Google has forgotten why they were successful in the first place and has instead pushed monetization to the detriment of their flag ship product.
Anecdotally, most users do not know the difference between paid results and organic results, and the top paid result is usually what the user wants anyway.
Do you think Google didn't test this on millions (billions, even) of searches? If showing additional paid results negatively impacted either CTR or first-search successes or whatever metrics Google thought were important for their long-term success, they'd have surely not gone all in on this model.
Paid results are search results.
Honestly, the only value Google has to me now is Google Apps because I like them better than Office365.
Power users definitely know the difference between paid results and real results, and over time will steer everyone they can off of Google if it persists in showing a lack of respect for the intelligence of its users. It might take a long time, but some will leave, and over time more will follow.
But that won't show in the next quarter's projections, and after that it will be too late.
When I start seeing technical people, HN comments, etc. advocating for using Bing instead of Google, I'll believe this. I don't think it's ever gonna ever happen. Google's power users are, if anything, an even more captive and loyal audience than Joe Public, and they know it.
I'm sure altavista was guided by various metrics too, but those weren't the metrics that I as a search user found important.
You could do very complex boolean logic searches with multiple, nested (()) and "" ...
As opposed to google where even the "allinsite:" tag does not even function properly anymore, and where half of your search results will not even contain your search terms.
I really miss altavista, actually ...
You are right that Google deciding to 'helpfully' remove terms from my search query is frustrating.
But yeah, I'm sure making ads look like results brings more clicks. The downside of that is Google basically becomes more and more unusable for queries directly generating money (like "buy <something>").
I think grand parent has a point. If someone wins the top spot for a certain keyword like "PayPal" it is probably because it is good enough to win it. Of course, there is probably more work needed there but if the add doesn't perform then no matter how much I bid the ad won't show up to people, at least not to many people.
some examples
Google needs to do more to prevent malicious vendors but at least things like this http://i.imgur.com/PTDcMsn.png are in the right direction.
There are two trends: more overall internet users, and a growing subset of the users that never clicks on ads.
That leaves the users who can't tell the difference as the primary marketing target.
I think the number of ads a person attends to per day is an inverse predictor of intelligence.
Google is acting more and more Yahoo-like.
The usability of ad clicks from Google is usually significantly worse than the organic results, even when they're the same company.
It's not really relevant either, the two companies aren't really the same types of businesses. DDG is a very niche, and I doubt it would scale to the size of Google. Likewise Google have to make some compromises, that DDG will not, to finance it self.
[Edit: apparently this is not true. DDG does not use Google, though it does use Bing and some other broad and narrow coverage search engines]
How long would duckduckgo have to grow at its current rate to become an actual blip on Google's radar? On the one hand, you're small. On the other hand, keep up a fast growth rate long enough and you get bigger faster than people's intuitions' expect.
I vehemently disagree. The early web crawlers and indexes did not cost hundreds of millions of dollars to run. Granted, there is significantly less web results than there are today, but the cost you're referring too is the entirety of google's servers. That price tag also includes the cost to host the web traffic of being the number 1 website in the world. You're talking a price tag which is indicative of a final product.
A new search engine would not have those costs initially, and if managed properly from the very beginning, would be able to scale and cover their bills, remaining profitable up until reaching (and hypothetically) replacing google.
I doubt that figure, but even if it is true, you're still talking about a final product (not a new start up). It's a figure that includes things like marketing and insane web traffic. These are things that a new search engine would not have initially.
I'm not saying running a search engine is cheap. It's not. But the implication is that it's like the pharmaceutical industry where you need billions just to get in the game. It's not like that at all. In fact, there have been a few search engines which have tried to get in the game. Search engines like Cuil (anyone remember them?). They may have failed but that doesn't mean it's impossible. And it certainly doesn't take hundreds of millions of dollars to get started.
And you don't need to doubt that figure, Microsoft discloses it in its financial results.