Right. And most people are fully persuaded by much lesser sums.

Money can change almost anyone&#x27;s opinion about almost any subject.

&gt;They cared not to be evil back then.The never did, that was just marketing nonsense we all naively swallowed.

They cared not to be evil back then. Now they say they do the right thing, and “right” is subjective.

Google is not optimizing for the fewest number of ads. They are optimizing for profit from ads.

They follow up on that thought:&gt; In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want.

Then later in that section:&gt; we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparentThis change seems to go directly against their belief that it&#x27;s crucial for search engines to be transparent. After the change, it&#x27;s way less transparent, or &quot;easy to perceive or detect&quot;, that an ad is an ad.

backrub.. still cracks me up when i see it.

I value input from new coworkers precisely because I often lose focus on things that I care about, often to be replaced by a nebulous feeling of discomfort. There&#x27;s something to be said for maintaining a certain low rate of turnover in an organization to keep ideas and ethics on the menu.I used to place a high value on how long people had been on the team, but the two extremely stable places I subsequently worked at were a shitshow, because there just weren&#x27;t enough outsiders to argue them out of their circular reasoning.At the boardroom level, the situation we warn about is &quot;surrounding yourself with yes-men&quot;. I don&#x27;t think Page &amp; Brin remember where they came from. And they probably forgot long before they started trying to convert a 767 to be their corporate jet, which was already more than 10 years ago.( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2006&#x2F;07&#x2F;07&#x2F;google_bed_plane&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.co.uk&#x2F;2006&#x2F;07&#x2F;07&#x2F;google_bed_plane&#x2F;</a> )

Perhaps it&#x27;s worth quoting Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in the original paper on the Google search engine:&gt; &quot;The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. ...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. &quot;(<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;infolab.stanford.edu&#x2F;~backrub&#x2F;google.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;infolab.stanford.edu&#x2F;~backrub&#x2F;google.html</a>)At the time they thought this was a bad thing...

Yes, they do factor in number of clicks. They also consider &quot;regret&quot; -- returning to the search list and picking a different result.

Do they factor in the number of clicks on each result? If so then it would presumably improve over time.I know Google also factors in how long people spend on the resulting webpage.

&gt;Ideally you could use Bing as your default engine, then fall back to Google whenever there&#x27;s a search that doesn&#x27;t yield good results.This is what I do with DDG. Unless I have a pretty specific search, or want Google&#x27;s really nice live sports scores widgets, DDG is usually pretty good.

&gt; clicks on search results, plus backs and dwell times, are vital training dataInteresting. Can you explain more on what is tracked after a user clicks a result and how this data is used?

Thanks for posting, it&#x27;s nice to hear from someone on the inside!Downvoters: why on earth are you downvoting Analemma&#x27;s post? It&#x27;s constructive, on point and overall the kind of post which makes HN comments valuable.

&gt; I used to work at Bing. If you really want Bing to improve, the best thing you can do is just use it: clicks on search results, plus backs and dwell times, are vital training data.A million flies are attracted to shit. I don&#x27;t believe this sort of training data will ever become useful if it&#x27;s in the same pool with the rest of the world. See also: voting with your wallet against the tyranny of the majority of uninformed consumers who buy whatever is most marketed. Those pennies don&#x27;t matter.In fact, I believe this sort of training and optimization for the mainstream plays a role in allowing bad results to proliferate.This is before we even consider the fact that clicking on many results can indicate that they&#x27;re bad (I click another result because the previous wasn&#x27;t good), or because they&#x27;re good (I&#x27;m browsing choices). Dwelling long can be bad (crappy &amp; slow site, it takes me long to find the information I want or turn away) or it can be good (I found good stuff and I&#x27;m spending a while on it). Whatever conclusion your training system draws might be completely wrong. And probably prone to being gamed.

Yandex does that. At the bottom of search results page there are links to other search engines. So if you aren&#x27;t satisfied with results, you&#x27;re one click away from Google. I believe they track these clicks and know which results are bad.

I used to work at Bing. If you really want Bing to improve, the best thing you can do is just use it: clicks on search results, plus backs and dwell times, are vital training data.Ideally you could use Bing as your default engine, then fall back to Google whenever there&#x27;s a search that doesn&#x27;t yield good results. If you have the time, you can also use the Feedback link on the bottom-right of the page to report bad search results; people do actually triage and read those.

