Comment by FloorEgg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FloorEgg | Hacker News Reader

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As a power user of Google search for decades, I find myself using it less and less (maybe now 5% of my historical peak usage). There are several reasons, but the main one is because they have gradually traded search quality for ad revenue with the direct consequence being wasting my time.

If I type in the name of a company so that I can navigate to their website, and I have to scroll past my whole viewport of other companies bidding to be placed above where I'm trying to go, I learn it's faster for me to just type the website address into the bar instead of going via Google.

They designed a UX that made my life easier and caused me to form a habit, and then broke that UX for money causing me to form a new habit.

It's just one example of dozens, but the consequence is that I see 95% fewer Google ads than I used to. My guess I am on the leading edge (along with many others on this forum) of a wave of change of user behavior that spells pessimism for Google search revenue.

It is unfortunate and only sometimes sustainable to alienate a third of your user base to extract 2x as much money from the rest for a net 30% increase in short term revenue. It’s not repeatable usually.

I'd assume Google leadership weren't unintelligent, looked at the trends, and decided maximizing search revenue per user was more advantageous than search quality.

E.g. how Amazon knows they have a problem with counterfeits and low-quality copies that damages their brand, but chose volume over quality

Neither company will ever explicitly put it in those terms, but it seems obvious Google isn't looking at search as a growth engine anymore.

It’s not a judgement of intellect but of character. Those people were forced out of Google when the advertising/boiler room mentality took over.

Amazon kind of does say it but they were clever about it. They don’t let rhetoric win only raw numbers. That means they will always shill or scam for profit. Has been that way for decades but only now are people paying attention.

> I learn it's faster for me to just type the website address into the bar instead of going via Google.

It pretty much always was, assuming you type reasonably well anyway. Especially once browsers just started guessing at what you want by automatically adding "https://" and ".com" to whatever you type into an address bar and trying that before redirecting you to a search engine.

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