers. They used their profits to grow, build Gmail, buy and grow YouTube, build Android.
Just running Google as-is without ads would have produced less value in the long run. Plus the SEO tide (which relied on DoubleClick ads that weren't yet owned by Google) began to rise and would've drowned Google Search much earlier if they hadn't grown.
Where I think Google took the bad (for consumers) turn was when they purchased DoubleClick and began to consolidate the entire ad business. Instead of losing money to SEO spammers, they began to make money. This put Google into a conflict of interest against their own users. Ever since then they've been piling onto that conflict of interest, draining more and more value from their products.
I feel like you'd need a new corporate structure or something, like the way an S-corp is different, but on steroids.
Because I agree, the forced obsession with "growth" at all costs, which seems necessary to operate a public company (at least in this century[1]), is imho the #1 reason why enshittification is unavoidable.
[1] I'd describe nearly all present-day corporations as fixated on quarterly results even at the expense of business viability. Something I truly don't understand is why big companies say, 75 years ago seem to have been so much less that way. If anyone has any theories I'd love to hear them.
I think there’s a middle ground between not making any money by not showing ads and plastering half the page with ads in a way that almost renders the product useless. I’m sure this was a result of a long list of promo packets that incrementally kept adding 0.01% increases to the ad impressions.
Google managed to dance the knife edge there for a lot longer than most though. AdWords made so much money in a fairly unobtrusive way, that they were able to scale it out without pissing a lot of people off. That and it was actually even sometimes useful.
They clearly decided to just say "fuck it" though. Sometime after Ruth Porat replaced Patrick Pichette and especially after Sundar took the helm (both happened while I worked there) but most especially in the last 3 years.
The term for this is “enshittification”
I remember being clever at school and showing off that if you typed "nukes" it would display an advert for ebay down the right-side. "Buy Nukes on EBay".
...and what did those eBay hits look like, back then? Real (books/films/tshirts/sings about nukes?), scam or unrelated?
But like always they didn't stop once they were a bit profitable with a few ads, instead they got greedier and greedier and made their product worse once they captured most of the market, I have wonder if there can exist some variant of capitalism that punishes becoming a bit too greedy, like a soft ceiling (tied to the minimum wage) over which most of the profits go to taxes, and a hard one where all profits over that go to taxes plus mandatory social work by its owners/executives.
> instead they got greedier and greedier and made their product worse once they captured most of the market
I wouldn't necessarily put it that way because not Google, nor any company, has moral capacity. They don't have souls. What they do have are incentive structures, and those flip when the stock goes public.
Pre-IPO: the board is mostly founders and VCs holding paper wealth. Their shares aren't liquid, so the only way they get paid is by making the pie way bigger for some future exit. That means "grow, grow, grow." and that means playing nice with customers.
Post-IPO: the board is legally stuffed with "independent" directors, whose pay comes in RSUs tied to the stock price. Now the shares are instantly tradable, and shareholders who can bail in a quarter want to see results in a quarter. Directors translate that into exec comp, and suddenly management's job is "make the stock go up right now."
Some theorists point out the obvious hack: take away the hot potato. Slow the game down. Make shares harder to flip, make earnings less frequent. If you could only trade stock once a year, you'd actually care what the company looks like in a year. If they only reported results annually, you'd be forced to think in years, not quarters.
Upside: management can focus on products and customers instead of quarterly guidance theater. Downside: investors hate being locked up, and capital gets more expensive because people price in that illiquidity. Transparency drops, execs get more room to bullshit.
It's a tradeoff: you can have maximum liquidity and hyper-efficient capital markets, but then you get short-term brain damage. Or you can slow the game down, but then you're basically asking people to trust managers more and accept worse capital efficiency.
Nobody;s found the perfect middle yet. LTSE[1] tried, dual-class shares are a kludge, and otherwise we just live with the cycle: grow like crazy private, IPO, then spend the rest of your corporate life addicted to quarterly earnings.
1. https://ltse.com/
That capitalism technically already exists in the US. We have very strong monopoly laws. It's just...nobody is enforcing them. Unlike the 70's and 80's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
AT&T eventually gave up and agreed to divest of the RBOCs because they didn't like their chances with the regulators. Imagine a Big Tech company having so little faith today in their ability to manipulate the government between lobbying, campaign contributions, and the most modern and economical play, stroking the President's ego.
Biden's FTC chair tried her best, but it didn't go anywhere because she had no support and Trump put an end to it. But both sides amirite?
They didn't. That was the whole "Step 2 ???? Step 3 Profit" era.
Volume.
i feel sometimes it's best for the company to stay private
The founders of the company still have a controlling stake in the business. External shareholders have little leverage.
Going public gave Google a lot of nearly-free money to grow, and it's how you've gotten both Gmail and Google+. But more importantly, it allowed them to offer much higher total comp packages by issuing more stock on the go. So I think they're prisoners of the stock market only insofar that if the stock stops going up, they're gonna have a harder time hiring and retaining talent.
So in a way, it's the employees holding the company hostage. They're simultaneously complaining about the innocence lost and stating their implicit preference for this outcome by demanding top-of-the-line comp.
If you want to be paid the same as at Microsoft or Facebook, you become Microsoft or Facebook.
>Going public gave Google a lot of nearly-free money to grow, and it's how you've gotten both Gmail
Gmail launched in April 2004, and the company went public in August 2004, so what you said is not literally true.
> and Google+
Thanks for the chuckle.
That didn't last long till they added paid results but at least they highlighted the paid results from the organic results... Those were they days when they used to have the motto of not being Evil. Accordingly, now, they are.
Yeah, I remember the long slow fade-out of the colored boxes the ads occupied. They went from like, pastel orange and green boxes, to lighter boxes, to even lighter boxes, to no boxes at all with the word Ad in a little symbol, to the way it is today where you have "Sponsored" on a different line than the ad, and you have to scroll below the fold to even see the first organic result, if there even is one, and only 2-5 organic results are even shown by default. And also of course in the mix, the AI Overview made up from I assume a handful of the spammy results being thrown through the cheapest, smallest model possible and summarized.
