You serve the ads while the answers spin up.
This is actually a problem I currently have with Ecosia on mobile. I search, get the result, and then the ads pop in, pushing the search results down, causing me to click the ad and not the result that previously occupied that part of the screen.
They've just done a rather braindead job of it, with the experience of these loss-leader queries feeling perceptually† worse than a regular SERP page would.
It's like a grocery store running a sale on e.g. milk, selling it for below-cost — but then making you have to wait in a line for five minutes in front of the milk cooler to get it. It feels like so much friction that not only wouldn't lure people in; it would push people to avoid that grocer when its milk sales are happening, and shop at other stores instead!
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† I emphasize perceptually here. Even if the total time spent waiting for an AI answer is shorter than the time it would take to load a SERP page, read and select a link that looks like it'll have your answer, click it, load the resulting page, and read it — the AI experience could still feel longer, in large part because "the ball is in your court" for a lot of the self-navigated query, with you being given things to look at and click on; while "the ball is in their court" for the entirety of the AI response, with just a spinner and no indication of what's happening.
As such, I wonder if this could be solved by just running a cute little animation under the AI prompt window: make it look like it's automating the loading of a [blurred to non-identifiability] SERP page, scrolling down, clicking a result, loading an [again blurred] page, highlighting a few random fragments of it, and then transposing them together to form the paragraphs of the answer — before the answer actually snaps into place on top of that animation. If you can predict how long before the AI answers, you can even use that to determine how long the animation should spend dicking around on the pretend SERP page and answer page.
It did what it needed to do to realise the same thing and get their fingers in all the other pies.
All human eyeball traffic goes through Google.
It is in their interest to keep destroying the open information marketplace because then advertisers are forced to buy through Google. (Much easier and more profitable than trying to make a good adtech product.)
As others in this thread already point out, it's extremely easy to use DDG or Bing if you want.
As an illusion sure, in practice not really.
I use Kagi, I bought the family plan so I could try convining my family to use it, did they? No.
Did my family want to use Signal for messaging? No.
Do my friends want to use something else than Discord for communicating with me? No.
Competition exists and in plenty but folk are too mind sucked to want to move platform. If its not broke, why change?
People don't want to change. And until such platforms close their gates or whereby something new comes along that isn't a clone; there will be no shift.
You won’t find me on any social media other than Linkedin and Twitter. And on those, I no longer post or interact with people. I keep Twitter because of announcements and Linkedin as a public CV. I also use WhatsApp because alternatives are not really viable (but I reduced its social aspect as much as possible). You’re free to make your choices. Just don’t complain about it, if you won’t heed my advices.
Google is testing on those as we test on animals. ML for only search? Naw.
If everyone turned off their droid, stopped using their email, switched to Firefox, they would still be on top.
Yes. It's better not to, if your going to preach, yeah. As I use no services other than Signal we are just pawns in this game. We are a just pittance of income who are keeping the empire's on top. And who do you run too? DDG is owned by Apple so your only fuelling their empire.
This goes deeper than you could imagine.
If switching cost > perceived benefit why should we expect anything other than status quo? When a truly innovative platform that offers benefit > switching cost, users will naturally flock to it. We're already starting to see that with ChatGPT.
No. Network effects mean that there's not only a high cost of switching away from the largest network, but there's a high cost to use anything other than the largest network. When that bias exists, you cannot infer any preferences from market outcomes.
benefit > switching cost + network cost
This has repeatedly been demonstrated as large networks have been disrupted. Folks switched away from MSN Messenger and MySpace didn't they?
All human eyeballs go through Google's advertising network first. (Unless you're an Apple-only person.)
So for advertisers it makes no sense to budget anything but Google first and foremost. Maybe they'll add some Bing-Yahoo if they have spare money laying around and want to catch the remaining couple percent of the audience.
P.S. Search is only a small part of Google's advertising network, and not the most important one nowadays.
https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/blog/genocide-in-the...
Their logic is that Palestinians represent a credible existential threat to Jewish people internationally in the same way that Hitler’s military did, so that criticism of IDF bombing campaigns is equivalent to Naziism, and Palestinian resistance is identified as genocide against Israel.
And since you asked that question in bad faith now it's my turn. Is bombing hospitals, schools, and aid convoys terrorism, or is it terrorism unless it's the IDF doing it to Palestinians, specifically?
Where's Daddy, animuchan?
The IDF, given the limited resources, comically unreliable allies, and the hostage situation, is doing a great job. You labeled your own argument to the contrary as being in bad faith because we both know that. :)
False.
The PCPSR polls (the only ones anyone is talking about) do show broad support for the statement that the Oct 7th attack was "correct". But overwhelmingly (91%) they do not believe that atrocities against civilians occurred during the attacks. 81 percent also said they did not watch videos published by international organizations showing atrocities, for a variety of reasons.
Which is still troubling, of course. But the reality of what these people actually said is entirely different from what you're describing.
Unfortunately some news outlets (such as the Times of Israel, AP) chose to present misleading characterizations of second poll in particular, which of course then got pasted all over social media.
The IDF is doing a great job.
Meanwhile there's plenty of denial going around as to atrocities committed by the IDF as well, of course. But this is a different topic.
So it seems your response is: on the basis of what you saw in some videos regarding an event in the Old City a little ways back -- most Palestinians are pathological liars, and that's all there is to it.
I saw the videos taken inside Al-Aqsa mosque, not just "some videos" and that considerably differed from what Palestinians claimed. And no, this is not an isolated event, just an example of very consistent pattern of lying.
Now about the 7ht October. Hamas paraded the captured civilians through Gaza and was welcomed by thousands of spectators. Honestly, the claim that 91% of the people are not at all aware of any atrocities against civilians can only mean two possibilities - they are lying or they do not consider it atrocities.
Where does Google's ad revenue come from if users give up on waiting for their searches to complete before they're ever shown any revenue-generating sponsored links?
Actually, thinking about this more, I fundamentally don't understand Google's search experience strategy over the last 10 years. Even before AI answers, they were heuristic-ing answers into a little box that pushed sponsored ad placements below the fold. Why push sponsored results below the fold? How does Google make money from a search engine that just answers people's questions directly, rather than doing lead-gen for the rest of the Internet (with much of the Internet willing to pay for that)?