IMO Google is doing the best they can to serve you relevant results, just that everyone and their uncle is spamming internet to get up in the ranking game.Think of modern google as a question answering machine not a serch engine. And do &quot;Show me Pioneer 10 subwoofer manufacturer specs&quot; instead of just jamming keywords and hoping for the best.

I work at Google (not Search though sorry), opinions are my own.&gt; When you have the actual manufacturer being buried in the results, we have a major problem.How do you know though? What if the majority users actually do what you describe in hopes of buying something and thus the shopping results are more relevant for them?I imagine either there is a bug or this is the case, because I&#x27;m sure the links people actually click feed back into the algorithms and the results are modified accordingly.This being said, it seems like the fact that your results aren&#x27;t personalized enough to your liking is a shortcoming, assuming you were signed in.

&gt; We cannot, as a healthy internet, let Google control so much of the web.It&#x27;s getting worse too.Back in the day, you could Google something for a manufacturer and include the name of the manufacturer like, &quot;Pioneer 10&quot; Subwoofer&quot; and automatically the first result would be a like to Pioneer&#x27;s subwoofer page or their main ecommerce site.You type that into Google today? You will get 15 results for AMAZON pages with Pioneer speakers. No, I want to buy it from Pioneer, not Amazon. Oh yeah? The actual link to the actual company, who actually makes those speakers? They&#x27;re on Page 2.When you have the actual manufacturer being buried in the results, we have a major problem.

Er, who do you think Apple pays for search on iPhones?

Google always says x many results and when you click page 5 6 or some it is usually empty... not as many results as displayed on first page

Do you (or anyone else) have any recommendations for an email service? I&#x27;ve cut pretty much everything Google out of my life, minus Gmail, mostly due to not wanting to go through all the trouble of transferring everything over to a service that I end up not liking. I&#x27;ve heard ProtonMail is good, but other than that, I&#x27;m not sure.

I felt the same about Google alternatives up until about 3 months ago. Google&#x27;s results have been declining in quality for a decade, with much more rapid decline over the past year or three.Google&#x27;s results are uglier and blatantly revenue based. They have now lapsed behind DuckDuckGo in usefulness for me. I fall back to Google a few times per week, with inconsistent results when I need a &quot;second opinion.&quot;I&#x27;d suggest giving DDG another try.I plan to remove Google from my life this year, at least as a central dependency. Search is already behind me. Mail, calendars, docs, and drive will be taken care of throughout the year. And my Android phone will be replaced with an iPhone.

Do you have a region set? I got an answer on the right from stackoverflow (don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s the correct answer.)

In my opinion, the results on DDG et al are a matter of users being trained by Google knowing too much about them. If you search &quot;Django&quot; on Google and get relevant results, it&#x27;s because Google knows you. On DDG you need to search &quot;Django framework&quot;.

Weird, I do not get that when running the query on DDG.Do you have the URL?

&gt; Bing&#x2F;DuckDuckGo have the article at around 7th or 8th place,You should take a closer look at DDG, it has the answer from serverfault.com in an instant answers box for your query and it highlights the required setting in a perfectly chosen excerpt from the correct answer:<pre><code> As of CentOS 7.2 tuned now has a no-daemon mode which 
 can be turned on by setting daemon = 0 in 
 &#x2F;etc&#x2F;tuned&#x2F;tuned-main.conf. This is mentioned in the 
 RedHat Performance Tuning Guide.</code></pre>

&gt; Google I can bang in cryptic queries like &gt; centos 7 tuned no daemonNot only can you bang in whatever query you want to DDG, you can bang it in via Google, using bangs (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;bang" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;bang</a>). I think that &quot;!g &lt;query&gt;&quot; is the second stop for many DDG&#x27;ers, when DDG itself disappoints. (My understanding is that it still offers some anonymisation over searching directly through Google, but I&#x27;m not sure.)

My latest annoyance, nevermind them showing pages that don&#x27;t have &quot;quoted&quot; keywords. They rewrite the search query in the textbox and remove the quotes. Just when you thought it couldn&#x27;t get more annoying.

Does verbatim mode actually work for you? It doesn&#x27;t seem to for me.

