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Comment by sen | Hacker News Reader

I teach everyone in my family to never trust the first few sponsored results now matter how convincing they may be. As far as I’m concerned Google know exactly what they’re doing and are actively complicit in perpetuating online scams against one family and friends. Are we seriously supposed to believe a company of their size, with their talent pool, and their money, can’t filter out such blatantly obvious crap? Sure.

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One of my older relatives searched google for the name of his bank, clicked the first link which was an ad for a phishing site, and 5 minutes later he was on the phone with some indian guy who was using remote desktop to install packages through some janky DOS interface. It was probably cleanable, but I just wound up formatting his hard drive and reinstalling with some really cranked-up adblockers. It was an hours-long hassle, and thank god he managed to change his banking passwords and put a fraud notice on his credit card, because he had handed all that info over.

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.

I love that analogy.

> 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...

So this is interesting because right now the search rankings are a steaming heap of crud because of what seems like daily algo changes.

It's gotten to the point where spam sites with out of date articles are now ranking number 1.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.

Lately I’ve been wondering if a niche search engine popular with hackers and not the general public could run circles around Google search results just because scammers and content farms wouldn’t be incentivized to game it like they are Google.

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.

> 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?”

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.

Yea I'm very curious about this too. Oddly enough, it's not the first time I've heard someone on HN complain about a search query being hard for Google to answer, tried it, and found the answer in the first result (and the next half dozen).

Humans are lazy. It would be more effort, after constructing their argument, to actually sit down and test that the argument passes a basic sense test. So, they don't. And most of the people reading (and upvoting to signal "I agree") won't either. Why should they? They agree with it, there's no sense in fact checking things you agree with, right?

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.

In this case, you’re the courtier of King Cnut. I just did the search and the first correct result is the sixth and the first five are incorrect, including the seemingly definitive answer at the top of the search.

Lazy? People who think this way? Mother Nature? Claiming to command the sea? I’m just talking about SEO spam.

When I do that search, neither the knowledge box nor the top 3 results answer the question.

I almost never even register the knowledge box at the top because I don’t _just_ want the answer, I also want at least a little context and chance to vet the credibility of the answer. In this case it says appropriate internal temperatures for cats, but I’m looking for the kind of answer my vet would give me if I asked if it’s okay to leave my cat on the balcony during the summer. I don’t want to take her temperature. The majority of the links on page one repeat the 105 degree internal tidbit so I could easily filter them as irrelevant, but they are all couched in paragraphs of keyword fluff and narration “many cat owners like to let their cats play outdoors during the summer months but how sunny is too sunny for your furry feline companion blah blah blah”

The knowledge box can be 100% wrong, I reported a case where the shown answer was taken from a pop-quiz site - but it wasn't the actual answer, just the first possible (and diametrically wrong) of multiples choices for a user to click on.

note that you cannot trust the knowledge box, I can't recall a specific example but I've seen some wildly wrong things in those.

Google doesn't care. Just having one FTE proactively blacklisting scams would clean up most of the mess. It is way easier to clean high ranking scam/SEO sites then to make a new one.

But Google are getting money of scams so ...

P2P distributed search, help make it better. https://yacy.net

Interesting to see someone else see this.. I've been noticing siilar for some of my sites, but also for other searches - recently 'liquid dog nutrition' eg.. so I too get the feeling that putting article based stuff front and center they are encouraging users to click ads - and for commercial sites to pay to play or get shut out.. it's terrible when you have a great site on page 3 of google results and see the crap they put ahead of you on page one - while shady sites pay to advertise there.

more and more like (a worse version) of the yellow pages every quarter.

Don't rely on training. Effective technical measures exist that block most of these social engineering attacks before they even reach the victims. They're called adblockers. Letting inexperienced people browse the Internet without one is reckless.

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.

U.S. government and friends simply don't care. Sever phone lines from outside western countries where law applies - you've solved the majority of the problem. Same with disinformation campaigns from other countries. Sever their internet. We can never prosecute illigal acts conducted outside the west.

Yes, because four million Indian Americans, 2 million Americans born in Africa, 5 million Chinese Americans, etc. aren't going to mind at all if you sever contact to their friends and family.

Of course the whole point of a search engine is to try and surface useful websites and filter out the obvious crap. And the objective of an ad is to subvert that process. And even in ideal situations they give almost no information to the user about what they actually are clicking.

This being a democracy, and this sort of thing going on for well over a decade, it must be "the will of the people".

huh?! are you trying to make sense, or just be confusing?

I'm pretty sure they're saying that such things should be regulated and that is a failure of [USA?] democracy that they're not -- seems right to me.

Calling the US a true democracy would have been a stretch at any point in it's history but in the age of lobbyists, two party entrenchment, and arbitrary term limits, it's more accurate to call the US a capitalist plutocracy. You get to vote somebody into office, though unless if it's an member of one of two parties, it's functionally meaningless.

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.

And yet despite all its obvious shortcomings, people looooooove democracy.

My comment was not a critique of democracy, it was the contention that the US political system is not really democratic in a meaningful sense. If you're a fan of authoritarianism, you'd be happy to know that's where most of the world is heading atm.

I agree, I was having a little laugh at people believe what we have is democracy in form.

Just so we're clear, there are no "sponsored results" on Google. There are results, and there are ads. It matters because if you lose the distinction you will lose the ability to remember what "sponsored results" were. On Yahoo! search, all of the results were paid. You paid more for a higher position. This dubious service was provided by Overture, and every search engine except Google was a customer of Overture's technology. The service that Google provides is specifically not paid results placement.

Absolutely. Google's making ads look like search results [1], but let's bring up an example from the early-to-mid 2000s [2] because that's extra relevant here when today's relevant search engines put ads confusingly at the top of your search results. The ad isn't a "sponsored result" but it's fair to say the results are sponsored (and confusingly so).

1. https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/squint-and-youll-click-it/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Media_Native

Regarding #1, did you ever notice how the "dark pattern" that article was about got reverted shortly after that, except not on DuckDuckGo which still contains that "dark pattern"?

I heard about it being reverted, but I have seen far too many people, myself included, click the links at the top thinking they're the first result when they're not. This article on ads offering gov services has some great examples in 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? ;-)

From that article:

> 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.

What exactly was reverted? Google search results look like the screenshot in that article for me.

I believe it was the placement of the favicon in regular search results that was reverted because it appeared in the same place as the word "Ad" in the ad.

Hah, my tired brain didn't even clock that consistently wasn't there for the actual results. Which I guess also says something about it being a clear distinction...

(DDG seems to do it the other way around: results have favicons, ads have nothing in that spot. anyways, adblocker back on)

I just searched for "employee identification number" on my mobile. The first full screen was ads - identified only by the tiny letters "Ad" in the upper left. How is making your ads show up first and look almost indistinguishable from results anything other than sponsored results? Google may not call it that, but I think you'd need to be a current or former Google employee to not understand what it is.

If you search for “employee identification number” the top of the page will be an ad which differs from the first search result (which requires 2 full screen vertical scrolls to reach on an iPhone 11) only for the presence of “ad” in 6px type instead of the favicon and replacing the tiny 3 dot menu with an i icon.

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.

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