Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
by kerkeslager on Friday January 24, 2020 @04:28PM
(#22142632)
> He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does.
Yeah, I think the only way that would happen is if someone came up with a novel superior approach to search and managed to legally protect it so Google couldn't just copy it. That's a very unlikely at this point.
> But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers.
I don't think I agree with this. Users don't necessarily behave rationally in self-interest: they can be (and are) manipulated, and unwilling to try new tools.
Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
by asdfasgasdgasdg on Friday January 24, 2020 @06:19PM
(#22143306)
I can believe that if there were another solution that were marginally better it might not be enough to unseat the top player in the market. But switching costs in search are extremely low so it would be surprising if people did not switch for a substantially better experience. In particular, it would require us to believe that what happened when Google showed up on the scene would not happen again, and to me that just does not seem likely.
Re:How much longer will we trust Google’s search results?
by kerkeslager on Sunday January 26, 2020 @12:11PM
(#22153185)
Perhaps switching costs are low, but they're certainly higher than people are willing to pay in many cases. Switching costs as high as "changing the default search provider" are demonstrably prohibitive.
As to the question posed by the article, isn't the answer obvious? I don't know if users even "trust" Google's responses now. But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers. As long as Google is still the best way to search up information on, e.g., obscure aspects of Stardew Valley's economy, users who want to do searches about such things will continue to prefer Google. If Google ceases to surface good results for queries compared to e.g. DDG, users will migrate to DDG.