I can pretty much only use Google in verbatim mode now

I find that a lot too. Trying to search for anything Rails related always shows Rails 3&#x2F;4 results before Rails 5&#x2F;6. If Google really knew that much about me, they should notice I always end my searching by clicking on a Rails 5&#x2F;6 result (because those are the versions I use) and every time I land on a Rails 3 or 4 result I almost always click back and try again. Same with Python when I get 2.x results, with all their data they should know I&#x27;ve used 3.x for years.If companies want to track me and build profiles on me, I accept that I can&#x27;t stop that without refusing to use their products and every site that&#x27;s integrated with it (Google Analytics, Adwords, etc). But if they&#x27;re going to do it, at least use that information to help me. What&#x27;s the point otherwise?

I have noticed that when trying to find the most recent solution Google shows me an answer that is 10 years old.ex. Adobe updates come faster than I can update, so I run into issues, so finding the most recent answer is what I am looking for and not a similar issue from Adobe pre CC.

Google used to have that, but of course they stopped it. There are browser addons that have he same effect though.

I would pay a subscription fee to my search engine to implement this feature. Currently use duckduckgo with a add-on to filter blacklisted sites but would love for this to be integrated.

&gt; I wish there was a way to directly help Bing&#x2F;DuckDuckGo&#x2F;Yandex improve their search results.I am amazed that no search engine gives me easy way to blacklist domains from my results. That would make the usefulness of any of them to increase by orders of magnitude. (and if they are careful, they might be even able to use the blacklisted data to adjust their general results , not only my personal results as well)And I can&#x27;t help to add qwant.com to the list of alternative search engines. No affiliation whatsoever, but I am pretty happy to use that as my daily search engine here in Europe.

Feels like a perfect opportunity for you to try out search engine keywords. On Chrome, it&#x27;s under Search Engine &gt; Manage Search Engines. This allows you to type (keyword) -tab- (query). For example, my work computer (on which I can only use Chrome or Edge) is force-defaulted to Google, but I have Bing set to keyword &quot;b&quot; and DDG keyworded to &quot;d&quot;, so I just type:b(tab) Whatever I want to search forand it goes to Bing with that query. It&#x27;s a great example of what you&#x27;re looking for. On my personal devices, I try to use Bing for as much as I can to see whether its personalized results will ever marry up to Google (it&#x27;s gotten extremely close, lately), but I often prefer searching Google Maps, so I have gMaps added as a search engine with keyword &quot;m&quot;, so I can search for anything with &quot;m (tab) place&quot; and immediately see gMaps results.

To me it is not so much result quality as integration. Currently, with Google no matter what I am searching for, I just type it into my location bar and hit enter. Whether I am looking for a new bar to check out on a Friday night or what does a specific compile error mean in Haskell. So in the first case, I will get a map with bars around me and in the second case I will get a link to stackoverflow. With DDG these become functionally separate. To do the Haskell error search I do the same thing, but to do a local bar search I have to open a separate tab, go to Google and do a search there. Same goes for looking for things like theater plays (Google will give me reviews, showtimes and a link to buy tickets all right there at the top of my search page), address or place name searches (map, directions, open hours and website link all come up right away) etc. The only thing I can do with DDG is the old fashioned &quot;find me links relevant to these keywords&quot; searches.

I wish there was a way to directly help Bing&#x2F;DuckDuckGo&#x2F;Yandex improve their search results. I&#x27;ve tried both, and it&#x27;s just not the same.Google I can bang in cryptic queries like 
&gt; centos 7 tuned no daemonand get the 3rd link about how to run tuned in a no daemon mode. Bing&#x2F;DuckDuckGo have the article at around 7th or 8th place, but prefaced by a lot of &quot;while technically not wrong, not what I&#x27;m looking for&quot; links. It&#x27;s even worse for more niche errors or code snippets.We cannot, as a healthy internet, let Google control so much of the web.

The distinction between the two has certainly gone down though (by quite a bit IMO). This feels like boiling a frog.

Agree, ads seem clearer than ever to me, the big bold &quot;Ad&quot; is more distinct to me than the previous treatment.

Yes I see the same, it&#x27;s really easy to tell what is an ad and what isn&#x27;t...

