Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image | Hacker News Reader

Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image

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They do the same thing on the Play Store, for example I just searched for Firefox and the first result is a sponsored spot for Opera. Does Apple do that on the App Store?

A funnier example: searching for Amazon gives Temu as the first result. Searching for Temu gives Shein as the first result. Searching for Shein gives Shein as the first result! ...but only because they outbid everyone else for the ad spot on their own name, resulting in Double Shein: https://i.imgur.com/0buR8Hq.png

As a user, I'm still baffled that the interface to view and manage the apps I have installed on the system - which is 90 out of 100 times why I'm opening the play store - is tucked away in some obscure corner of the app.

The other 10 times, it's because I want to install some specific app that I already know and I just want to get to the page of that exact app - either through a direct link or through the store's search.

There were exactly zero times where I opened the store with the motivation "gee, I really feel like installing a new app, but I have no idea what it should be... Let's check out the recommendations!"

Yet this seems to be what the entire UI is optimized for.

Just opened the App Store to check. There’s an ad for chrome on the home screen. I click search and before I start typing search suggestions pop up. The first one is for chrome. I type Firefox and click search. The first result is chrome.

This is also true on Apple's app stores, to be fair. I didn't know this until I got a MacBook Pro recently and my assumption that Apple's controls would be tighter than Google's was proven quite wrong when I opened the Mac App Store for the first rime.

> Does Apple do that on the App Store?

Yes they do. Their search already sucks in normal circumstances—I remember searching for “Pinboard” (the bookmarking service) and had to scroll by thirteen pinball (the game) apps before starting to see Pinboard apps—but you can type in the exact name of the app you want had have an ad for a competitor above it. Not only is it allowed, it’s encouraged.

Learned that App Store does this too during a recent MFA rollout.

What really surprised me was that when instructed to install Google Authenticator, a significant portion of people (I'd estimate close to 50%) would search the exact name and then proceed to reach to install the sponsored top result with a completely different name until I stopped them.

Same thing happened to me. I wanted to get "Fit Notes" - a free and ad-free app. I searched for it and the first result is some adware/subscription-based crap. I skip over. I scroll down part the "Sponsored: Related to your search" section with a whole bunch of others. I am still seeing more paid/in-app-purchase/subscription-based apps.

At this point I thought that the app didn't exist for newer versions of Android.

It turned out that it was the second result, just above the "sponsored" one. It looked so much like a part of the first result that I just skipped over it.

I would love to see trademark law changed to ban this practice. Google, etc should not be allowed to, in effect, charge money to avoid having one’s trademark become a search term for a competitor.

Paying for ad slots to raise brand awareness is one thing, but a search for a trademark should resolve first to a valid holder of that trademark.

I usually use the app store in Fedora and am used to finding what I want and having it installed within secounds.

Occasionally, I help people with their Mac's, and it can easily take half an hour to get something installed (finding their password etc), and on iOS, there are ads that buries the real results.

Then I am reminded how spoiled I am in the Linux world! No ads and quick access to a large selection of open source and commercial programs, no accounts or logins!

I wonder how much this can end up contributing to the Kleenex-ification of a brand or a term. You search for firefox and random other browsers come up. Now browsers in general are associated with the firefox term. Of course, when it comes down to it, there isn't much difference between browsers anyway, the UI is different but they all need to work with the same websites, and people have been using specific application names in place of the type of data/work ("Excel file" being used to refer to a CSV).

I just searched "Firefox" in the app store. The top result is Google Chrome with an Ad indicator (Google paid for higher placement). Second is Firefox.

> Amazon

Speaking of amazon... By god amazon search is horrid for this.

If you search for HP laptop you get a whole bunch of sponsored Lenovo's at the top of the page.

I’ve stopped using either the play/app store to search for apps. I search kagi and then click-through to the appropriate app store.

Sometimes it's not even close, I went to download the PAX Australia app and the top result was Revolut. I'd love to know the set of circumstances that the algorithm picked them to sponsor there.

Testing this with Aurora Store and the search terms actually give me the correct results. Another reason to use that over Google Play Store

I don't understand how no one's brought a racketeering suit against them.

> You wouldn't want someone looking for your website to find your competitor instead. For a small fee, I can make sure that doesn't happen.

It is same on PlayStore and AppStore.

You would be surprised to know Apple started this in AppStore before Google on PlayStore. I assume it is because Google wanted to be safe from Antitrust lawsuits (Follow Apple rather than going there first).

> Does Apple do that on the App Store?

Yes. In fact, I often get sponsored stuff before Apple’s own apps, when I’m searching for the Apple app. I’ll also get things like games, when I’m looking for development or productivity apps. It’s crazy.

One of the things that I do, each morning, is take a long walk, listening to music.

I’m an Apple One subscriber, so there’s no limit to the music from the catalog. I don’t buy individual songs. It’s already been paid, so they aren’t selling me anything.

I use the “Discovery Station” playlist, which gives you random songs, based on your preferences.

It used to be quite good, but lately, it’s been stuffing weird pop songs into the playlist. These are ones that I’d never listen to, otherwise. I will tell Siri that I don’t like the songs, but they keep coming, anyway. I often dislike up to five songs in a row; at which time, the phone gives up on the station, and starts feeding me random songs from my library.

This renders the “Discovery Station” pretty much worthless.

It’s fairly obvious that the playlist has been corrupted by paid results.

Pandora has always done the best job of selecting relevant unknown music for me, but the limit on skips (even for paid accounts), makes it worthless. Undiscovered music is frequently obscure for a reason, so I can sometimes skip a majority of the selections. I’ve always been puzzled about why Pandora never got borged by Apple or Microsoft. They were excellent, a decade before the AI hype bubble was even a broken rubber on the drug store shelf.

> Does Apple do that on the App Store?

I believe so - and it seems the devs know it happens, bevause I often see a paid ad for "Chrome" if I search "Chrome"

As a curiosity, this is a common strategy for advertising! But people still disagree whether it is the best investment. You can generally win on your own name with comparatively low bids, because it is obviously the most relevant search term, and relevance is often factored into the price you pay for ad placement. So you may choose to bid defensively, to stop competitors from advertising on your name. Even so, the obvious counter-argument is that the person searched for you _explicitly_ by name, so how likely are they to click on your competitor's ads? I don't have a ton of experience, so perhaps some orgs make the decision in a data-driven way, but I suspect most make the decision in a mostly faith-based way.

On play and app stores if you search for Microsoft Authenticator, which I imagine most people working at a company would be doing, there's an Ad first, which is rather annoying for a security application

Results may vary:

Searches for Amazon, Temu, Shein - result in each being listed in the promotional panel and then as the first result.

For Firefox: Chrome is listed in the promotional panel and Firefox as the first result (below it).

The promotional panel has a different background colour and “Ad” badge, but is otherwise identical to other listings.

Two results fit on the screen: the promotional panel and the first listing. Diverging from Google is that the ad result is obvious and doesn’t push the search result out of view.

> Does Apple do that on the App Store?

The iOS AppStore is just as bad. Even if your search term is the exact app name, they’ll show you random stuff first (maybe they’re hoping you buy before realizing it wasn’t what you were looking for). And since App Store contents are like 98% crap, the chances of randomly finding something worthwhile are miniscule.

Letting users do what they want to is just not a business model for these megacorps.

Apple is even worse. Try searching for Grok in the app store and it will be almost impossible to find due to some deal they have with OpenAI.

Try searching for chrome using ma edge.

It basically intercepted said search and gave me an ad saying to keep using edge.

Thinking back it seems unbeleivable so I searched.

https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-wind...

Same on maps as well. That has actual annoying consequences where you end up at the wrong place.

The Santander bank does the same when you enter the address of a broker while doing a transfer. They show an ad for one of their investment funds

> Does Apple do that on the App Store?

Yes, this has been my experience, at least on mobile. Is this different for others?