>they used to have the motto of not being Evil
They still do have it.
...at the very end of Google's Code of Conduct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil
The problem is, some of us do have a habit of asking our search engine for the weather. And we ruin it for the rest of you.
I thought Google always had ads, but at first they were clearly marked and always relevant?
Edit: I stand corrected. Ads were added later, but when first introduced they were clearly marked. I got my history wrong.
Nope, there were no ads at the beginning. It was a big deal when they announced AdWords. And the ads were unobtrusive and often quite useful at the beginning.
Google was quite vocal about clearly marking ads, in contrast to Overture, Yahoo, and others who mixed ads into search results in the late 90s / early 2000s. I think the period when Google lightened, then entirely removed the colored background that made it easy to identify ads was an inflection point in their fall from being a company that genuinely focused on users towards becoming just another megacorp run by profit-maximizing MBAs.
No, they had no ads for several years. AdWords were introduced in 02000, at which point Google had existed (initially as google.stanford.edu) for four years, since 01996, which was 40% of the amount of time the Web had even existed. I started using Google in probably 01998, when people on Slashdot got excited about how much better their search quality was than AltaVista, but it probably wasn't until 01999 that I switched over completely—at first AltaVista still had better coverage.
Nope. The slope has been slippery, but way back at the top of it there were zero ads on the page.
Not at the very beginning. But when they first added ads, they were clearly marked in the top with a yellow background (and they didn't take over the whole page), and on the righthand column (and they were clearly marked as sponsored links).
I'd have to dredge it up but someone put up a site that showed the visual changes to ads over the past 15 years, and they've become more and more indistinguishable from organic search results, and they've taken over more of the page.
A great visual history of enshittification, and also how "growth at all costs" capitalism leads to that enshittification. Google was still taking in money hand over fist in the mid 00s when they had a few, clearly marked ads, but capitalism demands the line arcs upwards no matter what.
My memory says that wasn't such a big selling point. When Google first came out it blew all other search engines away in terms of result quality.
If, back then, Yahoo and Altavista were minimalist and Google was a garish nightmare of ads and flashing gifs and nested banners and affiliate buttons, I would still have happily used it for the results.
Google's search interface is still reasonably clean IMO. Nowhere near its minimal best. Yes there are ads and "sponsored results" and shopping frames and all that crap, but they really aren't everything that's wrong with Google Search.
Quality of results and inability to specify queries beyond vague suggestions are the worst things.
I don’t have an image to prove it, but I remember google making it a point and bragging of having clearly differentiated ads (in pale yellow I think?).
It was a big contrast and a signal of classy goodwill, back in the age of replicating popups and garish blinking text.
Exactly this. I remember when it was just a couple small links in a yellow banner you could scroll past. Same with YouTube, the ads used to just be a banner under or beside the video but didn't interfere with the main content. Once the ads got invasive, I installed ublock and haven't looked back. I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about that.
For Google, the ads used to be on the right side. It was a big deal when they made you start scrolling past them.
Of course it was the quality of the search results thanks to the algorithm (Page Rank) that at the time was unmatched and amazingly resilient, compared to the competition, against the primitive SEO tactics of the day (key word spamming etc.).
However, the lean interface without blinkentags and ads was definitely a selling point. Also, IIRC, the guarantee that you'd only get sites that actually contained all the words in your search query (that feature is long gone, too, of course).
I guess it depends how you define "selling point" exactly.
The interface and speed were great, no doubt. Did you ever encounter another search engine that produced similar or better results that you otherwise would have used, but Google's interface sold you? I never did, so it wasn't a selling point for me.
There was a time when google's search web page was under 16kb.
Speed. Altavista, Dogpile, Metacrawler and the rest were slow, and Google felt instant.
For me at least, it wasn't that either. It was the quality of the results.
I would have put up with slow bloated adware Google results of early 2000s, compared to fast minimal sleek interface with results of Yahoo/Altavista/anything else I tried.
The results were good. I remember admitting that for many things I really could have used 'I'm Feeling Lucky' and bypass the SERP entirely, but I disliked relinquishing that much control, so I never made a habit of it. Today I don't think I could trust it much of the time.
Are you just re-emphasizing your point? I was trying to point out another differentiator that many people commented on at the time.
I'm not sure what you are unclear about, but yes I was re-emphasizing my point for you.
There were lots of "differentiators" that did not really matter, including speed. The differentiator was result quality, not how or when they were presented.
Yeah, the results were really that much better than any other engine. The fast minimalist design was also a selling point, though.
Straight from the horse's mouth:
> ..."we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
- "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page[1]
They weren't wrong!
[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
I remember when Google Maps allowed you to enter "*" as the only search term, and you'd see every business in the area. Not just a portion of those who had paid for placement. Those were the days...
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
I also am old enough to remember when their motto was "Don't be evil."
Which has been doublespeak from day one.
I knew larry and sergei socially when they were grad students. I completely believe that when they started that was a genuine sentiment. I wonder at what point they realized personally that that was gone
Yes, things change. In fact, change is basically the only thing you can confidently predict.
I'm old enough to remember when the web didn't exist ... and when I dumped Altavista and Ask Jeeves and co for the cool kids: Google.
I'm fucking livid. Well actually: mildly unimpressed. The cool kids rarely last as such and "do no evil" ended up behind a green tent and a single shot was heard.
Actually, I am slightly stressed over this whole thing.
Instead of stressing, you could move on to supporting the next cool kids.
With what kind of assurance that history won't repeat itself? If anything, the rate at which companies enshittify has increased. Instead of taking 10 years now it takes more like 3 (or less).
Life is change. Sometimes that’s worth fighting for and sometimes it’s worth fighting against. Is the current Google worth that battle for you? I’d rather see what comes next.
