That is not the thesis of this article. In fact, the opposite. The article claims that despite the increase in advertising, for the given exemplar (hotel search), the ads actually make Google more useful compared to the ten-blue-link baseline.
Lots of us have little interest in doing shopping searches on Google--we search directly on Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Target or whatever.
With respect to non-shopping searches for a huge proportion of queries the top page of results are dominated either by shopping responses or fluff articles.
You could copy and paste this thread into the comments of any other article about Google search in the past few months and it would be no less relevant. Only, you needn't bother, since this discussion gets rehashed every single time, so there's already a discussion with much the same points as this one, and much the same value, already there. That's a good sign that the discussion is lacking the nuance that I always hope to find here. But what's actually happening is a complete lack of engagement with what was ultimately a pretty interesting article.
In that case, why try to make a judgement? If you can't make a judgement but it irritates you, why not just spend your time on another page? Surely a discussion about the discussion is always going to be less useful and relevant than the discussion that organically develops out of the same topic.
If the heading is "Google search", asdfasgasdgasdg could just spend their time elsewhere.
The fact that fifty thousand people have already had their say doesn't mean that the next hundred people who want to have their say is a subset of the first, and thus may benefit. And, moreover, if people keep writing articles about related topics, related discussion is going to keep coming up.
And counterexample - every time I look up a hotel, I want to go to their actual homepage because I find the aggregators often intermingle pictures of the different room types and I want to see what the actual actual suite I'm booking looks like.
And Google buries the actual hotel homepage pretty deep, in my experience.
* also note it’s driven substantial consolidation in the hotel industry, because big companies like Marriott can just rake in their direct bookings.
Arguably this is because there is still "full" organic reach possible, and the users govern the subreddits. If there were to be a major throttling of organic reach such that the only way to get prominent visibility on Reddit was to pay based on reach, or mods lost the ability to control and curate their communities, I wouldn't be surprised to see Reddit drop in quality and user base.
You can weed out the fake reviews on reddit better than say on amazon because of other users.
Just use some common sense and if you see an echo chamber subreddit then take the review with some salt.
Yesterday I wanted to buy some inear headphones on Amazon and the user experience on the site itself is abysmal with countless no name China wares and suspect reviews.
A search on fitness related subreddits what people actually use and how (water damage through sweating seems common) was much more useful.
But you meant users reaching content.
Firstly, Google seems to be far more aggressive about using synonyms, and it's almost always done in a way that broadens a query. So, for example, if you search for a particular brand of some kind of product, the results that come up are often about such products in general (you can see which word got substituted, because they highlight the found keywords in bold).
Worse yet, it's also aggressively dropping specific words from the query (they show up stricken through under the result links). It used to be that it would do that when your search wouldn't even get a pageful of results - but now it gets to a ridiculous point where I make a two-word query, and the top result has one of those two dropped! And yet if you quote the word, forcing it to be there, there's no shortage of results for the more detailed query.
In practice, this means that most of my detailed Google queries end up quoting all or almost all words in them, because that's the only way I get results that I actually want, rather than a bunch of random vaguely related links. Even that doesn't seem to be 100% reliable, because it seems to sometimes ignore even the quoted words...
While I have no idea why this is going on, it's clearly not to improve search result quality. Which leaves only one hypothesis - that this is somehow related to advertising. I don't know if it's about paid search results, or preferentially treating websites that have Google ads on them, or just generally steering me towards online stores rather than e.g. forums (where the quote-forced detailed queries usually lead). But either way, this is worrying, because search has always been so fundamental to what Google is - and if that is being twisted so badly now, what can I expect from other products?
Of course it is, they'll earn more if it takes you longer to search and you are more likely to click on one of the ads. I think it's as simple as that.
For both searches, the first page was largely the same just in a different order. The big difference comes on the later pages of results.
The overlap between the HN crowd and the crowd following influencers is probably minimal, but as far as a % of the platform, I'd wager most people are going through these soft ads unwittingly.
Also, instagram is supposedly the platform with highest organic conversions & so I expect instagram come up with a way to monetize this off-platform Ad deals if not already.
Does any country have a law telling these influencers need to inform their followers about their sponsorship? Such laws exist for affiliate marketing.
The U.S. does.[1]
1. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/04/ftc-s...
Now most are very careful and even "overdisclose" advertising as a result (they disclose even for products they mention that they are not paid for it).
I wish they would overdisclose here. It does not help that on social media, lots of people think adding "#sp" is enough.