So they are actually Ad Search engines.

The sponsored spot is appalling, I reported something that looked dodgy which appeared above the UK gov identity verification for passports and such app. When people search for a specific app, putting something else in front only makes me think you are untrustworthy scum, so my trust in the play store is fundamentally broken. There's a fundamental incompatibility between giving the right result for what was searched for and pushing promoted irrelevant results.

One of my "sales pitches" is "I can find answers online, I know kung-fu".

I've been using internet since '98, and I somehow developed this elusive skill of knowing how to navigate all these ads, seo farms, paid content, murky websites, and getting straight to the answer, no matter what the question was.

For a long time I didn't thought of that as a special power. I thought it was natural, like driving a car, or speaking English. And I occasionally got surprised seeing someone trying to find something online and spending minutes, if not hours to get to the right place.

Last couple of years I found it to be way, way harder. And it's noticeably getting worse almost on a daily basis right now.

Recently I've tried perplexity and it was absolutely amazing. I know this may sound like a sales pitch, but I was really blown away by the user experience. Except it sometimes says "results cannot be found or I am not suppose to show them to you". Well, fair game, I wouldn't be able to find these results on google either.

I've seen a lot of change in the industry last 30 years, things we took for granted or thought would stay there forever. I genuinely think Google is finished as a search engine for the web. The only problem is that we don't have a solid contender yet. Perplexity is close tho.

Is Perplexity, as a business, sustainable? I'm skeptical of these "AI search is better than web search" claims. Not because it's not true, but because of how wildly subsidized these AI things are. Web search doesn't suck because it's an impossible problem, web search sucks because it has to be profitable, and the profitability comes from making it suck. That's not true today for AI tools, but it will be in a few years. What will stop AI tools from being sucked into the same ad-infested black hole once the free money runs out?

I find it's still not that difficult to have that "special power", but you have to adapt your tools. Before the only tool you needed was Google, now you need to know which one to use for each type of request.

I mostly juggle with Google, Kagi, and various LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity... but the differences matter less).

Try DuckDuck Go, it performs significantly better than Google for me

> I genuinely think Google is finished as a search engine for the web.

Google Search is garbage, but highly unlikely to be "finished". Millions of people still find it useful, and Google is adopting "AI" on the results page just like any other "AI" web search service. The reason the UX is not good is, first of all, subjective, and second of all, because Google is in the advertising business, and they've found it more profitable to corrupt their results page and deal with any negative feedback, than to deliver clean results like they did decades ago without the profit.

This is a carefully planned, tested, and executed design decision, just like anything they do on the SERP, and not some arbitrary sign that they don't know what they're doing anymore.

The possibility of a new player disrupting the dominance of a trillion-dollar corporation that has built a highly optimized index of the entire web over decades, by leveraging technology that requires vast resources to run, is highly unlikely. Not impossible, but highly unlikely. Google could improve the search UX tomorrow if they wanted to.

> The only problem is that we don't have a solid contender yet.

Sure we do. Kagi offers a much better UX, and I haven't had the need to rely on external results for nearly a year now. I haven't tried Perplexity, but I imagine it could be good as well, depending on the quality of its index.

But these are relatively niche services catering to an audience that cares about these things. The sad reality is that most people simply don't, and will use whatever search engine is set as default in their browser. Which is why being the default is worth paying millions, and is literally keeping companies like Mozilla alive.

Google deliberately made search worse so users do multiple searches for each query so they can profit off showing more ads:

https://journalrecord.com/2025/02/20/is-google-making-search...

It's not just Perplexity, it's any of the "deep research" offerings on the market really. And the reason why they work so well isn't because of any kind of secret sauce, it's because they have infinite patience to wade through all the bullshit and can thus brute force this without necessarily knowing the shortcuts. It's basically more of the same: https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/altoids-by-the-fistfu...

Right? Google is dog caca now. Myself and everyone I know keep getting sent to AI-written garbage nonsense slop websites, or for some reason, to the Hindustan Times

I have found both perplexity and Claude.ai good enough. Since I pay for claude because of development, why not use it as search engine as well? So maybe the future is multi provider?

> I didn't thought of that as a special power. I thought it was natural, like driving a car, or speaking English.

You’re clearly taking for granted any learnt skills which you have and projecting them to others. A substantial portion of the world population can’t speak English, and I suspect the grand majority of humans don’t know how to drive a car either.

I know you have to turn the wheel to turn the car and that I should keep to the right, but that doesn’t count as actually knowing how to properly operate a car.

Its sad but I think at this point its kind of a safety issue not to use an ad blocker. Those results are not clearly ads and I've clicked on fake links in the past when they were.

It absolutely is. I fear for the older generations and less tech minded people who google their bank, and get some random phishing site. Or similarly google what should be libre software and get some random malware on a site that looks 'close enough'.

Lets call it what it is, a cancer, one that literally enables countless bad actors and purely for a search engine's own profit. In theory theres a time and place for ads, but maliciously inline and disguised as the actual results people want arent it.

You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid, or if you don't want to use search results from Bing's index, I've been very happy with Brave Search.

If you're trying to do anything in terms of official documents, there's a middleman charging more. I searched for "passport application" the other day and it was 4 ads of people offering this service.

My dad was trying to get an ESTA visa a couple years ago and ended up paying twice the actual price, because he can't discern what's the official site or not.

Strong agree but unless it gets built-into the browser, the average net denizen simply won't do it. The number of times I've seen a friend of the family try to show me an article on their laptop while casually trying to shoot down the pop-up ads like they're playing a marketers version of Missile Command was astonishing.

And EVEN if they do install a blocker, 9 times out of 10 it'll be AdBlock Plus and not uBlock Origin [1]. You know, the one that allows companies to PAY to have their ads whitelisted.

This doesn't even cover browsing on a smartphone which unless you're running Android Firefox which supports browser extensions, you have very few options.

[1] Notice I said uBlock Origin and NOT uBlock.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

The FBI agrees with you: https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-b...

Indeed. I got my credit card phished after buying tickets from an 'official' local museum website, it was the first result on Google. Later on I realized that all five top results were scam sites, the real one was 6th. They eventually fixed it.

Let's be more precise about what ads actually are, based on how the ad industry works today: malware

All of the ad links are broken by our firewall at work. People complain but eventually they learn to skip the ads. Absolutely a security risk, search ads are second only to phishing emails as a threat vector.

Plus when you click on one, they show you more! So the risk snowballs

Absolutely. I cannot use anything online anymore without pihole + ublock

Adblockers are a safety risk of their own - you’re giving @gorhill admin-level access to your browser.

I’ve started asking ChatGPT to give me the right link. I can’t imagine they won’t start embedding ads too but so far, it’s been pretty clean.

There was a time when Google disallowed this. Google even asked us (Firefox team) to report ads squatting on our trademarks. Eventually they stopped caring and now it's in their ad sales pitchdeck just how effective trademark squatting can be.

I feel like there’s at least some country in the world where the legal regime would be amenable to ruling against Google if they were taken to court over trademark squatting by the trademark holders.

Can you in principle sue people buying these ads for trademark infringement? (I realize in practice the answer is that it's not worth the game of whack-a-mole.)

This is not allowed and the advertisers are on borrowed time: https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en

You can bid on competitor's keywords, but not use their trademarked name in the copy, especially not in a deliberately confusing way.

But I don't think Google moderates this very proactively.

Can anyone reproduce this? When I search "Midjourney", I get an ad for Midjourney (from Midjourney), followed by Midjourney, the site. After that, I get the Midjourney Discord, the Midjourney subreddit, the Midjourney Wikipedia page, and then (inexplicably), another Midjourney ad.

That seems about as good as it could be.

Edit: I guess I should say that I do agree that the quality of Google Search is pretty poor these days, so I directionally agree even though I can't reproduce this issue. Still, it's interesting to see how much our searches differ. I can't imagine what algorithm in Google decided to give me great results and you trash.

