I couldn't help thinking that that Ad was a lot like a locksmith accepting a few bucks to let some burglar into my house no questions asked, and then explaining to the cops that he's just as much a victim as I am.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Locksmith/comments/41ydjn/serious_q...
It's gotten to the point where spam sites with out of date articles are now ranking number 1. Yet everyone else is being thrown around page 2+. Google is inevitably only concerned about Ad spend so this instability of rankings forces you into their ad spending machine.
Organic results in the last few months have been a cesspit and so by the looks of it we are now in a full stream of shit with Google. Ads are scams, organic results are not what they should be due to endless 'algo updates'.
What's the solution? I ponder this daily. Without Google and Facebook targeting, starting a successful, long lasting business just got hard again.
It frustrates me a lot. I don’t even know how to find useful information online anymore for everyday things like “how hot is too hot outside for a cat?” I invariably land on a garbage page with paragraph after paragraph of unintelligible keyword fluff. I keep thinking that one of the paragraphs will have a the content I’m looking for, but more and more I get to the end and realized I just scanned a whole page of referral links and content that was clearly farmed out to be written by someone who either doesn’t know English or GPT2 or something.
But Google are getting money of scams so ...
Maybe this wasn't a real example, but searching exactly this (quotes not included) returned the answer in a knowledge box at the top of the page and the first several organic results had the answer very clearly in the text.
You can see this in the recent Google 2FA threads too, lots of people were quite sure Google is doing this to get their phone numbers. The facts don't line up with that, but who has time for facts? They know they're right, and so do the people upvoting. If you point out the facts a handful of confused people might agree, yeah, what you're saying does seem to match reality, but that's no match for the self-assurance of those who haven't checked at all.
Much of the time you can get a long way on just lots of people believing you, without any basis in reality. But Mother Nature couldn't care less what you believe, and it's tricky for people who think this way to sense where the line will be until they've stepped over it.
Better versions of the (apocryphal) story of King Cnut the Great can get this across. The courtiers pretend to believe their King's claim to command the sea, but the sea of course couldn't give a shit, it's just water, it obeys Mother Nature's laws (in this case Gravity via a fairly circuitous process causes Tides) but not the whims of men.
more and more like (a worse version) of the yellow pages every quarter.
I don't think Google has an interest in keeping those ads. The reputational damage, and adblock installs it drives, must be more than the few clicks those ads make. Pissing off the user (or more likely, whoever helps the user clean up the aftermath) to the point that they install an ad blocker costs all future ad revenue from that person.
But until not just Google, but all the other ad networks, have cleaned up their act to the point where I can safely let my mother browse the Internet without an adblocker, I'm installing an adblocker on every machine I support.
So many bad things come from ads: Scams like this, tech support scams, ads tricking users into installing adware/malware, really attractive looking offers that sell you utter garbage (with promises that it's risk-free since you can return them, except shipping is on you and costs more than the product), resource usage on your computer, tracking/fingerprinting, disgusting imagery of various nasty diseases being shoved in your face ... there are very few benefits ads have to you, and they're vastly outweighed by the risks and costs, especially for users who don't know how to avoid being taken advantage of.
Also, once that person gets voted into office, they immediately have to deal with both lobbyists and members of the deep state that are already in those lobbyists pockets. If you try and go against the will of the state or corporate America (not the people, mind you), the CIA and corporate media will relentlessly smear you and try to demolish your likelihood of re-election. You can also have members of the house of representatives with abysmal approval ratings actively impede legislation with overwhelming public support. Assuming you can somehow overcome these odds, you then have to contend with the fact that you have at most 8 years to achieve what you need to accomplish before likely having the next one in charge try their best to dismantle your accomplishments.
Note: some might find it odd that I consider term limits evidence of the superficial nature of US democracy. It's important to realise the motivation behind the introduction of term limits in the first place was following FDR's 3 re-elections, Republicans were worried that if they did not introduce term limits, they would never get a chance at getting elected again. This is because FDR's policies had overwhelming support of the people - democrats and republicans alike. Of course, what really happened was that future Democrat and Republican presidents lacked the backbone to resist kowtowing to lobbying and corruption but the damage has been done. Anybody seeking to remove term limits would be (and not without some justification) accused of trying to turn themselves a dictator.
Now, I’m sure a Google PR person would insist that this tiny bit of text is a clear and unambiguous visual distinction but they’d be lying to you hoping that you are unfamiliar with eye-tracking research showing how little things like that matter, not to mention the way Google has trained users not to notice by using the smallest icon sizes and progressively removing as many visual indicators over the years as they think they can get away with.
The fact that people at Google feel the need to claim that this is a meaningful distinction tells you that it isn’t. Nobody at Google got defensive about this back when they didn’t offer advertisers a way to get the top result because it was completely obvious that ads were separate.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/squint-and-youll-click-it/
Remember when Google highlighted ads in different colours? Like the garish pink and green from way back in 2001: https://edge45.co.uk/blog/google-adwords-evolution-timeline/ (scroll down to see it near the bottom)
Look at how they intentionally tried to differentiate the ad from the rest of the search results: large swaths of white space separate the top sponsored ads from the rest of the search results even in a time when monitors were smaller, with clearly different link and background colours, etc.
I wonder if anybody's built a browser plugin to provide Google search results pages that look like they used to back in 2001? ;-)
> It’s hard to imagine what Google looked like without ads
...I'm not too sure on that one, Colin. Not a whole lot of imagination required.
(DDG seems to do it the other way around: results have favicons, ads have nothing in that spot. anyways, adblocker back on)