They do the same thing on the Play Store, for example I just searched for Firefox and the first result is a sponsored spot for Opera. Does Apple do that on the App Store?
A funnier example: searching for Amazon gives Temu as the first result. Searching for Temu gives Shein as the first result. Searching for Shein gives Shein as the first result! ...but only because they outbid everyone else for the ad spot on their own name, resulting in Double Shein: https://i.imgur.com/0buR8Hq.png
This is also true on Apple's app stores, to be fair. I didn't know this until I got a MacBook Pro recently and my assumption that Apple's controls would be tighter than Google's was proven quite wrong when I opened the Mac App Store for the first rime.
The Mac App Store is such a wasteland. I don't know why Apple doesn't provide it a budget and some real human curation.
The average person searching for Microsoft Word, which is on the App Store, gets screens of templates and junky overpriced apps.
For all of those app stores, the current approach prints them money and lets them claim impartiality, while still allowing some control through acceptance rules, ToSes and automated security measures. All those things scale well. Any other approach I can think of ends up having corner cases that involve human support or interfacing with regulatory systems - and these things do not scale well.
I don't know if curation is really the problem. Nearly every other platform has a search that when you search for "Mr Beast" on YouTube or "Elon Musk" on X they know you mean the popular one and not some 2-bit dork's fan page or parody that happens to have those words in the title/keywords.
I think they just (A) have no idea what they're doing when it comes to search and (B) the scamware that fills all their App Stores makes Apple a ton of extra money compared to people finding the real apps which usually are monetized outside the app store due to Apple's absurd revshare.
There's that saying about "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating." The apple and play stores are like that. They don't care what you buy as long as they get to control the choices you choose from.
> Does Apple do that on the App Store?
Yes they do. Their search already sucks in normal circumstances—I remember searching for “Pinboard” (the bookmarking service) and had to scroll by thirteen pinball (the game) apps before starting to see Pinboard apps—but you can type in the exact name of the app you want had have an ad for a competitor above it. Not only is it allowed, it’s encouraged.
Same thing happened to me. I wanted to get "Fit Notes" - a free and ad-free app. I searched for it and the first result is some adware/subscription-based crap. I skip over. I scroll down part the "Sponsored: Related to your search" section with a whole bunch of others. I am still seeing more paid/in-app-purchase/subscription-based apps.
At this point I thought that the app didn't exist for newer versions of Android.
It turned out that it was the second result, just above the "sponsored" one. It looked so much like a part of the first result that I just skipped over it.
I just searched "Firefox" in the app store. The top result is Google Chrome with an Ad indicator (Google paid for higher placement). Second is Firefox.
Sometimes it's good to live in a region that no one cares about. I just searched for Firefox in the Android Play Store application, there were no ads, and the first result was Firefox.
I also don't get any ads in American and UK podcasts for the same reason (except for those read by the host, but there are few of those and they're easy to ignore).
That's interesting. I wish it were more practical to use a dedicated VPN for some less-developed country just for my podcast client.
Can you tell us which region are you in? (Iceland?)
Does anyone publish a scorecard of search results vs Google region settings?
Podcasts are normally plain mp3 (or similar) files that get downloaded as-is off an rss feed, as far as I understand. I don’t think anyone gets extra ads outside the sponsored/host-read ones.
The big podcast networks like iHeart are able to dynamically splice ads into episodes, so they can be targeted based on geoIP or whatever other signals they have on you.
Everyone posts to centralized RSS feeds these days. The company that owns the feed creates duplicates of the uploaded file, inserts ads into them, and serves a version of the file containing ads localized to the downloader's country.
If the same podcast is uploaded to Youtube through the uploader's official channel, it won't contain those ads and you're better off downloading that.
Same here.
Sometimes it's not even close, I went to download the PAX Australia app and the top result was Revolut. I'd love to know the set of circumstances that the algorithm picked them to sponsor there.
As a curiosity, this is a common strategy for advertising! But people still disagree whether it is the best investment. You can generally win on your own name with comparatively low bids, because it is obviously the most relevant search term, and relevance is often factored into the price you pay for ad placement. So you may choose to bid defensively, to stop competitors from advertising on your name. Even so, the obvious counter-argument is that the person searched for you _explicitly_ by name, so how likely are they to click on your competitor's ads? I don't have a ton of experience, so perhaps some orgs make the decision in a data-driven way, but I suspect most make the decision in a mostly faith-based way.
It is same on PlayStore and AppStore.
You would be surprised to know Apple started this in AppStore before Google on PlayStore. I assume it is because Google wanted to be safe from Antitrust lawsuits (Follow Apple rather than going there first).
> Does Apple do that on the App Store?
I believe so - and it seems the devs know it happens, bevause I often see a paid ad for "Chrome" if I search "Chrome"
Same on maps as well. That has actual annoying consequences where you end up at the wrong place.
When I tried, I got the expected midjourney site first up. I'm logged in to Chrome in case that matters.
For comparison DDG gave me the site as third link, which only just made the bottom of the screen.
DDG often gives me useless Ebay links which remind me of the early days of search.
Perhaps these single data points are useless?
Its sad but I think at this point its kind of a safety issue not to use an ad blocker. Those results are not clearly ads and I've clicked on fake links in the past when they were.
It absolutely is. I fear for the older generations and less tech minded people who google their bank, and get some random phishing site. Or similarly google what should be libre software and get some random malware on a site that looks 'close enough'.
Lets call it what it is, a cancer, one that literally enables countless bad actors and purely for a search engine's own profit. In theory theres a time and place for ads, but maliciously inline and disguised as the actual results people want arent it.
It's already happened to an elderly family member who was trying to troubleshoot a printer problem. The top results were 1-800 hotlines run by scammers looking to get remote access to their machine to "fix" the issue. Google has hordes of these companies padding their pockets and won't lift a finger to remove them.
Searching for official manufacturer manuals/user guides for appliances is also another goldmine for third-parties.