Google SERPs are personalized. Likely OP is a Midjourney user which is recorded in his targeting profile.

When OP searches for Midjourney as a Midjourney user, Google’s algorithm infers he might want to consider an alternative because why would an existing user search for the product they’re already using.

We see evidence supporting this given no Midjourney ad showed up for a direct keyword match query; and only alternatives triggered.

This is kinda like Amazon retargeting you with alternative toasters after you just bought a new toaster. Most people think this is stupid. Well, the most likely cohort to buy a new toaster is a person that just bought one because they’re not satisfied with their purchase.

Yes, I can. I get deevid as a first result occupying the whole screen (on mobile) as it lists the sub-links, too (one of them being a sub-link to the "AI kissing generator")

Then comes PixVerse, a sponsored result for a google play app.

Then difuss.me.

Then comes midjourney.

Yes, I see something similar for the query "Midjourney": 4 sponsored results from Deevid, Artlist.io, Lovart, Pollo AI (see the screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/ESM3xtJ)

Finally Midjourney. Unlike in the article I have never visited Midjourney.

It was number 1 when using the "Web" link, it was also the number 1 when I clicked "all"

Not sure why they get very different result.

Another repro:

https://imgur.com/a/ZNtA0rI

Historically. If you are logged in you get better results. I got no ads when logged in. Not logged in I got 8 ad links in total before the real site.

I searched on DDG, first result was www.midjourney.com the second result was the Wikipedia article about midjourney.

Same. On an android browser, not signed into any Google accounts. Got the legitimate result at the very top.

That's when you are not logged into Google, they will show some organic results before the ads.

Seriously, all I get is Midjourney links and links to midjourney official accounts on a number of other platforms

Going incognito, the first link is a sponsored ad for... midjourney

Just tried on my own on google, I get the Midjourney official site on 1 result, followed by Wikipedia about Midjourney. I am not a midjourney user.

In a "private session" tab I'm getting on the first page:

- the official site - their subreddit - their Discord server - Wikipedia - Facebook - LinkedIn

here's my repro: https://imgur.com/a/p0wBgWy

Wondering if OP has malware that’s injecting results into the search.

They still get away with it as ‘only’ 1% complain and Google thinks they don’t matter.

We built our entire company for that 1%.

Hey freediver,

I bought a kagi shirt in the initial batch, got it, and then after one wash it unraveled. Your support team was great and gave me a coupon for a replacement shirt, which I ordered, yet it never shipped. Could I get that shirt :D

Kudos for Kagi. I stopped using Google and gladly pay Kagi for search to not show advertisements or junk.

If Kagi ever starts showing ads to me, a paying customer, I'll ditch it too. If I get the feeling that Kagi is selling my search history, I'll ditch it too.

Keep being awesome, Kagi CEO

How is Kagi for non-US folks? I've tried switching to DDG a while back but the experience for me, living outside the US, was not great. Sure, programming related searches were pretty good, but everything else was not.

Does Kagi have a better localized experience?

And we thank you for it! I've been a paying customer for about a year now and I can't remember the last time I purposefully used Google search.

And, relatedly, only 1% complain because they make complaining hard. This is why analytics driven decision making can backfire!

Kagi is so good

How will you fight the inevitable slide that happens if you ever got on top? I’m convinced Google started with the absolute best of intentions before the money and greed turned them into a horror movie villain.

And we are very grateful

Yeah but you're now filling up Hackernews threads with advertising, so.... same evil?

When I search for "midjourney" without an adblocker a bunch of times, I'm getting:

- No ads, with correct midjourney.com as the top result, about half the time

- A legit ad for midjourney.com with the title "Your Imagination, Unlocked", the other half the time. It's the only ad, and the correct midjourney.com is also still directly below it as the first organic result

So both seem fine for me. I've never seen ads on Google with the kind of formatting shown by OP either.

Obviously everybody's search experience is different, based on geography, profile, who else is running ads for those keywords, Google runs different formatting experiences as A/B testing, etc.

I am highly suspicious tech markets do not see realistic average Google behavior for whatever reason. The pervasive belief in tech that Google Search is even passable suggests people in the Valley or even Austin aren't getting the experience most people do.

I recall a Googler once suggesting to me that Googlers seeing ads might look like ad fraud to advertisers, so I'm not positive Googlers dogfood how bad this is either.

It's quite possible that the ads also got taken down, as they were against google ads' policies.

Tech companies routinely monitor social media like HN to take action.

You don't fall into any desirable demographic for targeting apparently, or you've never leaked enough info about you that would signify you as desirable.

In other words, nobody is bidding to reach your eyeballs specifically.

This could be a market inefficiency. OR, it could be you're actually a terrible lead for midjourney-type products, and the market is working correctly.

Were you logged in or logged out when you ran the searches?

Firefox on my phone I got midjourney.com as the first result

Weird

I'm old enough to remember when a big selling point of Google was that it didn't do this.

Had to dig up this link, 1999 review[0]:

"Google (www.google.com) is a pure search engine - no weather, no news feed, no links to sponsors, no ads, no distractions, no portal litter. Nothing but a fast-loading search site. Reward them with a visit."

[0] https://i.redd.it/uea6u7c4oje31.jpg

My memory says that wasn't such a big selling point. When Google first came out it blew all other search engines away in terms of result quality.

If, back then, Yahoo and Altavista were minimalist and Google was a garish nightmare of ads and flashing gifs and nested banners and affiliate buttons, I would still have happily used it for the results.

Google's search interface is still reasonably clean IMO. Nowhere near its minimal best. Yes there are ads and "sponsored results" and shopping frames and all that crap, but they really aren't everything that's wrong with Google Search.

Quality of results and inability to specify queries beyond vague suggestions are the worst things.

Straight from the horse's mouth:

> ..."we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

- "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page[1]

They weren't wrong!

[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Even when they first turned on ads, it was arguably a net win. I worked AdWords tech-support 2005-2008, and sat in on the “Ads Quality” core team meeting.

They basically had this big money dial, and rather than crank it to 11, they were fiercely protective of the core user experience.

They kept ads mostly to the side (unobtrusive), only served them on queries where there was a high probability of commercial intent, and only promoted ads above organic results if the predicted CTR was extremely high.

I remember being delighted more than once when the ad system surfaced the product I wanted when organic results did not.

Now…? You get all spam above the fold.

The Ads Quality PM back then was Nick Fox, who I just learned became SVP for ads and search last year. Which means he is at least indirectly responsible for the OP. Not entirely sure what to make of that.

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

I remember when Google Maps allowed you to enter "*" as the only search term, and you'd see every business in the area. Not just a portion of those who had paid for placement. Those were the days...

I also am old enough to remember when their motto was "Don't be evil."

Google's motto used to be 'Don't be evil'. They've since deleted the first two words.

I'm old enough to remember when the web didn't exist ... and when I dumped Altavista and Ask Jeeves and co for the cool kids: Google.

I'm fucking livid. Well actually: mildly unimpressed. The cool kids rarely last as such and "do no evil" ended up behind a green tent and a single shot was heard.

Actually, I am slightly stressed over this whole thing.

Yes, things change. In fact, change is basically the only thing you can confidently predict.

WDYM "selling point"? It was us, users, who have always been sold.

And yet they always knew that ad-supported business is going mean enshittification. Kagi website has this epic quote from the original Google paper to drive the point home:

"The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

— The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998

Wow, so not only have they lost the war against SEO spammers, they've now decided to completely obscure which results are actually ads.

What an embarrassment Google has become, but I guess that sweet-sweet ad money trumps everything else.

I showed Kagi to my partner yesterday and she instantly became addicted to it.

Going public puts too much growth pressure on companies.

You can't be happy building great products and thinking long term, nope, you've gotta show higher growth in the shorter term too.

