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Comment by voisin | Hacker News Reader

Search is a disaster now, with the screen resembling a late 90’s teenager’s website with ads taking over everything visually. They’ve increased noise at the cost of signal and that itself will be the downfall. Now they are letting the ad cancer spread to YouTube with multiple unskippable ada before each video.

Ads will go to wherever they are most effective. Google to Facebook, then Tik Tok, etc.

Android - does anything about Android these days seem like it is a driving ambition for a company the scale of Google? And what does it contribute to their bottom line apart from ads via the platforms above that are eating themselves?

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The unskippable ads are getting progressively more aggressive too. Two 30-second unskippable ads on an 8-minute video? It’s a disaster.

Keep in mind that a lot of issues with search are oblivious to the general public. I don’t think I have ever heard a complaint, outside of tech circles.

How much noise can be introduced before the general public feels they aren’t getting meaningful results? It is just a matter of time, because Google shows no ability to restrain itself from selling out to advertisers.

Google is so entrenched they're the default search engine on 3 major browsers and it even became a verb in the English dictionary. Do you think the average members of the public are gonna start Googling stuff on Bing anytime soon?

I think most non-tech people don't even realize if they are or aren't getting meaningful results. They got conditioned that whatever is on the first results page of google is what's relevant for what they're looking for and if it's not there then it must not exist.

I really don't see any major market shift away from Google search any time soon. Maybe if Apple launched their own could change things up a bit.

> Google is so entrenched

This entrenchment is what makes a company like Google fat and lazy and take their users for granted. Behaviour that we are seeing growing year by year. If they stop paying Apple to be the default in Safari (or the government says they can’t, or Apple just decides to kick them in the shins the way they did to Facebook with anti-tracking tech), users would go to whatever else became default. I.e. there is no sacred loyalty earned that would cause anyone to take actions to switch back.

FWIW, literally every non-tech person who I’ve switched to DDG has been happier with the results when I’ve asked them what they thought.

> Do you think the average members of the public are gonna start Googling stuff on Bing anytime soon?

They are already, by accident. And a large amount of them doesn't even realize it's a different page...

I dunno, the thing everyone tells me when I say I'm developing a search engine is "oh thank god, Google is so awful lately". Like I've gotten this reaction from my barber and random taxi drivers.

I do think if it's it's less of a conversation topic outside of tech it's because people outside of tech are less reliant on internet search.

If anything I think people have an exaggeratedly poor view of Google's performance. I think it works pretty good, it's just that some of the ways it fails are confusing and frustrating. There's so much magic it's not entirely obvious why you're getting the results you are getting.

Given that there is an increase in people adding “Reddit” to their search terms, it would seem people aren’t getting the information they are looking for directly from Google searches.

I also see a lot of older family members simply query Siri for 99% of what they are looking for.

The 30% (or whatever it is) cut in the app store?

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