This trick is what caused me to click and Ad for the first time in forever.
If the icons happen to be dark its easy to ignore the &#x27;Ad&#x27; text. Maybe its time to supply a complaint. I doubt this is legal in Sweden.

100% - it&#x27;s a dark pattern and you know exactly why they&#x27;re doing it: cash money from advertisers.The internet is slowly being turned into a corporate power grab and it&#x27;s only getting worse YOY =|

Fortunately in french &quot;Annonce&quot; is longer than &quot;Ad&quot; and doesn&#x27;t look like a favicon ! Maybe they will change it to &quot;Pub&quot;.

But notice how the &quot;Ad&quot; text is specifically formatted (and placed) to resemble a favicon? They&#x27;re blatantly trying to make the ads and organic results appear uniform to someone quickly scanning the page.As a user, I want the ads more easily distinguishable, not less.

Not sure about the facts underlying the analysis.  In my search results (and it&#x27;s important to remember that it&#x27;s possible you get different results than another user, due to launch experiments and trials) the ads do not have icons.  They say &quot;Ad&quot; in bold text. The &quot;organics&quot; results have icons.

Same here. I think typically antivirus extensions like McAfee provide a few extra metadata on google search results that makes the page look exactly like it does now. My first instinct was &quot;oh which extension fucked this up? anyway, I&#x27;ll check it out later&quot;. Unfortunate to find out it&#x27;s a change on big G&#x27;s end.

Huh... I thought it was just me. I have a rather atypical setup with my privacy extensions and browser settings, so I just assumed that one of them was changing the DOM to make it look like this. Just yesterday I was searching for some ISP offers and clicked on an ad result. Well.. I think I just need to get over my lazyness and finally host searx locally.

Their current behavior is no different in that regard AND is more confusing for internet users and business AND is based on the twisted &quot;market price&quot; of the search keywords

For example facebook or amazon could pay NOT to have an ad above their resultThat sounds an awful lot like a shakedown practice. &quot;Nice search result you got there. Would be a shame if it would be obscured by an ad...&quot;

If the competitor was smaller with more money to spend or let&#x27;s say had higher margins, it was stupid of them to agree to this type of (possible?) collusion.

&gt;I also think firms should be able to buy &quot;blank space.&quot; For example facebook or amazon could pay NOT to have an ad above their result. Maybe they already do, I dont see an ad when I search facebook, however I do see an ad for amazon above the top amazon result.Backblaze had a competitor who bought ads for the search term &quot;backblaze&quot;. The CEO successfully contacted the competitor CEO and they agreed they&#x27;d be in a pissing match throwing money at Google if the practice and retaliation (backblaze buying on their search term) occurred. The competitor promptly stopped the ad campaign.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.backblaze.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;save-marketing-money-nice&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.backblaze.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;save-marketing-money-nice&#x2F;</a>

By &quot;whitespace&quot; they mean &quot;whitespace instead of an advertisement to a competitor&#x27;s website&quot;.

Reduction of confusion, and information density.Why does Amazon need to appear twice in a row - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;8Dhr1mj.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;8Dhr1mj.png</a>

What&#x27;s the benefit to whitespace over their own domain name?

if you BUY the entire whitespace above the first organic result (could cost north of 1-3 ads) then the first organic result would be the top of the list. It wouldnt matter if you are the top organic result or not, youve just paid not to have ads above that result.If at some point you slipped down the organic list, you would have the option to buy a normal ad again.

I worry about the implications of the blank space idea. For example, if I owned coolstuff.com, when should I expect for my standard search result to be shown below the &quot;blank space&quot;. Today, if someone searched &quot;cool stuff&quot;, my site shows up as the top search result, but my arch-nemesis, the owner of neatstuff.com, has an ad tailored to that query. Would his ad go away since mine is the top search result for &quot;cool stuff&quot;? Similarly, if my site is preferable to Google enough that my site shows up every time someone searches for something like &quot;cool shit&quot; or &quot;awesome things&quot;, would I also benefit from this &quot;blank space&quot; program, at the expense of the owners of coolshit.com and awesomethings.com?

You would build that into the cost of buying &quot;no ad above my top result.&quot;

&gt; Google should just be smart enough to see the top result and the ad are the same linkThey are smart enough, but they don&#x27;t get any money from people clicking on search results, only ads, so of course they&#x27;re going to show the ad - some people will click it.