There's no AI preview in that screenshot, so it's not everything that's wrong with Google Search.

Yeah, I was waiting for an actual 9 headed hydra of crap, featuring:

* a whole page of sponsored-yet-indistinguishable-from-organic results

* a confidently incorrect AI snippet

* the below-the-fold top organic results being all content spam

* the first actually relevant result from a reputable source being then paywalled with a "you ran out of stories for this month" overlay on a website I have never browsed in a year

* the 2nd actually relevant result prompting a "login with google" overlay with prefilled identity that gets clicked by accident 20% of the time

* all of the above in a Chrome browser, requiring a quadruple opt-out before allowing you to use GMail without also starting a browser-wide session to keep track of your every keystroke

* or alternatively an app based mobile interface where links can't be copied and pasted to prevent loss of tracking

* something with AMP

This is not even close to everything that is wrong, if anything it should be called "barely the tip of the iceberg of everything that is wrong".

In their defense it does feature a bunch of other invisible things (lack of cached results, lack of direct links you can obtain with a right click, etc)

search: "coffee is mostly water"

"No, coffee is not mostly water. That appears to be a misconception based on a popular television show. Coffee is actually about 98% water."

A similar thing happens when you search “Canada eTA” — a $7 (required) entry visa the government typically issues instantly. But on Google, several sponsored sites appear above the gov site, and charge $100+ for the same service but slower, and they do god knows what with your passport details and personal data.

There are tons of other examples like this. It’s very easy to get tricked by Google ads if you aren’t suspecting a scam.

There also has been a drastic change in YouTube search in the past year. It used to be that search would be logical, you search for a specific string and you can go through pages of videos that matchup to that. Now it at least feels like they have completely mixed that original search with a some sort of ranked preference of what they think I want to see. It’s a shame and an actual huge downgrade.

Try searching something and sorting results by most recent. If you then change the upload date filter (e.g. from 'this month' to 'last hour') you'll get completely different results...

YouTube search will also only show you maybe 10 videos relevant to your search terms and then just give you random videos it wants you to watch that have little or nothing to do with your original search.

I'm not using an ad blocker; when I search for Midjourney on Google the real thing is my first result; I don't even see any sponsored content. Not sure what's happening for OP.

(Please don't read this as a defense of Google on the whole.)

Piggybacking on to provide a screenshot since I also see no sponsored content and Midjourney is my #1 result, well above the fold.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/Oxo4FJl.png

I get the same results as Op, but on mobile, where there are 4 sponsors above the link. It’s about two screen scrolls to the real result.

When I search it I see the same thing as OP.

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/hlF6OoU

> I'm not using an ad blocker

How do you tolerate the web without an ad blocker?

Mine has one sponsored link which is just a course for midjourney. But I don't doubt at all that the OP post is real. This stuff is all dynamically generated. There is probably even some AI deciding how many ads you'll put up with.

Ideally Google would offer some kind of ad free option, perhaps on a higher tier of the Google One plans.

With uBlock off, I get two sponsored ads, and the real site is nearly pushed below the fold: https://i.imgur.com/AkVbvSI.png

Geo targeting or other targeting signals play a role in this

odd, I also don't see any sponsored content any longer for any search whereas I definitely remember seeing what OP has for other searches. But I also now see a tab for AI mode next to ALL which is new... but I also switched to DDG a while ago

Relevant (800 comment!) 2024 HN discussion on how we got here with Google Search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

I knew what the image was, even before clicking on the article...

When I tried, I got the expected midjourney site first up. I'm logged in to Chrome in case that matters.

For comparison DDG gave me the site as third link, which only just made the bottom of the screen.

DDG often gives me useless Ebay links which remind me of the early days of search.

Perhaps these single data points are useless?

That's not my experience at all: https://i.imgur.com/JXAJMNh.png

Searching for Midjourney finds Midjourney with direct links to sections of their website. uBlock Origin blocks ads. All is well.

They seem to classify users in a way that puts technically-proficient users in a separate class to regular users.

One class receives a more traditional experience.

The other receives whatever they're currently pushing. For example, my Dad's Gmail has a much higher "ad email" : "real email" ratio than mine. Also, the styling of an "ad email" line is far more subtle than what I receive.

I checked with my technical friends. They all receive similar experiences to what I do. But my parents and other people I help with their personal tech receive the ad-heavy version.

My conspiracy theory is that they're trying to detect journalists, lawmakers, regulators, and more, in an attempt to avoid being forced to push ads less aggressively.

ChatGPT is next: https://sources.news/p/openai-ads-leader-sam-altman-memo-sta...

I just started paying for Kagi. I'll use them as long as they stay ad free, which seems part of their core selling point.

I haven't used google in years and didn't realize it was this bad. How are they able to keep their market position?

Market momentum probably. People "Google" things. People don't "Kagi" things or "DuckDuckGo" things.

I question why Instagram is so popular. I don't use it but my wife does and she constantly runs into errors and bugs. It's a multi billion dollar company and suffers from the sort of issues that beta software does.

They got to their position first, got the market share and then enshittifed from there.

Too bad I cannot zoom into the image in my phone. Even tapping on it does not enable me to really see it much larger.

Android Firefox and its various forks (I use Waterfox) have a setting that allows zoom on all sites.

You can usually force enable zoom in browser accessibility settings.

Yep. Its a shit website, talking about a shittier website.

Meanwhile, over on Kagi: https://cln.sh/LbZ8VBbKzjyzKchNC4hS

I’m still amazed that Kagi search results are basically on par with Google’s (and without the ads) in all my comparison tests that I’ve done. And Google has orders of magnitude more resources.

What has Google been doing all this time?

Mine looks slightly similar: my top result is the Wikipedia page for Midjourney.

I've pinned all results from wikipedia.org, which is a killer feature and why I'm paying for Kagi, instead of giving away my data for free to Google.

I love Kagi, been using it for over a year now. Sadly I haven’t been able to get anyone else on board, even with gift subs.

Serenity, thanks.

So what's crazy about this is that I remember, when I first joined Google in 2011, that they were particularly proud of how people would just stop using URLs and use Google to navigate. So people would type "amazon" to get to Amazon.com instead of actually typing out `amazon.com`, or using a bookmark or directory etc. And they wanted to keep search at a quality that would continue to get people to do that. And later the fear with mobile becoming ascendant was that people would stop using search in this way, etc.

But it looks like they just keep giving people more and more reason to... not do that.

These guys warned us about this sort of thing.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

Appendix A. Page 18.

Lol hilarious to read that now. Damn.

For what it's worth, when you view a Google search results page, part of the page is populated by ads (results come from the Google Ads teams) and part of it by search results (results come from the Google Search team, and unaffected by anything to do with ads).

The post points out a problem with the fraction that is allocated to Ads, but pretty sure that's not "everything that's wrong with Google Search" (if true, it would actually be an endorsement of the quality of the organic search results, which I doubt is the intent).

Not really, its just a condemnation of the amalgamation which is unable to be perceived as different from the user - it shits on the organic search in their mind and anyone saying "well our search is still good!" is completely missing the point.

Remember that Goole is not a public service. It is a business.

It has two (or more) customers with different needs. For now, google needs to satisfy us (the users), but not delight.

I'll be honest....

I'm puzzled why OP did a web-search (i.e. used a business to find) 'midjourny' rather than simply entering the known URL.

How times change.

It becomes even sadder when Google caters to political propaganda of any kind, from any party or country, if the price is right. I wish Google realized how much greater and more beneficial the product and company are to the people who use them than all of that. I am not naïve -I understand they need to profit- but perhaps they are focusing on short term gains while introducing this poor user experience, which will eventually lead to major losses.

Google is still far far better than the competition which is crawling with manipulated results and fake sites and phishing scams. The other are so much easier to take advantage of and manipulate (e.g. search ranking). No security based filtering ,etc.