Most web-usage is happening on mobile, and ad-blockers are less common there. So, younger generation is pretty much living through the ads constantly.
Yup. For reference, on Android your best bet is to install Firefox + uBlock Origin. On iOS, I believe Kagi's Orion has built-in content blockers but you can also install uBlock Origin [1].
[1] https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ublock-origin...
Not just the older generation. I can’t get my adult children to care about ad blockers.
You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid, or if you don't want to use search results from Bing's index, I've been very happy with Brave Search.
I agree about DDG, but I find Kagi worth paying for.
A very valuable service for its price.
Also translate.kagi.com is much better than Google’s one.
For translation, a good one is DeepL.
people say that but they often come back to Google ;)
I've just learnt to use ad blockers. the only time I disable it is when I look up the definition of something or the location of a place and the entire page goes blank because of some rules I've added to uBlock.
> You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid
The only people who would say that are people who would be better off just asking ChatGPT.
Any nuanced search that isnt some encyclopedic fact is terrible on DDG.
I agree somewhat, but those searches are getting less and less good on Google though.
In my recent experience, I'm far better off asking ChatGPT or just using it through Bing/Copilot than what I used to do a decade ago, which was deep dives through 5 pages of long-tail search results.
If you're trying to do anything in terms of official documents, there's a middleman charging more. I searched for "passport application" the other day and it was 4 ads of people offering this service.
My dad was trying to get an ESTA visa a couple years ago and ended up paying twice the actual price, because he can't discern what's the official site or not.
The FBI agrees with you: https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-b...
No, the previous admin's FBI did [0]. But then that alert page (on ic3.gov, Internet Crime Complaint Center) was taken down almost immediately after the 11/2024 election, before even the director was replaced. I genuinely expected this sort of basic alert should remain non-partisan.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241008235322/https://www.ic3.g...
Indeed. I got my credit card phished after buying tickets from an 'official' local museum website, it was the first result on Google. Later on I realized that all five top results were scam sites, the real one was 6th. They eventually fixed it.
Strong agree but unless it gets built-into the browser, the average net denizen simply won't do it. The number of times I've seen a friend of the family try to show me an article on their laptop while casually trying to shoot down the pop-up ads like they're playing a marketers version of Missile Command was astonishing.
And EVEN if they do install a blocker, 9 times out of 10 it'll be AdBlock Plus and not uBlock Origin [1]. You know, the one that allows companies to PAY to have their ads whitelisted.
This doesn't even cover browsing on a smartphone which unless you're running Android Firefox which supports browser extensions, you have very few options.
[1] Notice I said uBlock Origin and NOT uBlock.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
Because the average person looking for an adblocker searches for "adblock". And they're supposed to know the difference between uBlock and UBO?
I’ve started asking ChatGPT to give me the right link. I can’t imagine they won’t start embedding ads too but so far, it’s been pretty clean.
That seems risky because of hallucinations. Wouldn't Google+Adblock be a better call?
Absolutely. I cannot use anything online anymore without pihole + ublock
All of the ad links are broken by our firewall at work. People complain but eventually they learn to skip the ads. Absolutely a security risk, search ads are second only to phishing emails as a threat vector.
They still get away with it as ‘only’ 1% complain and Google thinks they don’t matter.
We built our entire company for that 1%.
Hey freediver,
I bought a kagi shirt in the initial batch, got it, and then after one wash it unraveled. Your support team was great and gave me a coupon for a replacement shirt, which I ordered, yet it never shipped. Could I get that shirt :D
Today is the day you find out whether you're the 1% of the 1%!
I give a shirt! Contact support@kagi.com until you get it.
We're finally going to find out if he gives a shirt!
Kudos for Kagi. I stopped using Google and gladly pay Kagi for search to not show advertisements or junk.
If Kagi ever starts showing ads to me, a paying customer, I'll ditch it too. If I get the feeling that Kagi is selling my search history, I'll ditch it too.
Keep being awesome, Kagi CEO
And we thank you for it! I've been a paying customer for about a year now and I can't remember the last time I purposefully used Google search.
How is Kagi for non-US folks? I've tried switching to DDG a while back but the experience for me, living outside the US, was not great. Sure, programming related searches were pretty good, but everything else was not.
Does Kagi have a better localized experience?
I find Kagi pretty good - I'm UK based.
I upgraded my phone a few days back and when search defaulted back to Google I realised how worthwhile my subscription is.
It's not all perfect, for instance I would love to figure out how to stop all map searches sticking with them: sorry Google is just lightyears ahead there so I'd always prefer that. But generally they're about the right amount of customisability.
The killer feature for me is being able to bury sites so you never ever get results from them ever again and to slightly bump up/down results for particular reasons (your own, not due to someone else paying an ad placement fee!)
Seems fine here in Australia, though I tend to use global results.
Works fine in AU settings too.
It's not as good as google at knowing where you are (gee I wonder why) but if I search Bahn Mi <my town> the results as good as google. Results for something niche like "Keycaps" are showing lots of local results too (or as local as you can get living outside a capital city in Australia).
As a non-US-ian, yes, it does, for search.
There's also a handy country dropdown if you ever want to localize to somewhere else, although I rarely need this, since it's smart enough to eg. show "tokyo hotels" even if your country is somewhere else.
You'll still need Google Maps though.
That’s my issue too, as a Brazilian. For anything more localized, Google is the only choice that has usable results. I leave DDG as my default engine and intentionally go to Google only when I need something that’s more “Brazilian context”.
Just curious, are you wondering about location-specific results ("best restaurants"), country-specific results ("how to do my taxes"), or language-specific results ("pasos de división larga")?
Yeah, location specific and country specific. Like if I'm looking for a product, I want results from local shops, not from eBay/Amazon/etc.
I mostly search in Swedish when searching for Swedish topics and DDG is usually awful for that.
Yeah but you're now filling up Hackernews threads with advertising, so.... same evil?