There's a couple handfuls of people I know personally who still use it as all-photo Facebook, and just post pictures of their dogs, or their kids, or their lunch.
Everything else is wall-to-wall hustling. Explicitly sponsored ads, business accounts promoting their stuff, meme pages that are hawking stuff in the comments, managed celebrity accounts, fitness models shilling supplements, and on and on and on.
She doesn't buy stuff based on IG anymore.
Do you remember television or radio? How much choice did you have over the ads there? You'd literally have to sit through mass-market beer ads for minutes at a time.
With Instagram, the ads and soft-ads are oftentimes quite targeted. I get ads about theatre plays, musicals and ballet in my city. I wouldn't have found out about them otherwise - I think it's great! You can actually select an ad and say 'don't show me this stuff anymore' and provide a reason. I get to no longer see ads I don't like! Phew, that's a killer feature!
If the people you follow on instagram are generic, you get generic ads. If you follow niche markets, you get niche ads that you may be glad to find out about. Internet ads have become a reflection of sorts, if you are bothered by the ads, maybe what you're really bothered by is unfulfilled potential that the ads are a reflection of.
Your mileage may vary of course :)
The increase appears to be dramatic. I signed up for YouTube Premium long ago simply because I couldn't stand the occasional ad anymore. I recently was at a friend's, and I wanted to show him a particular cooking video that I liked, on his iPad. It was a 16-minute video and it was interrupted three times by an ad. mid-video. Unbearable.
The thing is, through Premium, I was actually looking forward to discovering new music with the YouTube Music app. Was I wrong. The recommendations are crap. They are repetitive to the point of nausea. I have a few hundred "liked" songs, but the recommendations are heavily skewed towards a few, mostly recently "liked" songs.
This has actually lead to me dreading marking a song as "liked", as it inevitably leads to this repetition and, much worse, to unending recommendations of the same artist's other songs, even if I "dislike" every. single. one. of. them.
I think there is a median point between this dichotomy where YouTube comes up with ways to collect revenue that don't depend on maintaining an adversarial relationship with their users.
If the ads make you feel like they're specifically there to make you hate them enough to pay, that's basically playing highwayman. You can't blame people for thinking that's distasteful. They could have less intrusive systems for advertising or just make it subscription only, patron/donation based like Wikipedia, or some hybrid of multiple models.
That's inherently subjective though. About the only way for a paid product to not make me feel that way would be to keep showing me ads after I pay up, which is not what we're after. On the other hand, people have claimed on HackerNews before that they just plain don't mind ads. Where do you draw the line that says that they're specifically there to make you pay up? It's intellectually dishonest to both complain about ads and complain when a company offers a reasonable alternative to those ads.
> They could have less intrusive systems for advertising or just make it subscription only, patron/donation based like Wikipedia, or some hybrid of multiple models.
They have that. Subscription only makes discoverability (YouTube's primary strength) far more difficult. AFAIK YouTube does offer paid channel subscriptions, but for whatever reason Patreon seems to have captured that market far better.
They REALLY need a way to easily say "exclude this genre entirely from my recommendations" or from specific auto-lists. I'd also love a way to reset the learning features or specify more clearly "only learn from these playlists."
It just bugs me that an entity with such a forte in data mining can err that much, to the point where they're losing a losing customer to the competition.
When you say useless does that mean you think the gap between Google and (other engine of your choice) is narrowing ? Do you see yourself switching to say Bing for better search results anytime soon ?
I tried this. The wikipedia page for "computer" was the second result. Above that, oddly, a store page for "computers" at Best Buy. Above that, some suggested questions like "what is a computer?" ("A computer is a machine or device that performs processes, calculations and operations based on instructions provided by a software or hardware program.") And above that, at the top, several advertisements and a map of where the advertising locations are.
I don't understand what you think should come up in a search for the word "computer". I already know what a computer is, and I think it's safe to say that's true of almost everyone using the internet.
Panel for computer sales at top. A maps menu showing computer shops near me. A Bestbuy link. Another panel for computer sales. Walmart, amazon, newegg. A wiki. And another sales panel.
Last week I saw an SAP ad over a twitch stream showing on a wall monitor in an esports bar. That’s either the smartest targeted ad ever (3 out of our table were software types who would be involved in an SAP purchase decision), or just some campaign manager clicking a box that means “put my ad anywhere you want.” The next ad was for twix.
I think if we face a downturn where all of a sudden there’s not money and smart people are trying to spend on ads that have real return, these platforms will really get slammed. I’m not sure what multiplier it is. But I think their leverage in the “BS ad” domain will be more than 1x whatever the downturn is.