I have been personally bitten by results on the likes of Bing or DDG (fake browser addons on top, crypto phishing sites on top, etc.)

Also user experience varies somewhat and for me with the same search prompt ("midjourney"), the intended site is the first result.

Kagi is worth every penny.

It’s likely that Google has tested how many ads it can place in search results before users lose patience and turn elsewhere.

On paper, the approach makes sense: push profitability as far as possible. But in practice, it can leave customers feeling squeezed and resentful, much like the increasingly nickel‑and‑dimed atmosphere visitors now complain about in Las Vegas, and the proliferation of tip screens.

Yes its purely economics and profit maximizing behaviour from Google.

Marginal benefit vs Marginal cost.

If I may offer a devil's advocate perspective.

I just googled Toyota Highlander (my car) and the ad in the search results is "please consider the Honda Pilot."

Now it's unlikely that I am shopping for a midsized SUV and am not aware of the major competitors, but squinting that away for a second - if I am searching for a car I think I want and Google informs me of a perfectly viable alternative that might be cheaper or better in some other way that can have a huge positive impact on my life. So in this case I am obviously aware of Honda but an ad for one of the Korean or domestic makers I hadn't considered could be useful.

Similarly if I am Google midjourney as in the article because I heard that somewhere and Google positions for me potential cheaper/better alternatives as ads - that's not a terrible thing and you could say hits at the best usecase of an ad - making me aware of an alternative solution to a problem I have that's driving my search to begin with.

I obviously don't feel this way about the majority of ads I see but when it "hits right" it's really useful

Fair point, but I'd argue that "Google informed [you] of a perfectly viable alternative that might be cheaper" isn't what happened. What happened is "Google offered you Honda first, for no other reason than Honda paid them money to do so".

If you squint they may look like the same thing, but their subtle difference is important. One is a tool suggesting "Hey I see you're trying to do A, but I think B might also fit your needs", and the other is "You want A? Ok, I'll eventually point you towards A, but only after you consume this message from our sponsor."

Google's not genuinely thinking "Hey this will help the user more!" and building that into their tool - it's an ad platform that mimics being helpful, in the name of growing profits.

(That's fine for them to do btw; They're a company and they need to make money somehow.)

Okay, then show those ads to people who google “midsize SUV” or “AI image generator”, not people who google the specific product by brand name. Sending people who google “midjourney” to competitors’ websites makes as much sense as sending people who google “midsize SUV” to bicycle websites: the user already made their preference very clear.

> If I may offer a devil's advocate perspective.

The devil doesn't need advocates. https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3145446/the-devil-doesnt-ne...

There are clear and obvious ways to show advertisements without making those advertisements look like top search results. You know this. Google knows this. There's no reason for anyone to pretend otherwise.

In my view a lot of this hinges on how well the results are identified as ads, and whether they’re vectors of fraud.

I’m not inherently opposed to ads that are relevant to a user’s search query, but I am opposed to watering down their visual differentiation until they look just like regular search results. Once upon a time Google put ads on a yellow background labelled “Ads”. Now they’re “Sponsored results” and they look mostly identical to the rest. This is simply not about providing interesting and relevant alternatives, but about tricking the user into clicking the ad so Google can charge the advertiser.

What I truly can’t abide, though, is the volume of fraudulent and malicious advertising circulating their network. Given Google’s $100 billion profit in 2024, the amount of fake/scam versions of real websites that they allow to appear in search ads, or deepfake Elon Musk bitcoin giveaways they allow in YouTube prerolls is a calculated choice, not an inability or lack of resources to prevent it. At the end of the day it would eat into their profit if they were to make it harder to post deceptive ads.

It is a business model problem, not Google’s problem. When it is easy to stand out by paying money, it will always become trash

Google searches days are numbered. But the older generation will probably use it for the rest of their lives.

Like broadcast TV.

I was searching for a specific library for Python the other day, and Google kept pushing me to 'Top 10 Python Courses!' articles or giant comparison boxes for products I didn't need. It has decided that whenever I type a technical query, what I really want is to buy something or sign up for a newsletter.

The moment the algorithm switched from trying to understand 'what information does this user need?' to 'how can we make money off this user right now?' is the moment search broke for anyone doing actual development work. We're now filtering through commercial noise just to find the docs.

I have been using an ad blocker for a long time and K didn't even know there was the sponsored ads feature

MidJourney not being the first organic spot is a bad experience. But it's normal practice that you can place ads on users searching for other company names.

This seems counter intuitive at first, but I think its reasonable. You don't get to exclude every advertiser from any random search string just because you have a domain name with it. How would that be enforced? There are many reasons to bid on brand names that are not necessarily squatting. Such as if my product is an integration of the tool. Many brand names are just basic words. Many brand names are very similar in SMBs.

But you can't use another company's trademark in your headline or adtext. Using another companies name is asking to get your ads taken down and lead to an account ban.

> You don't get to exclude every advertiser from any random search string just because you have a domain name with it.

To my understanding, Google keywords are already semantic. It's not that it shows ads because it can't tell that the string is a specific product name - it's showing ads because it determined that string to be referring to Midjourney (the entity in Google's knowledge graph).

> There are many reasons to bid on brand names that are not necessarily squatting.

Google is a leader in AI - I feel they could very easily filter out these blatantly misleading ad campaigns, while keeping "legitimate" ones, if they didn't have financial incentive to turn a blind eye and have more people fooled into clicking ads.

It would be more acceptable if the ad followed the actual correct top search result.

Also, "many brand names are just basic words" doesn't accurately describe the situation where it's blatantly obvious that copycats are picking this same word solely so as to muddy the waters for users trying to find the original.

At least it was on the first page. I just searched for Midjourney on the iPhone App Store. It put 2 other results first. Each result is about 2/3rds the height of the screen meaning the actual "midjourney" result was a screen and a half down, so off the screen.

You can try with https://www.google.com/search?q=midjurny

My superpower is mispealing even trivial words, Google autocorrect them, but most of the time there are no ads :)

The problem in the post is even worst with YouTube, because Google adds allow to show http://example.com/sale?utm=123456789&crap=987654321 as http://example.com This is not a problem in most business sites, but in YouTube it allows any user to impersonate the main page.

Google got misled by the term mid journey so, it put the result mid page :)

An interesting search term that, at least for me, always returns the four top results as sponsored is "web hosting": https://www.google.com/search?q=web+hosting

Also, searching for "netcup", I got two sponsored cloud services before seeing "https://www.netcup.com/": https://www.google.com/search?q=netcup

I just got good first page hits and ranking for a search for "midjourney", but it looks like Midjourney is paying for 2 Sponsored spots on the first page, even though the user searched exactly for Midjourney's well-known brand name.

https://i.imgur.com/u025ZaU.png

On a search for exactly this particular well-known and fairly unique brand name, I think probably midjourney.com should've been the first hit, as a freebie, without needing to buy ads. (Either that, or the second hit, and the Wikipedia entry as the first.)

(Incidentally, it felt a bit retro not to get the usual clutter of AI/infoboxes/etc. at the top of the page this time.)

My first result is midjourney.com. I so often see people criticizing Google search but I never see the negative with my own eyes. Whenever I search I get what I want or need.

Google Search must be highly personalized, and I don't know what I'm doing right but clearly my personalization is working.

Edit: Oh I realize now it's the sponsored results they're complaining about. Well that's just greedy. I mean, you haven't paid a cent for Google Search since 1998? And you just expect them to do everything for free.

I happen to not see the sponsored results right now, maybe because of uBlock, or chance, but even if I do see them I don't mind them at all. Poor Sundar Pichai has to keep the lights on somehow.

This discussion is crazy. Google is a business that sells advertising. They build a free browser so that it is easier for the end user to use their product. Chrome does tricky things to help google like, automatically searching if you don't type a URL into the address bar. You as a user, you have typed midjourney instead of midjourney.com using google search as your dns lookup.