Kagi is so good
And we are very grateful
How will you fight the inevitable slide that happens if you ever got on top? I’m convinced Google started with the absolute best of intentions before the money and greed turned them into a horror movie villain.
Maybe another company will take over at time. Why does one company have to stay perfect and on top of game for eternity?
I love many of the companies I use and work with... but I'm always on the lookout for a backup plan if one gets greedy. Companies are not loyal to their consumers, we should never make the mistake of providing loyalty to corporations.
Kagi is great though, for now! :D
Observationally, Google search and Kagi are fundamentally different business models.
Google followed/trailblazed the "enshitification" arc of providing a free service that sees widespread adoption by the public, and then financially exploiting the widespread adoption by leveraging usage of the service to serve ads like in the screenshot.
Kagi is a subscription service you pay for and they generate their best effort at an ideal service for you using the money you gave them.
The Google model of providing a free service sort of requires that it be enshitified in order to close the circle on the business case. Reliance on VC money in this model is likely a further aggravating factor to aggressively exploit usage of the service once widespread adoption is achieved.
The Kagi model has an opposite pressure, where if it tries to exploit adoption of the service in a way that users don't appreciate, users will simply abandon their subscription, putting a core revenue stream the business has built itself around at risk.
Is it possible for Kagi or a business like that to become shitty? Sure, a new manager that misunderstands core realities can show up anywhere and ruin the business, or sagging business financials could require VC injection which then pressures further financial extractions from uses. But the structural pressures on a Kagi-style model certainly seem to steer it in the right direction when Google's structural model invariably steered it into something that becomes less pleasant than we all initially knew.
"How will you fight the inevitable slide that happens if you ever got on top?".
Don't get too greedy. There must be examples... 37Signals?
"Don't get greedy" and similar variations assumes intent rather than what I see as the reality of how companies operate within the US--not a failing of individual virtues. If you're a public company, your shareholders will want stock prices to go up and are more than happy to use their shares to vote for whoever is willing to make that happen.
This is, of course, an exaggeration. Not all shareholders value profits above all else, but many big ones do. Ignoring what incentives (and disincentives) are put on a business drive it's behavior. If you want something contrary to those incentives, you need to change those pressures or you're doomed to be disappointed.
Valve is arguably a good example
Valve is also of course a privately held company.
Maybe B corporations?
It's really us who have to change our mindset about companies. It's foolish to expect them to retain the quality or purported ideology they claimed to have when they were trying to win customers, after they reach a point where they can exploit and extract money and suppress choice and competition. A CEO will say anything now and might even mean it, but it's empty words really, and not even their choice in the long run.
We have to not get attached to companies, and not get the idea that they care or have feelings of good or evil. They are tools, like a hammer, or a stapler. A stapler isn't evil if it mashes up all the staples into a tangled mess. It's just broken. You don't mourn a broken stapler, eventually tools just wear out. You throw it out and get a new one. Corporations are the same, McKinsification / enshitification / etc are a part of their natural lifecycle, you should expect that and just switch to a different tool that actually works.
Since they are subscription based and not ad based, their incentives are inherently aligned with customer preferences. This doesn't mean that they are immune from getting worse, or just becoming complacent, but it does at least make it less likely. Ad-supported companies succumbing to enshittification is virtually guaranteed thanks to the misalignment of basic incentives between the company and users (note: not customers).
"If the service is free, you are the product."
There was a time when Google disallowed this. Google even asked us (Firefox team) to report ads squatting on our trademarks. Eventually they stopped caring and now it's in their ad sales pitchdeck just how effective trademark squatting can be.
I made the mistake of agreeing to undertaking that I would not use the trademarked brandname of one of my competitors' keyuwords in our Google ads bidding. Talking with a lawyer after the fact, I learnt that we can freely use the keywords but agreeing to the undertaking is a more serious and legally binding corporate promise. Now they are bidding on my brand names but we can't bid on them. So, I do agree Google search sucks, heh.
Why did you agree to this without it being mutual?
I'm not using an ad blocker; when I search for Midjourney on Google the real thing is my first result; I don't even see any sponsored content. Not sure what's happening for OP.
(Please don't read this as a defense of Google on the whole.)
When I search it I see the same thing as OP.
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/hlF6OoU
Piggybacking on to provide a screenshot since I also see no sponsored content and Midjourney is my #1 result, well above the fold.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/Oxo4FJl.png
Same here, though for me the second result is the Midjourney Discord rather than Reddit.
But I'm in Europe. Perhaps that affects results? I wouldn't be surprised if the Google experience were more ad-heavy in low-consumer-protection nations.
This is exactly what I see with adblock turned on. When turned off, the first two results are ads.
I get the same results as Op, but on mobile, where there are 4 sponsors above the link. It’s about two screen scrolls to the real result.
Mine has one sponsored link which is just a course for midjourney. But I don't doubt at all that the OP post is real. This stuff is all dynamically generated. There is probably even some AI deciding how many ads you'll put up with.
Ideally Google would offer some kind of ad free option, perhaps on a higher tier of the Google One plans.
> I'm not using an ad blocker
How do you tolerate the web without an ad blocker?
by buying everything that appears?
With uBlock off, I get two sponsored ads, and the real site is nearly pushed below the fold: https://i.imgur.com/AkVbvSI.png
Geo targeting or other targeting signals play a role in this
odd, I also don't see any sponsored content any longer for any search whereas I definitely remember seeing what OP has for other searches. But I also now see a tab for AI mode next to ALL which is new... but I also switched to DDG a while ago
Meanwhile, over on Kagi: https://cln.sh/LbZ8VBbKzjyzKchNC4hS
I love Kagi, been using it for over a year now. Sadly I haven’t been able to get anyone else on board, even with gift subs.
I’m still amazed that Kagi search results are basically on par with Google’s (and without the ads) in all my comparison tests that I’ve done. And Google has orders of magnitude more resources.