The FTC has spoke on this before. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;news-events&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;business-blog&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;ftc-staff-search-engines-differentiate-ads-natural-results" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;news-events&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;business-blog&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;...</a>I believe nearly all the search engines are still guilty of this one.I also think firms should be able to buy &quot;blank space.&quot; For example facebook or amazon could pay NOT to have an ad above their result. Maybe they already do, I dont see an ad when I search facebook, however I do see an ad for amazon above the top amazon result. Google should just be smart enough to see the top result and the ad are the same link, and handle the situation more appropriately, like tucking the ad text underneath the result, or signifying that the top result owner has paid to hide ads. I have to say, I dont find these results differentiated ENOUGH from the ad. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;8Dhr1mj.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;8Dhr1mj.png</a>

That&#x27;s just truth in advertising. Just because they&#x27;re not Google&#x27;s ads doesn&#x27;t mean they shouldn&#x27;t be shown as such!

This is what Basecamp has been complaining about for a while now too [1]. They even testified in front of Congress about it [2].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;04&#x2F;google-paid-search-ads-shakedown-basecamp-ceo-says.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;04&#x2F;google-paid-search-ads-shake...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;01&#x2F;17&#x2F;technology&#x2F;antitrust-hearing-boulder-colorado.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;01&#x2F;17&#x2F;technology&#x2F;antitrust-hear...</a>

If my Michelin alternative Yalp became influential and I allowed restaurants to bubble up to the top based on money, am I engaging in racketeering?

The difference being that you pay magnitudes less for your branded keywords than the competition, through the quality score. Allowing companies to advertise against their peers is actually creating more competition on the marketplace (which is a good thing).Edit: Disclosure - I work at Google but this is my own opinion on multi-sided markets

It&#x27;s Never Racketeering<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.popehat.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;14&#x2F;lawsplainer-its-not-rico-dammit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.popehat.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;14&#x2F;lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...</a>

This is a tricky proposition. Google has free speech rights to display whatever they want on their own server pages. These aren&#x27;t statements of fact so it&#x27;s not falling under libel &amp; co.It&#x27;s like saying that you want to regulate what can advertising companies display on billboards, ex. they cannot display competitor&#x27;s ads nearby your company&#x27;s offices. Since the billboard space is private and owned by the ad company (similarly to the ad space on Google servers served pages), they get too decide to put there whatever they want (barring free speech limiting regulations).

For branded keywords, it&#x27;s not just shady, it&#x27;s racketeering. You wouldn&#x27;t want your competitor to show up first when someone searches for your brand, would you? Then pay up.E.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;SfomkdQ.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;SfomkdQ.png</a>; the second result is a competitor&#x27;s ad, the third result is the organic result.

Never seen this image before. Fascinating. A damning visualisation of Google&#x27;s slow but steady descent into a soulless money-making machine.

With each AdWords display change, Google&#x27;s been adding billions of dollars to their revenue by confusing and fooling their users and blurring the line between the content and ads.A visual guide: &quot;A (mostly comprehensive history of Google&#x27;s ad shading and labeling&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;0RxdzBE.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;0RxdzBE.png</a>

Spot on. I find myself having to concentrate quite hard now to distinguish between ad and result.

Yes! My biggest complaint is I can&#x27;t quickly scan search results now, there&#x27;s so much wasted space.

I just want compact results again.. searching for coding related stuff I need to be able to quickly scan through a bunch of results to see if it&#x27;s what I&#x27;m looking for.. but now they are so spaced out it&#x27;s just weird and inefficient.

I remember when Google made a point of being ethical by putting ads on the right rail with a light blue background so it was clear which results were ads and which were organic.

To be fair didn&#x27;t internet marketers ruin things first by cramming keywords in URLS and page titles to game search engines?

Cloudflare has an option for native AMP urls, at your own domain, as well.

To users, side effects are the same as goals. We have nothing to judge a vendor on except observed behavior.

The parent mentioned that: &quot;as they can&#x27;t fix [the URL appearance] without losing out on tracking, they&#x27;re trying to change what the URL means.&quot;

Yes, and that fix is worse than the original problem.