Google is a business that has correctly identified that users are most likely unable to type the full URL into a browser and uses this opportunity to display some advertising. As my retirement investment holds a small amount of ETFs that would own google shares, yay for me. Thank you for not typing .com

I think people need to keep repeating this until they make sense of it.

- Google is in the business of selling online advertising.

...

The tech stuff? AH its just stuff they offer so they can do the above more efficiently and effectively.

Thats it. It seems many either cant see the truth or dont want it to be so.

Sure, just don't complain when people get fed up enough to burn all this shit down with a vengeance and your retirement investment is all zeroes.

Author has never ran startup on the internet. For past 15-20 years, if you have competitors you have to bid-buy top ad slot from Google. That’s hundreds or thousands of dollars monthly.

Midjourney don’t do that because they are doing good with new signups without it.

Look up "Hacker News". Some days this site isn't even on the front page.

I searched on my work browser, on my personal browser, on the phone (mobile + desktop page) and in all cases I use the link to midjourney.com first.

The spirit of the question I can subscribe to though: too many ads on top of the results these days.

I found it mildly amusing that when I googled for jlcpcb recently, pcbway showed up before them in the google results. I still don't really know if there is any meaningful difference between the two companies

I don't have a problem with this in general, I do have a problem when they deceive users, which happens often. If I search for Amazon and get Temu ad - that's OK. But often when I search for X they will show sponsored results that pretend to be that X. This is esp true with apps on their play store, which is something fairly new. I barely use Google Search these days so don't know how bad it is with search.

This is a pattern you see often. A product gets to a point where it's hard to grow revenue as the market expects, so the company does everything they can to squeeze more revenue.

We can have the plain old good Google search results page back on by default. It works by making the "Web" tab the default. Tested on Firefox and it works great. No extension needed. Instructions in the topmost comment of this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1ctk95k/comment/l4...

I remember a company saying its most effective ads were search ads for their own name.. like what midjourney does

https://postimg.cc/8JwL9WFx

> I remember a company saying its most effective ads were search ads for their own name

I don't have the full context, but this is almost a tautology. Of course you get the highest click-through-rate and highest conversion for searches that are your own name. You usually also get a relatively cheap bid, because most search engines prefer to prioritize relevant results, and you will be very relevant for your own name. But you would have gotten most of those clicks and conversion _for free_ even if you didn't advertise on your name, because the searcher would see your organic result. Advertising on your own name is defensive, not offensive -- you protect customers that are already yours, you don't get new ones.

source: I run marketing for a small business, we advertise on our own name too, and of course it is also the most effective if you calculate it naively.

the sponsored results looks like you are in an ads experiment since this really isn't how it typically displays

I stopped using Google because I'd quickly search something, click the first link then, like Wiley Coyote, slowly realize I'd run straight off a cliff.

I can't believe that's what their standard is now.

Kagi. Worth every penny. Become the customer and it all gets better.

While many see it as a problem, kagi.com sees it as an opportunity.

It’s been like that for years. Just stop using it along with other Google-services, their products are unsafe dogshit, their earning model is to sell you and your privacy, not make great products.

I use several search engines (Brave, duckduck) to find stuff along with different AI-models (outside the browser, I disable the browser ones). This way I have at least some semblance of control of my information and no one company controls everything. Something like Google or Microsoft shouldn’t even exist.

To be fair, DDG sometimes is just as bad.

For example, if I search for "anonbib"[1] it shows nothing but revenge porn links[2].

[1] https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/

[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/anon-ib-revenge-porn-site-se...

I made the mistake of agreeing to undertaking that I would not use the trademarked brandname of one of my competitors' keyuwords in our Google ads bidding. Talking with a lawyer after the fact, I learnt that we can freely use the keywords but agreeing to the undertaking is a more serious and legally binding corporate promise. Now they are bidding on my brand names but we can't bid on them. So, I do agree Google search sucks, heh.

Why did you agree to this without it being mutual?

Use it long enough and you will subconsciously train yourself to ignore the first 2-3 results. I don't think it's wrong, it's just how ads work.

I wonder what this does to all the people that type even known URLs into Google instead of the location bar to go to that URL. You know, people like my parents.

My key complaint (in addition to the one cited in TA) is that, if there is a wikipedia article related to what I'm searching for, I want that at the top of the results. Maybe above, or possibly right below, the link to midjourney.com. Maybe others don't see the value in that, but Google has had literally a quarter of a century to figure out what I want, and hasn't yet learned that.

This is why Kagi exists.

It does not fully show the problem as the result is immediately beneath the sponsored content.

The problem is when you are searching for something more complex and it does not find it immediately, which means you need to jump through the sponsored content over and over to find something (when tweaking a query or paging). It is easier to use simpler search services like DDG and do quicker search iterations compared to google.

It's even worse on mobile. For some searches the first real, normal, webpage link can be two or three full page scrolls down from the top.

I stopped using Google when it started discriminating against browsers without JS recently, and it looks like I'm not missing much. Is stuffing ads in your face this "better experience" that sites are always trying to beg you to enable JS for?

Incidentally, Bing's first two results for "midjourney" are the official site, followed by the Wikipedia page.

Turn on the adblocker if you don't want ads?

This is how my google search looks in chrome with ublock lite https://imgur.com/a/GrXP77y

Maybe some percentage of users will select a crap alternative product because they show an ad above your thing but I bet it's a minority.

Ideally, searching once for 'midjourney' would mean getting the url to directly access it time and again (and, create a bookmark). Perhaps the issue is more on the business model, rather than the effectivness of search offered by Google.

What is search anyway (not being flippant!)? Its quite an odd 'thing' really these days.

I use an ad blocker, so I don't worry about sponsored links for fake products appearing above genuine ones. Also, this isn't just a Google problem; Bing has it too. My issue with Google is that it includes YouTube results in the main search results even though there's a separate Videos tab.

If it's any consolation, these companies paying for ads on a competitor's brand name are probably paying through the nose to get clicks that only bounce. IF it's worth it at all, it's probably temporary. It's an indicator that market share is still up for grabs.

Probably not the first comment to this end, but I have been using Kagi for the last few months and it’s good. Past attempts to use other search engines didn’t last long because of search quality but Kagi is good enough as long as I don’t expect local results, which is a fine tradeoff.

I wouldn't characterize that as "everything" that's wrong. It is at least one thing.

How about some policies to ensure customers have the control to see what they want to see? For example - I don’t support to see ads ahead of actual search results?

I see an opportunity for someone who can code. Make a website that tabulates search results for common terms. Listing the position of the desired search hit could be the ‘veracity score’ and allow users to assess the distortion field of each search engine

If we could get circa 2010 Google back people would not waste nearly as much time with “AI”.

It seems to me that there are many other things wrong with Google Search not depicted here.

How much of this is due to the awful mobile first design paradigms that infest a lot of web development these days?

Because 3-4 sponsored ads used to be always there.. but they used to be clearly marked as such and to the right side of the page previously..

I liked the search results a lot better when the ads were on the side. You could see a competitor if that was of interest to you, but you didn't have to scroll when you wanted to just find what would likely be a top result.

I just tried the same search on DuckDuckGo.

Midjourney.com is second on the list. Not good. But better.

On one hand, google forces users to surrender more and more person information for "advance security features" on other hand google allows malicious links to be the top 10 (sponsored) search results. .

My dad stopped using Google like 20 years ago for exactly this reason. He was not happy when his relevant local small business was pushed off the first page by out-of-state providers of tenuously related services

Baidu did this in the past and quickly lost his credit and market in China.

That is why I use my own domain index

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

Just to nitpick on the example: When a trusted or frequently used webpage is bookmarked, search can be restricted to those bookmarks with `*` in Firefox and with `@bookmarks` in Chrome.

Google Search jumped the shark years ago. It's the modern-day Yahoo at this point. Even Bing is a better experience, which is not a sentence I ever thought I would type a decade ago.