What has Google been doing all this time?
> What has Google been doing all this time?
Making money hand over fist. Not to say that's necessarily related to quality or morality, it's just been their focus.
Serenity, thanks.
When I search for "midjourney" without an adblocker a bunch of times, I'm getting:
- No ads, with correct midjourney.com as the top result, about half the time
- A legit ad for midjourney.com with the title "Your Imagination, Unlocked", the other half the time. It's the only ad, and the correct midjourney.com is also still directly below it as the first organic result
So both seem fine for me. I've never seen ads on Google with the kind of formatting shown by OP either.
Obviously everybody's search experience is different, based on geography, profile, who else is running ads for those keywords, Google runs different formatting experiences as A/B testing, etc.
You don't fall into any desirable demographic for targeting apparently, or you've never leaked enough info about you that would signify you as desirable.
In other words, nobody is bidding to reach your eyeballs specifically.
This could be a market inefficiency. OR, it could be you're actually a terrible lead for midjourney-type products, and the market is working correctly.
I am highly suspicious tech markets do not see realistic average Google behavior for whatever reason. The pervasive belief in tech that Google Search is even passable suggests people in the Valley or even Austin aren't getting the experience most people do.
I recall a Googler once suggesting to me that Googlers seeing ads might look like ad fraud to advertisers, so I'm not positive Googlers dogfood how bad this is either.
I'd go as far to guess that the tech-literate people (who would be both less susceptible to clicking on enshitified links and more likely to report or discuss them) have, somewhere in their tracked-data-portfolio, a "don't serve too much garbage to this person, they aren't gullible and they'll tell people we're serving garbage" setting.
Apologies for the weird grammar.
It's certainly possible, and maybe not even maliciously: Advertisers are refining their targeting to get clicks, the best advertisers will only annoy people likely to click an ad. The problem with giant algorithmic platforms is often things go off the rails simply due to nobody at the helm understanding what the platform is doing anymore.
Firefox on my phone I got midjourney.com as the first result
Weird
Can anyone reproduce this? When I search "Midjourney", I get an ad for Midjourney (from Midjourney), followed by Midjourney, the site. After that, I get the Midjourney Discord, the Midjourney subreddit, the Midjourney Wikipedia page, and then (inexplicably), another Midjourney ad.
That seems about as good as it could be.
Same. On an android browser, not signed into any Google accounts. Got the legitimate result at the very top.
There's no AI preview in that screenshot, so it's not everything that's wrong with Google Search.
search: "coffee is mostly water"
"No, coffee is not mostly water. That appears to be a misconception based on a popular television show. Coffee is actually about 98% water."
My favorite one thus far has been:
> was there a US president named Bob, Robert, or who went by either?
> No U.S. president has ever gone by Bob or Robert as their common or official name. The closest case is James A. Garfield (20th president), whose full name was James Abram Garfield — no Robert in there
Why is James A. Garfield the closest???? What metric are we using for this comparison, lol
"Yes, coffee is mostly water, with standard black coffee consisting of about 98% to 99% water..."
I just got good first page hits and ranking for a search for "midjourney", but it looks like Midjourney is paying for 2 Sponsored spots on the first page, even though the user searched exactly for Midjourney's well-known brand name.
https://i.imgur.com/u025ZaU.png
On a search for exactly this particular well-known and fairly unique brand name, I think probably midjourney.com should've been the first hit, as a freebie, without needing to buy ads. (Either that, or the second hit, and the Wikipedia entry as the first.)
(Incidentally, it felt a bit retro not to get the usual clutter of AI/infoboxes/etc. at the top of the page this time.)
Relevant (800 comment!) 2024 HN discussion on how we got here with Google Search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976
This is how paid placements work, and it's in the app stores as well.
And yes, _most_ people will just click on one of those top 3 links, not realizing that they are not going where they might have hoped to go.
What's worse is that many people actually go to google to search for the website name they want. And the search engine will "help" them by popping up suggestions before the user might have completed typing .com. So now instead of searching for therealwebsite.com, they search for "therealwebsite". That of course will NOT show them the real website, it will show all the garbage.
I stopped using Google when it started discriminating against browsers without JS recently, and it looks like I'm not missing much. Is stuffing ads in your face this "better experience" that sites are always trying to beg you to enable JS for?
Incidentally, Bing's first two results for "midjourney" are the official site, followed by the Wikipedia page.
You can try with https://www.google.com/search?q=midjurny
My superpower is mispealing even trivial words, Google autocorrect them, but most of the time there are no ads :)
The problem in the post is even worst with YouTube, because Google adds allow to show http://example.com/sale?utm=123456789&crap=987654321 as http://example.com This is not a problem in most business sites, but in YouTube it allows any user to impersonate the main page.
Kagi is worth every penny.
Too bad I cannot zoom into the image in my phone. Even tapping on it does not enable me to really see it much larger.
Android Firefox and its various forks (I use Waterfox) have a setting that allows zoom on all sites.
I "open image in a new tab" and can then pinch to zoom in the new tab, too.
You can usually force enable zoom in browser accessibility settings.
Yep. Its a shit website, talking about a shittier website.
Same shit, different screenshot. The most irritating part is that other folks can't reliably reproduce results like those shown in the screenshot. Yet, I can think of countless examples of this happening to me. My guess is that it's highly beneficial to Google to barf out walls of poor-quality ads when it knows nothing about you. I can't be sure why, but there's a pattern.
When you look for my (somewhat obscure) company's app on the Play store, the first result is always a sponsored listing for some totally unrelated app.
About a year ago, I googled "silverfast" (film scanning program) on a fresh Windows installation not connected to me in any way, and I got several ads for scammy scanner software before the program I was looking for showed up.
When I watch youtube videos from obscure creators while logged out, I routinely get AI-generated ads for random stuff. The funniest one was deepfaked Chuck Norris emphatically telling me I should feed my dog carrots. Yet, when I watch a video from a big YouTube channel under the same conditions, I get ads from major household brands.