Some of the worst targeted ads I've ever seen are on Reddit and Imgur
meanwhile a startup can focus on building a great product, sometimes while not needing to be profitable.
Amazon.com took advantage of this, with Jeff Bezos famous quote of, "Your margin is my opportunity".
First I get a large map card with a couple of stores with computer in their names nearby. I don't know how useful that is since I don't have a real search intent.
Next I get the computer page for best buy (I am in the USA) and the computer wikipedia article.
I have just tried duck duck go. I just get a full page of computers on best buy, amazon, etc
I don't think the google results are any worse than the ddg ones here.
If anything, trying to match with a 2 nearby places which are partial matches (computer in their names) is relevant.
And at least it gives me the wikipedia article. On ddg, it can be seen on the right side widget or at the bottom of the second page
Now with that being said, it would be nice if companies cared more about having sustainable businesses with healthy, non-intrusive user experiences than revenue growth.
Since the original article is more about Google, I would like to say that while Google's paid gmail+office is a compelling product that I liked paying for until I realized that there was no way I could merge services bought with my "free" Google account with the paid account. I think this is a lesson for Twitter if they ever do offer a paid service: integrate well with the old free account or convert old account and history smoothly.
I'm worth literally zero to Twitter; I use an adblocker everywhere, and when that fails, not only do I never click on an ad, I purposefully scroll as quickly past them as I can.
I'd pay a couple bucks a month to remove that hassle.
> Search for something generic like "computer" and you can see an example of how hard it is to get information instead of ads.
To be fair, "computer" is such a generic term, I can't even imagine what you expect to see when you search for it.
Tangentially, I find IG's place in the social media panoply to be fascinating. It's the only service that everyone seems to feel positively about: it doesn't inspire the loathing that Facebook and Twitter does or the mockery that Snapchat does (even by their users).
But watching people use Instagram is the closest I see people coming to the popular addict/junkie metaphor and the stereotype of smartphones and social media turning us into slackjawed automatons in thrall to a colorful Skinner Box. It's really eerie.
Well there is actually some mockery about the lengths some people go to alter their perceived appearance[0].
And don’t give me duckduckgo, that one regularly ranks spam domains and typo domains higher than the real results
I just discovered the "reddit"/"hackernews" trick while doing this for actual content I want to read.
As far as I'm concerned I will never recommend Jumpcloud or any other service I find doing this.
On the plus side, it has been very cool chatting with people from all over the world doing the same things, and getting compliments (like, actual comments, not just likes).
Google has recently launched one of its biggest updates (BERT) which should improve the understanding of your keywords tremendously. By utilizing the power of NLP (Natural Language Processing) technology, it will now be able to provide more relevant and accurate search results for everyone.
You can read more about the update via the company's blog: https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-language-unde...
I'm also finally noticing ads when watching YouTube on Chromecast. There used to be zero ads (which was a little confusing) but now there's ads.
I'm not sure what you expect. I mean, yeah. I have to put OSRS in any search for "murder mystery" to get the result I wanted. But that's not a huge deal.
Who searches for generic "computer" that isn't a 70 year old lady probably looking for a new computer. Google in that scenario is just serving up what they're most likely looking for.
And heck, it's not like the wikipedia link was that far down. It was under a couple of store links and then bam. Wiki for computers.
That said, yes, there is definitly a downward spiral where placing more ads drives your viewership away, which in turn lowers your revenue and makes you place more ads, which drives away viewership, etc.
This isn't really a problem with 'ads', this is a generic problem of management driving a thriving property into the ground in the name of short-term profit.
I see ads panel for computers, followed by wiki, videos about computer, questions, map with computer shop and list of links related to computer terminology.
I don't use ad blocker. Still get relavent results.
I’ve noticed that I use Google a lot less now because all the ads and baloney stress me out. Turns out a lot of the stuff I used to search for isn’t that important.
#1 in my list would be anything from w3 domain. God bless their souls but that thing is the SEO plague
I stopped using IG & Twitter largely because it went from having relatively few ads to where I started seeing an ad nearly every other post. The value of the platform proportionally declined significantly and I no longer bother using them.
Google is slowly becoming useless (even with an ad blocker) because you have to hack search terms in order to get useful results. For example, I append words like "wiki" or "reddit" to get results that aren't SEO'd. Search for something generic like "computer" and you can see an example of how hard it is to get information instead of ads.
It feels like ads are definitely a bubble, and I suspect the next big tech companies will not be ad based.