I liked it better when these were off to the side, I hope the person who convinced Google to put them as part of the list looking like a search result got a $100 million raise.

There have been ads above the fold for about 20 years. I just did the search and the official Midjourney site is the first non-sponsored hit. You'll find this for most searches.

20 years ago the ads appeared in a clearly marked and differently marked sidebar, away from the main content.

This makes me sad because I’m old enough to remember when I left Altavista/Lycos/Yahoo for Google because of the obnoxious sponsored search results.

Google is not the old google.

Now it’s the sick man of the tech world languishing towards its death.

Out of that carcass, lots of new firms which will improve the open internet will likely emerge.

This is how paid placements work, and it's in the app stores as well.

And yes, _most_ people will just click on one of those top 3 links, not realizing that they are not going where they might have hoped to go.

What's worse is that many people actually go to google to search for the website name they want. And the search engine will "help" them by popping up suggestions before the user might have completed typing .com. So now instead of searching for therealwebsite.com, they search for "therealwebsite". That of course will NOT show them the real website, it will show all the garbage.

Locale plays a role, I think. Searching from Romania, none of these examples replicate. Amazon is first for Amazon, Midjourney first for Midjourney, etc.

That's not "everything"! Just wasted ~3 hours trying to set up an account, supervised by me, for my 8 year old daughter.

(1) There are some old rules for a user interface.

(2) Billions of people know these rules, implicitly, and right away and easily use sites that follow the rules.

(3) Google, and others, want a new, different, original, snappy, creative, user interface but in this effort set aside the old rules so that at most only the programmer understands the user interface and in a month he (she) won't be able to use it either.

Analogy: They are really good at making pancakes but now are trying to make Bouillabaisse and are getting only rotten sea food.

Uh, the user interface has a lot of cartoons in a popular, new style but one of their cartoons shows little girl and some of the underside of her skirt -- dumb de dumb-dumb. If they make a mistake like that, then they are sloppy or worse workers and, thus, no wonder the rest is awful. Time to short the stock?

People are really starting to notice the sharp decline of Google search. I blogged[0] of a very similar experience a few months ago.

I don't even mind the AI Overview (too much) but the search results themselves are noticeably worse. In my example, the best search result and the one that the AI summary is clearly based on is the 6th ranked result.

Is Google doing this deliberately to make the AI Overview seem better?

In an ideal world, Google would use AI to provide better search results. Something like: "Here are the results for your search term A, which was slightly ambiguous. I suggest added term B or C depending on what you meant". It seems like that is not going to happen.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2025/4/yo_google%2C_thanks_for_the_ai_ov...

Try searching for "FedEx phone number" and it's not even in the top 10 search results. Not sure if FedEx is using SEO or paying to suppress results, but I was shocked Google couldn't even return this basic search successfully. I remember when Google Search used to actually work and have useful results and something like "FedEx phone number" would have the 1-800 number in bold text for you to click and immediately use. Now I use ChatGPT for those type of questions--and get the results I expect.

youtube is worse. it usually gives you three matches, than some completely random sh** that does not match a single keyword you typed in.

Offtopic, but I hate websites that restrict zoom on mobile. I'm sure the image is very convincing, too bad I can barely read the text.

I find the Ads to be annoying, but the "ML Fairness" (re-calibrating demographic distributions of photos) to be more disturbing.

though I've noticed that they've dialed down the knobs a bit. It's still there, but far less blatant (probably due to the attention-grabbing BARD debacle)

sounds like a transient issue. I just tried [midjourney] and midjourney.com was the top ad and also the #1 result, dominating the page.

Could not reproduce.

You might be part of an experiment or have a rogue extension installed that is hijacking the results (it's happened to me).

I couldn't remember ever seeing anything this bad. So I tried this in my browser and the real midjourney was the first result. Then I remembered I'm using Brave as my default browser, and most people aren't. In all the years I've been using it I've never once regretted it, and every once in a while I get a little reminder like this about how bad ads are on the web. I don't know why it isn't a more popular browser choice.

We need Reader mode, but for search results.

Seems perfectly tailored to the product being sold and the customers paying for it

Product being search users. Customers being advertisers.

they've become a shady, low quality search engine. Even Yandex returns midjourney.com as the first result.

Can we be honest here? This isn't (really) Google's fault, because ANY company in the same position would do the same. It's our fault, for letting them.

We could pass a law preventing this nonsense tomorrow, and Google would have no choice in the matter. However, "we the people" don't have strong advocates fighting for us, while Google has both (very strong) legal and political contributions (ie. bribery) teams ensuring that never happens.

The real problem here is that we've ceded our democracy to corporations: blaming Google (or any individual corporation) is missing the real issue.

P.S. But, the good news is ... we can always take our democracy back.

It is still their fault because at the end of the day they choose to do this. Yes, the incentives encourage them to make that choice, but if I offer you a million dollars to murder someone and you do that, you're still responsible for what you did.

Now the definition of "their" needs clarification here. Google as a whole cannot be meaningfully morally responsible because it is not an actual person, and as such, not entity that possesses the ability to be moral or immoral in the first place. It's an organization. But all organizations are run by people, and people at the top do have a lot of capacity to make meaningful choices. When they make choices that they do, we can and should hold them morally accountable for them.

Meaningful regulation is also good, but, well, consider two societies: one has low rates of property crime because of draconian enforcement, the other because people just choose not to do it despite very little enforcement. Which society is more pleasant to live in?

This is a completely valid (if perhaps fanciful) perspective; I’m not sure why it’s being downvoted.

I searched it on Bing and got the official midjourney site as #1 and a wikipedia article as #2.

Weird, I don't see those sponsored links. Maybe because I use ublock like a normal person.

Same shit, different screenshot. The most irritating part is that other folks can't reliably reproduce results like those shown in the screenshot. Yet, I can think of countless examples of this happening to me. My guess is that it's highly beneficial to Google to barf out walls of poor-quality ads when it knows nothing about you. I can't be sure why, but there's a pattern.

When you look for my (somewhat obscure) company's app on the Play store, the first result is always a sponsored listing for some totally unrelated app.

About a year ago, I googled "silverfast" (film scanning program) on a fresh Windows installation not connected to me in any way, and I got several ads for scammy scanner software before the program I was looking for showed up.

When I watch youtube videos from obscure creators while logged out, I routinely get AI-generated ads for random stuff. The funniest one was deepfaked Chuck Norris emphatically telling me I should feed my dog carrots. Yet, when I watch a video from a big YouTube channel under the same conditions, I get ads from major household brands.

My guess is that there's three things happening. 1) More moneyed advertisers have more refined targeting constraints, that implicitly filter out ill-defined user profiles. 2) Google feels the need to do a better job of targeting for advertisers who pay them more. 3) In the absence of a well-defined user profile, Google shotguns a bunch of low-cost ads at you to try to build a profile. Just guesses.

Impressions to logged-in users bid higher than anonymous sessions. There's almost certainly higher tiers of demographics beyond that, not that you're allowed to know.

They're pushing so hard on Gemini because they know the search days are limited.

Hmm I just tried that search and Midjourney's site was at the top.

Regardless, at this point, I consider Google Search "legacy software." I rarely use it anymore. Google's AI mode or ChatGPT Thinking perform much more nuanced searches for me and surface the results I'm looking for much faster.

I used to consider my Google-fu top notch, but even without Google Search "Classic" getting destroyed by SEO spam, it's still more work at the end of the day than AI models. I'm sure spam and irrelevance will be the eventual fate of these AI models too, but for now they're the new Google

Yahoo! did this as it died too

For the love of god please use (and pay for) Kagi.

I cannot possibly fathom how they stay afloat with just 50k+ users.

Google's ad engine, also featuring search results somewhere on the page.

