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Comment by loverobots | Hacker News Reader

Google is better only with ads turned off. Otherwise DDG and Bing beat Google's ads anytime. Try surfing Google without an ad blocker to see what I'm talking about, they've gone way over what's acceptable.

Either way I go the extra mile to give the underdog a chance.

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Google has gone so far over the line with ads it's ridiculous. I didn't even realize it until recently when I disabled my ad blocker for a moment.

I'm amazed Googlers can look at that every day at work and not feel like their company has lost it's way.

Just checked it now with ad blocker off on my 13" macbook air screen. The organic results are barely above the fold... barely. Offensive.

I don't use AdBlock and I haven't consciously noticed an ad in a long time. In fact, I'm having a hard time finding queries with an ad at the top at all.

My reliable go-to query for maximum ads is [electric heaters].

[Credut cards]

To be fair though, most people asking queries like this actually do want ads!

The one query that literally ALWAYS has lots of ads is 'flowers'. The query that always has product ads is 'dslr'

Care to post a screenshot? I just disabled AdBlock and looks legitimately the same.

Here we go.

Original - http://imgur.com/AGM7I

Ad-blocked - http://imgur.com/Sj7pe

This is from my laptop screen. The first non-ad result is barely visible on the top fold of the page.

Thanks to that key word goes to zach from a comment in this thread. The results are pretty astonishing. I'm disappointed on barely how little visual difference exist between an ad and a legitimate result.

It is a commercial query though, organic results are often less relevant.

;) Google decided that companies that pay them more (between price per click and CPM) are more relevant? Color me surprised. Google is also on a jihad against extremely useful sites that do things like price comparison and reviews. Guess why?

Ad placement also depends on quality: http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...

Ad placement, within the ad boxes, is partially determined by a "Quality Score". Actual placement depends on (quality score x bid).

There's a lot more to it than that. If somebody clicks your ad and then peel out within a few seconds then obviously your ad didn't do anything for them so the next time somebody clicks, your price goes up. Pretty soon you write a better ad. I know it isn't popular to say this but sometimes when I'm looking for a product to buy, ads are relevant. And the better the ad the more I appreciate it.

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