It&#x27;s the intended side-effect. For the longest time ever AMP wouldn&#x27;t even acknowledge it&#x27;s a problem (oh, we just provide the standard, it&#x27;s the browsers&#x27; fault).Then Google relented and provided a non-solution in the form of an obscure bar on top of AMP pages (in which the link to the original page is deliberately designed to not look like a link).The signed exchanges is a bone thrown towards standards committees after all the damage has already been done.And the &quot;solution&quot; has been directly called by Mozilla harmful, they are not going to implement it. Safari shares Mozilla&#x27;s concern.

Actually, that so-called &quot;fix&quot; obscures the actual Google URL where the content is served from.

AMP obscuring the URL is a side effect of the current technical implementation, not a goal – and they are working to fix it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;searchengineland.com&#x2F;google-announces-signed-exchange-solution-to-deliver-amp-speed-to-publisher-urls-315504" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;searchengineland.com&#x2F;google-announces-signed-exchang...</a>

Also what is the technical benefit?  On android it feels like a downgrade

AMP isn&#x27;t being forced on websites, they choose to enable it or not.

It is not a requirement for AMP. CDNs now let you roll your own domains on the AMP standard: 
 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cloudflare.com&#x2F;announcing-amp-real-url&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.cloudflare.com&#x2F;announcing-amp-real-url&#x2F;</a>Bing also uses the AMP standard: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.bing.com&#x2F;Webmaster-Blog&#x2F;September-2018&#x2F;Introducing-Bing-AMP-viewer-and-Bing-AMP-cache" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.bing.com&#x2F;Webmaster-Blog&#x2F;September-2018&#x2F;Introdu...</a>

Because the Department of Justice doesn&#x27;t enforce anti-trust law anymore. Read the book &quot;Chickenshit&quot; for more details.

How is hijacking the domain with Google for AMP not anti-competitive? I&#x27;m surprised a class action lawsuit hasn&#x27;t erupted because of that.

Let&#x27;s distinguish between obfuscating the query parameters, the the path, and the domain. They are different things, and the domain name especially is a major security boundary.

I am not comfortable with someone else&#x27;s domain becoming the de facto front door to my website.There&#x27;s nothing I can do it about it, but I tend to hate it.If my name is Mike and someone powerful calls me Chucklehead, I will have to start answering to that name in order to continue doing business.But what REALLY concerns me is if a year later, that powerful someone calls someone ELSE Chucklehead.

&gt; From the very beginning it was intended that users would follow links, not type in URLs.so, about that<pre><code> 4.6 Locators are human transcribable.

 Users can copy Internet locators from one medium to another (such as
 voice to paper, or paper to keyboard) without loss or corruption of
 information. This process is not required to be comfortable.

</code></pre>
you can&#x27;t copy a page title into a client and expect it to find the right resource, now, do you?accessing the URL is listed as one of the fundamental use case for them, and for good reasons, detailed elsewhere in the same rfc

URLs have always meant something to users. It’s how you trust the content and indeed the link. And now with so many exploits and phishing it’s even more important. Typing in a URL might be rarer, an honour only reserved for google, facebook etc. but reading urls is very important

The &quot;web&quot; is built around &quot;human readable&quot; technologies. Even actual implementation details that the user doesn&#x27;t care about - like the application layer protocol (HTTP) and the source code for pages (HTML, CSS) - is human readable.The &quot;point&quot; of the web was to serve humans, not machines. If we wanted to serve machines, we&#x27;d just throw binary blobs around, which would be orders of magnitude more efficient.That said, I still have a bunch of &quot;ancient&quot; tech magazines that had directories of URLs for (then) popular websites, grouped by category. That&#x27;s how we found things then.People forget that there was a world before Google.

&gt; Typing in un-obfuscated URLs has almost never been a key feature or use-case of the webMaking people type in URLs is not a key feature of the web. Letting people interact with their various signifiers has always been.Too many people involved in UX and product and commentary have forgotten that &quot;don&#x27;t make me think&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean &quot;don&#x27;t let me think.&quot;The URL is a set of half a dozen affordances.

You&#x27;re talking about writing URLs as if that&#x27;s the only purpose they serve. You also read URLs.Same as I&#x27;m not going to type a long path to a file on my file browser or CLI, I&#x27;m not going to type the full, character-by-character URL. But being able to see the path also provides extremely useful information.