Juicylinks.ai helps rank your apps higher on LLM recommendations like AI SEO

Google is an adtech company and not a search company so this is normal

It's not wrong, it's how Google evolved based on demand and literally on the industries it created and that everyone was happy to join.

SEO + AdWords = this

It apparently took everyone decades to notice this is where we were always headed.

I think future app stores should offer users an ad control panel. Let us choose whether to see ads, what kinds we prefer like tools, games, or education, and even which recommendation algorithm we want to use.

Ask your doctor for a specific drug and he will reply, without disclosing his sponsorship money, about another drug that is just as good.

At least Google writes the word sponsored, the real world doesn't do that.

Google is unusable.

that is bad, I think the even worse sin is putting sponsored apps above the app you really searched for so you end up clicking on the wrong one.

Can't wait till ChatGPT responses look like this

Far from everything

I'm going to grumble about the title. If you say "in one image" the you should just link to an image. If it isn't that self evident, then should title it as such.

Let them advertise themselves into oblivion.

This is pretty mild actually. If you do a google search for any remotely "salesworthy" word, like say, "microphone" (because you want a wikipedia article on how they work maybe, or links to organic results for whatever comes up, you get absolutely flooded by a whole pile of sales offers and filters as if Google were fucking Amazon. I've had it happen with all kinds of searches, even some that weren't at all for a product.

It didn't used to manifest in this way with Google results, and it's a ridiculous beshitting of the basic idea of just using its search.

IMGUR link to an example I quickly pulled up.

https://imgur.com/a/EdBLIMg

That's not everything that's wrong.

from a new customer perspective who just heard about midjourney, search may be a good spot to find alternate products. what google needs to know is if it is a navigational search and unless it keeps a long history, it may not know that. the simpler answer may be that companies who know you use a product like the one they make may just be willing to spend a bunch and google may be willing to add friction for the $.

Like many of you, I serve as IT support for family. Some of those family are beginning to slip cognitively, so I'd like to say: Fk google for doing this. You are confusing my relatives who cannot tell the difference between your ad-spam and actual links, and it is not an exaggeration to say that you are now taking advantage of old people.

I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock) and move them over to chatgpt when possible. If anyone has better ideas, I'm all ears.

> move them over to ChatGPT

OpenAI has even more VC money to pay back than Google ever did.

Practically all the large tech companies so far have turned to ads and monetizing users rather than charging enough to remain more neutral.

I suspect one day, when you ask ChatGPT "Can you give me a link to mid journey", you'll instead probabilistically get a link to whichever competitor paid OpenAI for the best placement.

In hindsight, we should have known this would happen eventually. At this point, we have to be actively be against free services. Every time its just a ticking time bomb. There's literally no incentive for them to be an actual good service, just good enough that you tolerate it and not consider other options, but shit enough that they can extract value out of you.

Kagi, as others have mentioned. Google search is dead.

Kagi is quite good, its clean, simple, and not much money.

Not Google related, but cognition and older relative relevant: The amount of predatory scamware targeted towards older adults on the app stores is infuriating. I have a family friend who is now in the early-mid stages of Alzheimer's, but is still able to live at home and enjoy her life. She gets confused and stressed out by the fake 'alert! all your photos will be deleted!!' ads that pop up when she does her adult coloring books or jigsaw puzzles on her ipad. Apple's recommended apps in this category are evil in this regard, every single one. I've had to disable $80/week 'security' subscriptions from her account more than once. It is shameful that this is allowed.

Buy them a Kagi membership and switch them to that.

My parents hate technology but they love their little KDE thinkpad.

> I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock)

I guess they are all on Firefox.

Creat your own family yahoo — a website you maintain that has links to the websites they commonly use like mail and bank. Set as home page and new tab page.

It’s a slight security risk since it shows where you have accounts.

If you are savvy, build your own search that just passes it to an LLM and returns as page.

This is a real risk. I know of someone who got phished with a fake number for Apple Support (the fake number was promoted and appeared at the top of the search results). Apparently they do this with banking phone numbers as well.

This is like going into a butcher's shop and being surprised that they're pushing meat on you instead of flowers or textiles.

Google is an ad company. They're the ad company. They built a search engine to sell ads. They built a browser to sell ads. They built an e-mail provider to sell ads. They built a video streaming platform to sell ads. They built a worldwide street-level navigation system to sell ads. They built an operating system and computers, just to sell ads.

They showed you ads. They gave you what they sell.

You don't like meat? Stop going to the butcher shop. Don't sit here complaining that the butchers keep trying to sell you meat.

Maybe Midjourney let its brand namespace become too diluted with copycats and also-rans and coasted on their initial work instead of putting in the effort to maintain the space. Maybe a lot of ppl searching for things that are like Midjourney are causing the competitors (who are obviously making efforts to invade the keyword) to be listed alongside. Maybe there's actually way more variables in the mix with OP's search/account/profile (however prolific or not it is). It's just not that clear cut and google is still has massive utility.

Another day another weak substack submitted by ....

Everything? That's not even half of it. I don't see any: * useless faq box * useless slop box * unrelated image gallery * hijacked business listing (with no support for recourse, of course)

The fact that people continue to willingly subject themselves to the internet without using an adblocker is insane to me.

Google has turned into altavista

I remember 37signals paying for an ad saying "We dont want to pay for this ad" or something to combat this for their keywords.

I think it was DHH or Jason who shared this somewhere in social media.

Edit: Yep! It was Jason - https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016

not only that, google now has like 10 AI apps, like literally I lost count.

> have enough backlinks

Doesn't link

Every time this comes up, I don’t understand what the alternative is supposed to be.

X (Midjourney in this case) may/not be trademarked in the user’s country - so what makes X so special that Google/others should rank this one over others? Does this mean X owns the keyword and other related searches on Google forever? That sounds worse than domain squatting!

Speaking of, quite often, X.com is already registered, so companies buy getX.com or just non-.com TLDs. Now which one is the right result for searches for X? The pre existing one or the new company? What if they’re in different industries?

Almost all SaaS companies have multiple comparison pages or blogs/articles/etc that mention and compare themselves with competitors - specifically for SEO to show up in those searches. Should this also be banned?

I could go on, but I just don’t see a situation where Google can solve this satisfactorily for everyone, without becoming opinionated and picking/choosing/preferring one competitor over the other. As such, they’ve gone for the easiest model we have in modern day capitalism - put it up for auction and let the market figure it out!

With udm14 and ublock origin on Firefox my first link is the official midjourney.com, then the subreddit, then the official discord, then wikipedia, then the offical Facebook page. That is just about perfect and covers what most people would want.

No ads. No LLM BS. While the experience google is pushing is terrible, the underlying tech still works in cases like this.

Google frequently ignores entire words in a search query or gives thematically similar but utterly irrelevant results.

Late to the party here but I made a browser extension that helps with this called Cat Search. It categorizes the search results and allows you to vote on them so you can ignore/downvote/banish the results you don't want

I will never use Gemini for this reason. The enshittification of Search is so treacherously disgraceful and user-hostile, that I have no faith that the same fate won't occur with Gemini as well.

Everything that is wrong about bullshit webpages that are SoMe optimized: I could not zoom because eyeballs so I couldn't see what was in the image.

But daaaaamn. I could see that footer all the time. Lucky I was not able to zoom.

smiles in UBO

Imagine seeing ads.

Install an ad blocker.

Wait till you see ads in ChatGPT.

ublock origin

Uh, midjourney is the first result on my google. Thanks to the magic of adblock.

Seriously is this the level of HN discussion nowadays?

Enshittification really should be upgraded to a fourth law of thermodynamics.

>using google

lol :^)

  > I typed in Midjourney to search for Midjourney because I wanted to use Midjourney.

For one thing, the author could have just gone right to midjourney.com instead of going through an intermediate. Additionally, when I tried typing midjourney into google, midjourney.com was the first result. This is on mobile Firefox, with no extensions installed.

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