The moment Google removed the yellow highlight on ads, their fate was sealed. They lived long enough to become the villain.

I do believe I just saw an open letter from some Google staff to the CEO reiterating the need to uphold their "do no evil" model.

I can't imagine what it's like for the original employees to watch the company become what it has.

All the things that made Google so appealing, and gain market share, seem to have faded. It's a bit sad, to be honest. I remember being so excited to become a Gmail beta tester, back in the day.

I'm of the opinion that it should be illegal for companies to offer the ability to buy ads for registered product names or trademarks.

Google, Amazon, and Apple all allow trademark and product name squatting. It's gross and abusive.

Generic terms? Sure. But actual trade names for products? That's extortion.

These services aren't helping in discovery if the customer already knows the name. They're merely forcing themselves into that relationship and taxing it.

You then have to buy n-many ads across m-many services just to keep you in front of your competitors that would squat you.

IMO, the services should just not buy the ads for their own name. It might hurt their bottom line a bit, but doing this makes the search engine shittier for the users who know what they want to see.

User input/frustration will eventually lead them toward alternative search engines, or provide enough feedback to Google/Bing/etc to make them disable registered service name or company names from being used as ad terms.

I've been using Neeva for a while now. It's ad-free and (for me, anyway) on par with Google. I have one premium account ($5/month) and one free account (used for work) and have had no issues with either. By default, searches aren't saved, although enabling it can lead to better personalized searches.

Kagi's one I've heard great things about as well, although I'm not a fan of a business model that allows me to pay for X searches before hitting a barrier that prevents further use of the platform (theirs is 200 searches a month for $5, which seems way too low based on my use cases).

In any case, users will force the change, not any government or corporate pressure. Businesses' best chance of fighting it is to refuse to play along.

Kagi does not have any barrier for using the platfrom. Perhaps you misunderstood the pricing?

They provide 100 free searches, 200 searches for $5/month, and 700 searches for $10/month.

If you run over your allotment, you pay 1.5c thereafter.

That's a barrier. That's exactly what I was talking about.

Edit: Admittedly, I didn't realize that they just bill for follow-on searches, I assumed they stopped you. That charge per follow-on search is even worse.

> I'm of the opinion that it should be illegal for companies to offer the ability to buy ads for registered product names or trademarks.

I'm of the opinion ads themselves should be illegal. Companies can "advertise" in a catalog I can choose to look at, but would no longer be allowed to invade my attention with their bullshit constantly.

We've let marketers ruin too many good things as it is, lets just kill off the entire industry for the good of society.

That's too extreme. The economy would fall apart and a lot of people would lose their livelihoods.

Think about second order effects. YouTubers. News stations. Newspapers. Film crews. Publishers. Writers. Marketers (who do more than just ads). All impacted.

Many of the products we use everyday would no longer be viable. Even the premium tiers are supported by ads.

Engineering salaries would be broadly impacted.

The economy is driven by hustle, sales, and ads. I'd rather live in this world than one than one that has no ads. We'd be less productive: less employed, less eager to buy, less eager to work. Maybe some aspire to that, but that society won't be building rocket ships and inventing immortality.

I do hate ads, but they're better than not having them. And I understand their utility and the overall ecosystem they support.

> Many of the products we use everyday would no longer be viable.

I think this is a bullshit myth the industry uses to justify itself. People are capable of paying for things, and to the extent they don't want to then maybe we really don't need whatever it was the ads were supporting.

I mean, a lot of the "content" exists purely as clickbait with a tiny bit of entertainment or information attached so it can product place or sell ads. Fuck it, we don't need it as a society.

>The economy is driven by hustle, sales, and ads.

Allowing jobs that make society worse for profit because "economy" is just the broken window fallacy. We are better off skipping the job part and just giving them money directly.

> We'd be less productive: less employed, less eager to buy, less eager to work.

We'd be doing bullshit jobs less. How is that a bad thing? Lets redirect what productivity we do feel like engaging in on making the world better instead of making the people at the top of the economic food chain wealthier and playing on people's insecurities to get them to pay for shit they don't need.

In my idea world, if I am interested in buying some new product or service I consult a catalog. Opt-in marketing, not bullshit carrot and stick marketing, and certainly not the kind of completely unsolicited bullshit that keeps us from having unfiltered email, answering our phones, or using the internet without an ad blocker.

But what can replace Google? Is there another search engine with stunningly relevant results like the early days of Google?

Bing is on it's way in that direction. Microsoft needed something big to make Bing relevant again. This could potentially be it.

Will they eat all of Google's lunch? Probably not, but if they can begin to chip away at the insane share (93%+) of the marketplace that Google controls, then it can only be for the betterment of the Internet.

Bing doesn't seem any better than Google though. I was thinking of something that gives you a dramatically superior result than Google.

I created aisearch.vip which searches using bing api, removes results containing ads or seo junk, and uses openai to summarize content to void clickbait. I believe that this is the only way to get the 0-4 good results hiding in the top 20 results. It's paid because it costs to run. But to be honest I myself am a fan of what phind is doing. Just can't understand how they are able to cover costs yet

Microsoft is really still in their infancy of building out their end vision for AI in search. Right now it's roughly a chat bot that summarizes and gives references, without really tying into their core search well. Eventually it will negate the need to click through to many reference, then it will be better able to curate a list of alternative sources for what you seek. I think that's the big problem with AI as it stands now, people think we've already reached the end of the road, when really we're only at the beginning of it. Watch and see what the next decade of it looks like. I agree with Bill Gates that it all will fundamentally changed the way we see and interact with the world (for the better).

> Eventually it will negate the need to click through to many reference, then it will be better able to curate a list of alternative sources for what you seek.

Doesn't that just kind of describe google now though?

I poorly worded that. I meant to say it will be able to answer most questions, but also refer you to the best sources for information that it can't provide.

I've been impressed with what Kagi is able to dig up for me on old and sometimes niche electronics test and measurement equipment. However, I don't think they are targeting the same set of users that early Google was. Among other things, you have to pay for Kagi.

No, but there are other search engines that aren't any worse than Google.

And, apparently depending on the style of your search terms or what you're searching for, one or two are better. I get noticeably better results from DDG, but I know that a lot of other people don't. I can only speculate that the difference must be search terms or topics.

I made DDG my default and was surprised by how well it works how. I do believe it sources many of it's results from Bing.

For what it fails to find well I just prepend !g to my query and have it bounce me over to Google.

Google results are more often then not trash now, so I don't think the bar is too high for competitors now.

> I do believe it sources many of it's results from Bing.

It does, yes, but not only Bing. At least report, it aggregates from about 400 different sources, and they also run their own crawler.

They used to have a list of the other engines they use, but I can't seem to find it anymore.

Not really. Yahoo was selling every search result slot. There was no quality to it at all. It was all paid.

AltaVista wasn’t terrible.

Infoseek! Until it was killed by Disney sex offenders.

https://www.wired.com/1999/09/arrest-of-a-web-pioneer/

(I had the misfortune of working for him )

Google can also return enough ads to push real search result below fold, while also making it as hard as possible to discern between real and paid results.

If you saw how much of Google's revenue comes from ad spending then it makes perfect sense why it is the way it is now. But it goes to show what being hyperfocused on revenue does to the user experience.

And DogPile and Lycos and all those other funny sounding search engines.