My guess is that there's three things happening. 1) More moneyed advertisers have more refined targeting constraints, that implicitly filter out ill-defined user profiles. 2) Google feels the need to do a better job of targeting for advertisers who pay them more. 3) In the absence of a well-defined user profile, Google shotguns a bunch of low-cost ads at you to try to build a profile. Just guesses.
Impressions to logged-in users bid higher than anonymous sessions. There's almost certainly higher tiers of demographics beyond that, not that you're allowed to know.
The fact that people continue to willingly subject themselves to the internet without using an adblocker is insane to me.
At least it was on the first page. I just searched for Midjourney on the iPhone App Store. It put 2 other results first. Each result is about 2/3rds the height of the screen meaning the actual "midjourney" result was a screen and a half down, so off the screen.
It's not wrong, it's how Google evolved based on demand and literally on the industries it created and that everyone was happy to join.
SEO + AdWords = this
It apparently took everyone decades to notice this is where we were always headed.
I remember a company saying its most effective ads were search ads for their own name.. like what midjourney does
https://postimg.cc/8JwL9WFx
> I remember a company saying its most effective ads were search ads for their own name
I don't have the full context, but this is almost a tautology. Of course you get the highest click-through-rate and highest conversion for searches that are your own name. You usually also get a relatively cheap bid, because most search engines prefer to prioritize relevant results, and you will be very relevant for your own name. But you would have gotten most of those clicks and conversion _for free_ even if you didn't advertise on your name, because the searcher would see your organic result. Advertising on your own name is defensive, not offensive -- you protect customers that are already yours, you don't get new ones.
source: I run marketing for a small business, we advertise on our own name too, and of course it is also the most effective if you calculate it naively.
For what it's worth, when you view a Google search results page, part of the page is populated by ads (results come from the Google Ads teams) and part of it by search results (results come from the Google Search team, and unaffected by anything to do with ads).
The post points out a problem with the fraction that is allocated to Ads, but pretty sure that's not "everything that's wrong with Google Search" (if true, it would actually be an endorsement of the quality of the organic search results, which I doubt is the intent).
Not really, its just a condemnation of the amalgamation which is unable to be perceived as different from the user - it shits on the organic search in their mind and anyone saying "well our search is still good!" is completely missing the point.
People are really starting to notice the sharp decline of Google search. I blogged[0] of a very similar experience a few months ago.
I don't even mind the AI Overview (too much) but the search results themselves are noticeably worse. In my example, the best search result and the one that the AI summary is clearly based on is the 6th ranked result.
Is Google doing this deliberately to make the AI Overview seem better?
In an ideal world, Google would use AI to provide better search results. Something like: "Here are the results for your search term A, which was slightly ambiguous. I suggest added term B or C depending on what you meant". It seems like that is not going to happen.
[0] https://sheep.horse/2025/4/yo_google%2C_thanks_for_the_ai_ov...
I stopped using Google because I'd quickly search something, click the first link then, like Wiley Coyote, slowly realize I'd run straight off a cliff.
I can't believe that's what their standard is now.
I wouldn't characterize that as "everything" that's wrong. It is at least one thing.
On one hand, google forces users to surrender more and more person information for "advance security features" on other hand google allows malicious links to be the top 10 (sponsored) search results. .
They're pushing so hard on Gemini because they know the search days are limited.
Offtopic, but I hate websites that restrict zoom on mobile. I'm sure the image is very convincing, too bad I can barely read the text.
There have been ads above the fold for about 20 years. I just did the search and the official Midjourney site is the first non-sponsored hit. You'll find this for most searches.
I find the Ads to be annoying, but the "ML Fairness" (re-calibrating demographic distributions of photos) to be more disturbing.
though I've noticed that they've dialed down the knobs a bit. It's still there, but far less blatant (probably due to the attention-grabbing BARD debacle)
I have been using an ad blocker for a long time and K didn't even know there was the sponsored ads feature
the sponsored results looks like you are in an ads experiment since this really isn't how it typically displays
Baidu did this in the past and quickly lost his credit and market in China.
Google Search jumped the shark years ago. It's the modern-day Yahoo at this point. Even Bing is a better experience, which is not a sentence I ever thought I would type a decade ago.
Hmm I just tried that search and Midjourney's site was at the top.
Regardless, at this point, I consider Google Search "legacy software." I rarely use it anymore. Google's AI mode or ChatGPT Thinking perform much more nuanced searches for me and surface the results I'm looking for much faster.
I used to consider my Google-fu top notch, but even without Google Search "Classic" getting destroyed by SEO spam, it's still more work at the end of the day than AI models. I'm sure spam and irrelevance will be the eventual fate of these AI models too, but for now they're the new Google
> have enough backlinks
Doesn't link
Google is an adtech company and not a search company so this is normal
Yahoo! did this as it died too
For the love of god please use (and pay for) Kagi.
I cannot possibly fathom how they stay afloat with just 50k+ users.
Seems perfectly tailored to the product being sold and the customers paying for it
Product being search users. Customers being advertisers.
sounds like a transient issue. I just tried [midjourney] and midjourney.com was the top ad and also the #1 result, dominating the page.
Google's ad engine, also featuring search results somewhere on the page.
I just tried the same search on DuckDuckGo.
Midjourney.com is second on the list. Not good. But better.
So what's crazy about this is that I remember, when I first joined Google in 2011, that they were particularly proud of how people would just stop using URLs and use Google to navigate. So people would type "amazon" to get to Amazon.com instead of actually typing out `amazon.com`, or using a bookmark or directory etc. And they wanted to keep search at a quality that would continue to get people to do that. And later the fear with mobile becoming ascendant was that people would stop using search in this way, etc.
But it looks like they just keep giving people more and more reason to... not do that.
