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Comment by apnorton | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading a book on web usability well over a decade ago, and one of the things it pointed out was how Google ensured that the links you wanted to click were "above the fold" --- not ads, but honest-to-goodness search results.

Recently, after they added AI-generated search responses (which seem to be wrong a considerable percentage of the time, at least for things I search for), and the inlining of ads to the search results page, I've found I have to scroll at least a full screen height to actually get to the search results a significant portion of the time.

The level of blindness to user experience at Google that has allowed the state of search to get to this level is staggering.

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The societal impact of that UI design decision will be interesting to watch play out. People are so used to trusting the first Google search result that it now being AI that's sometimes wrong or hallucinated.

But as they stated, Google has already had ads inline with the search results, and it's been like that for well over a decade. (Long ago, ads used to only be on the sidebar)

Frankly, the AI section at the top seems like something Google would have been very reluctant to add since it saves the user from scrolling through the ad listings, and it was only added to compete with newer AI search services.

For over 20 years now everyone has been screaming:

“Advertisers are the users, consumers are the product” about every Web2.0 company which are the current corporate juggernauts

So they are not blind to user experience, they are providing exactly the user experience that their company has always been providing

The sole difference is they don’t have to care about the product experience (what you see) because humans form habits and rarely change them even if the experience is “degraded.”

There are no other options if you’re organized for alienated transactions which is every service and company ever.

What exactly do you expect?

Switch and bait?

Offer a good free product with minimal ads, until you realise your finding mainly comes from ads, then panick and enshittify.

Oodles of cash for ai server farms needs to come from somewhere, I guess, until it doesn't.

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