Comment by rprospero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rprospero | Hacker News Reader

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I performed your experiment and it didn't seem to match your conclusions.

My search was: jwt web toolkit

The search page itself had no Google ads on it.

The top link was the homepage for the toolkit project. There were no ad links on the page.

The second and third links were for wikipedia, which contained no Google ads.

The fourth link did have Google ads on it. The fifth and sixth lengths did not. The seventh link did.

I tried again with a different set of search terms: neutron spin echo

The top of the page did contain a link to Google Scholar, followed by three links to pay walled articles. I am not aware of any profit agreement between Google and the publishers, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it's there.

The remaining links were either to pages containing no advertising (Google or otherwise) or to more pay walled articles. Short of Google have a relationship with the publishers, Google again made no money on this search.

For the record, I don't have an ad-blocker turned on, so I would see ads if they were there.

"jwt web toolkit" and "neutron spin echo" are your best examples of results that might contain ads?

How about "playstation 4" for example?

I get one ad there. The first organic result is the Sony homepage. The second is the wikipedia page.

Seems pretty reasonable.

Those weren't my best examples of pages that might contain ads. They were my last two Google searches. If was I looking for ads, I'd probably search of acai berry or something similar. However, I had understood the original complain to be that you're assaulted with Google ads on all searches, not just the ones where you're intentionally looking for ads.

I guess the main place where I was unfair to the parent was his comment that not recognizing his comment that:

>There is no longer a big push for 'finding things on the web' which was the appeal of early search engines, now the bulk of the web use search as their portal to a giant reference library and product catalog.

I do use it as a reference library, but almost never as a product catalog. I imagine that, if I used Google to search for things to buy, there would be far more ads, but that forms a negligible part of my internet usage.

You really took an extreme here. Those queries are so far from the mainstream that the fact that you don't see ads for those keywords doesn't invalidate your parent. Think outside of those niche queries to realize what a more traditional user sees.

A query like "LA Car Rental" will give you an idea of what the parent post describes.

If you want to stick closer to the tech niche, try "build iphone app". Even the query "java profiler" gets me four ads on the page.

What should the SERP for "LA Car Rental" contain? If that's all you typed, what is Google to suppose you want?

Assuming you don't actually want to rent a car in Los Angeles (or maybe if you do), you will get much more entertaining results by adding a little qualification, e.g., "LA Car Rental scams".

I do not disagree with those statements, but your comment somehow comes across as unnecessarily contradictory. I was just showing that there are ads on the pages. I did not take any stance regarding what those pages should contain.

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