Google has turned into altavista
With udm14 and ublock origin on Firefox my first link is the official midjourney.com, then the subreddit, then the official discord, then wikipedia, then the offical Facebook page. That is just about perfect and covers what most people would want.
No ads. No LLM BS. While the experience google is pushing is terrible, the underlying tech still works in cases like this.
Regular google + unlock origin gives me the same results
Could not reproduce.
You might be part of an experiment or have a rogue extension installed that is hijacking the results (it's happened to me).
from a new customer perspective who just heard about midjourney, search may be a good spot to find alternate products. what google needs to know is if it is a navigational search and unless it keeps a long history, it may not know that. the simpler answer may be that companies who know you use a product like the one they make may just be willing to spend a bunch and google may be willing to add friction for the $.
My dad stopped using Google like 20 years ago for exactly this reason. He was not happy when his relevant local small business was pushed off the first page by out-of-state providers of tenuously related services
Everything that is wrong about bullshit webpages that are SoMe optimized: I could not zoom because eyeballs so I couldn't see what was in the image.
But daaaaamn. I could see that footer all the time. Lucky I was not able to zoom.
Enshittification really should be upgraded to a fourth law of thermodynamics.
If we could get circa 2010 Google back people would not waste nearly as much time with “AI”.
smiles in UBO
UBO works on startpage and ecosia as well and increases traffic counts for less invasive search engines
Can't wait till ChatGPT responses look like this
Google frequently ignores entire words in a search query or gives thematically similar but utterly irrelevant results.
I don't have a problem with this in general, I do have a problem when they deceive users, which happens often. If I search for Amazon and get Temu ad - that's OK. But often when I search for X they will show sponsored results that pretend to be that X. This is esp true with apps on their play store, which is something fairly new. I barely use Google Search these days so don't know how bad it is with search.
This is a pattern you see often. A product gets to a point where it's hard to grow revenue as the market expects, so the company does everything they can to squeeze more revenue.
That's not everything that's wrong.
Wait till you see ads in ChatGPT.
Or even worse; you don't see explicit ads, but rather ads are used to influence the results.
Try searching for "FedEx phone number" and it's not even in the top 10 search results. Not sure if FedEx is using SEO or paying to suppress results, but I was shocked Google couldn't even return this basic search successfully. I remember when Google Search used to actually work and have useful results and something like "FedEx phone number" would have the 1-800 number in bold text for you to click and immediately use. Now I use ChatGPT for those type of questions--and get the results I expect.
ublock origin
That's not "everything"! Just wasted ~3 hours trying to set up an account, supervised by me, for my 8 year old daughter.
(1) There are some old rules for a user interface.
(2) Billions of people know these rules, implicitly, and right away and easily use sites that follow the rules.
(3) Google, and others, want a new, different, original, snappy, creative, user interface but in this effort set aside the old rules so that at most only the programmer understands the user interface and in a month he (she) won't be able to use it either.
Analogy: They are really good at making pancakes but now are trying to make Bouillabaisse and are getting only rotten sea food.
Uh, the user interface has a lot of cartoons in a popular, new style but one of their cartoons shows little girl and some of the underside of her skirt -- dumb de dumb-dumb. If they make a mistake like that, then they are sloppy or worse workers and, thus, no wonder the rest is awful. Time to short the stock?
Every time this comes up, I don’t understand what the alternative is supposed to be.
X (Midjourney in this case) may/not be trademarked in the user’s country - so what makes X so special that Google/others should rank this one over others? Does this mean X owns the keyword and other related searches on Google forever? That sounds worse than domain squatting!
Speaking of, quite often, X.com is already registered, so companies buy getX.com or just non-.com TLDs. Now which one is the right result for searches for X? The pre existing one or the new company? What if they’re in different industries?
Almost all SaaS companies have multiple comparison pages or blogs/articles/etc that mention and compare themselves with competitors - specifically for SEO to show up in those searches. Should this also be banned?
I could go on, but I just don’t see a situation where Google can solve this satisfactorily for everyone, without becoming opinionated and picking/choosing/preferring one competitor over the other. As such, they’ve gone for the easiest model we have in modern day capitalism - put it up for auction and let the market figure it out!
The issue you're describing is ranking results or ranking between promoted/ad content.
The problem more at hand is unless you're paying big bucks, they can and will place content that at best is another competitor, or at worst is genuinely trying to harm your users. Ads being inline and as close in appearance to regular results as google can legally get away with is the problem. There are heavily misaligned incentives at play, ones that enable a lot of malware and phishing attempts.
No, I’m definitely not talking about ranking - that’s downstream of my point.
I’m talking about the “simple” solution that everyone alludes to but can’t seem to explain how it would feasibly work.
You're describing the exact (complex) problem that Google Search was born to solve. And at some point they successfully did.
If we agree it's something they can't solve anymore, letting them pay to stay is a disservice to the users.
Uh, midjourney is the first result on my google. Thanks to the magic of adblock.
Seriously is this the level of HN discussion nowadays?
Can we be honest here? This isn't (really) Google's fault, because ANY company in the same position would do the same. It's our fault, for letting them.
We could pass a law preventing this nonsense tomorrow, and Google would have no choice in the matter. However, "we the people" don't have strong advocates fighting for us, while Google has both (very strong) legal and political contributions (ie. bribery) teams ensuring that never happens.
The real problem here is that we've ceded our democracy to corporations: blaming Google (or any individual corporation) is missing the real issue.
P.S. But, the good news is ... we can always take our democracy back.
Thanks for the anecdote, but everyone’s advertising experience is different — that’s the whole point of targeted advertising. It doesn’t invalidate the OP’s point, though.
FWIW, I just used the Google app on iOS and got one ad (for artlist.io) before the midjourney.com link. A lot of people use Google this way to get to a named website, btw.
Impossible to know beforehand if it’s midjourney.com , midjourney.ai, getmidjourney.io or some such other idiocy - search engines exist for a reason.
Also - well-known that ad, sorry, search engines might well give two people different results for the same query.