I wonder if one was actually useful, maybe I’d notice it?
The solution is to force ads upon you and hope that you accidentally click on one due to sensory overload. Or more ads.
Meaning that, due to and capitalist incentives and double-dipping from tech companies, what you're searching for may actually be what's advertised
So if you have a long-tail page ("obscure part number") then the only way to show it is buying an ad for it.
Does any of us have any insight in Google manipulating the world?
We weren’t aware of this.
The ad company we used notified us of this issue and gave us three days to fix it. Afterwards our click-through rate went from something like 3% to .25%.
Many of those "accidents" are not really accidents: I've seen two kinds of ways sites engineer those "accidents"
(1) many sites, like phys.org, have crowded and confusing layouts that try to trick you on clicking on an "x" or something to close an ad but really clicking on the ad, there's a lot of deniability on this on mobile where the touch accuracy is poor
(2) a few years back there were a lot of sites which seemed to always change the layout when you were trying to click on something in the sidebar, anandtech was one of the worst, i could swear they were watching the mouse events and predicting the click events. this stopped all of a sudden, could be Google put the smack-down on this behavior
The worst part is I've seen search other video sites that used to surface exact titles stop working around the same time. I'm not sure how to reliably find things I know are there anymore.
I thought it was just because they were forcing third tier Chinese knockoffs for everything I searched for. After a few months, I gave up completely. I now look for product reviews on YT, THEN go back to Amazon and search for exactly what I'm looking for. Even then? The search results are still jammed with cheap knockoffs.
Found it interesting that I’ve flipped my search tool usage in such a short time. I use models for most “searching” but then utilize Google Search as the last resort.
Now I wonder what the median CPC is for part numbers (I’d guess very cheap), and which one is the most expensive (no idea, super curious).
How is it good news?
Consumer searches for $FOO. $FOO does not show up in the search results.
At this point, the search is useless to users.
But when an algorithm does it, they go "wow such future"
Thankfully I never see any ads - ublock origin kills these off. That includes the horrible UI choices Google made on its search interface. A custom ublock origin rule filters away the pointless "others also searched for pink cats" while I was searching for epic skyscrapers. Evidently Google tries to link-lose me here, wasting my time.