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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

This Pluralistic post seems very rant-y, but it links to a Bloomberg piece that seems like a better source for backing up the claim: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-obamacare-open-enrol...

As someone with a little experience with the 'advertiser side' of Google, they also push junk to their paying clients, using every opportunity to sell terrible, worthless placements to advertisers. Which is to say that the problem is not that 'searchers' are the product, the problem is that Google is not focused on creating value for its counter-parties.

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It's incredible hard to build a ad business around fairness. In 99% of all cases it's going to be a highest bidder thing.

Is that not fair?

For the advertiser, not the customer. There is never and incident to show the best product instead of the best paying one.

This discrepancy is always there for everything we see and get advertised for.

That’s strictly not true, at least for “old media” advertising.

Advertisers are selected based on being palatable for the content and the audience. It’s common for content licensing deals to has stipulations about which advertisement is acceptable. Virtually all platforms — even Google Search — has rules about the type of advertisements you see. There are of course laws that prohibit the advertising of certain types of products in certain places.

Even if these scams had the money for a full page NYT article, they wouldn’t had gotten it.

Why should it? If you aren’t satisfied you can take your business elsewhere… wait never mind, there is no alternative.

I agree that Google is benefiting from being the dominant player in a two-sided marketplace (which makes it harder to compete), but we can always choose not to use it, both as advertisers and as searchers. Google’s exploitation of its counter-parties has definitely caused me to use alternatives more and more often.

Google is my third choice for searches. I try Ecosia first, but their indexing is garbage so I typically then go to Brave. If Brave doesn’t have it then I submit to the evil overlords at Google. Thankfully Brave indexing is pretty good so it‘s had a measurable impact on the amount of search I actually put through Google.

I use DDG on the consumer side but you, I and most people on HN are outliers, the other 90% don’t care enough to use something else yet.

Kagi is the correct answer, because you pay for the service you use.

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