Sidenote: your comment gets downvoted,huh. Though I don&#x27;t agree with you I&#x27;m happy to see someone with opposite arguments. Have an upvote as you contributing greatly to this conversation.

This is categorically wrong. URL is the fundamental part of the web and without it, the Internet couldn&#x27;t be decentralized. Imagine if I must reach tweeter by typing &quot;tweeter&quot; somewhere then that somewhere now becomes the gatekeeper. The URL allows distributed gatekeepers. A mechanism with a distributed structure will need something like URL infrastructure.

&gt; This is part of Google&#x27;s attempt to de-prioritise the URL.URLs have always been an implementation detail and not a user feature. From the very beginning it was intended that users would follow links, not type in URLs. HTML was built on hiding URLs behind text. Then AOL keywords happened. Then search explosion happened. And short URLs. And QR codes for real-world linking. And bookmarks because yet again typing in URLs is not a major driving use case.Typing in un-obfuscated URLs has almost never been a key feature or use-case of the web. If anything URL obfuscation is a core building block of the web and is a huge reason _why_ the web skyrocketed in popularity &amp; usage. Don&#x27;t pretend that somehow AMP obfuscating URLs will be the death of the web. The web exploded in growth despite massive, wide-spread URL obfuscation over the last 20 years. Nothing is actually changing here.

A few weeks ago, I changed my browsing and searching habits purely to get out of that A&#x2F;B test bucket. Now it looks like we&#x27;re all in it.

&gt; &quot;the solution&quot;That&#x27;s a solution, but not a particularly great one since it requires too much from the user to see mass adoption.

I&#x27;m confused. Isn&#x27;t AMP mostly an issue on mobile devices? Can you use this on a phone?

&gt; I posted the solution below,Sorry to be &quot;that guy&quot; but for me the solution is to use DuckDuckGo.It&#x27;s not perfect, but neither is trying to play arms race with Google&#x27;s JavaScript.

Thank you. Solved it for us, at least on desktop.

&gt;Thanks for ruining the Web, Google.I posted the solution below, which I found a few days ago. The script will work with greasemonkey and tampermonkey, it will provide you with results similar to the ones before the change. If you also use uMatrix, there will be no ads.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greasyfork.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;395257-better-google" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greasyfork.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;395257-better-google</a>

I can&#x27;t mentally parse the results anywhere near as fast as I used to be able to. It&#x27;s horrible.

I&#x27;d love to learn what % of A&#x2F;B tests get rejected after the test has concluded.I suspect there&#x27;s naturally a laundry list of biases that all the work we designed and implemented needs to succeed or boy do we look silly.

I think half of it is the ugly font they are now using. Ugly is the perfect way to describe it.Google is really not good at creating beautiful products...

&gt; I&#x27;ve been in this A&#x2F;B test for a couple of months now, so I&#x27;ve had time to adjust, and I still hate itMe too. It just looks ugly.

I mean, I generally get the gist of what you are saying, but you are saying &quot;no, you&#x27;re confused, it&#x27;s not misleading...&quot; It&#x27;s kind of like saying &quot;no, you don&#x27;t have hypochondria, it&#x27;s all in your head!&quot;

&gt; Their destructive AMP service confusingly shows you Google&#x27;s domain instead of the website&#x27;sNo, it doesn&#x27;t. It&#x27;s actually served from Google&#x27;s URL, but it (the AMP service) shows you the original site URL (well, it shows the domain by default but that&#x27;s a button that expands to the URL if you click it.)Your address bar shows you the Google URL, but that&#x27;s not misleading, either, since what the address bar has always shown is what location content is being served from, not a content identifier distinct from the mechanics of content distribution.&gt; they can&#x27;t fix that without losing out on trackingNah, they could track of they worked like a classic CDN

If you want a favicon fix. Use this CSS userstyle <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;userstyles.org&#x2F;styles&#x2F;179230&#x2F;google-search-old-style" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;userstyles.org&#x2F;styles&#x2F;179230&#x2F;google-search-old-style</a> with Chrome&#x2F;Firefox extension &quot;Stylus&quot;.

Do they really? Wouldn&#x27;t a &quot;strong SEO&quot; site be ideal for their spiders?

Google decides the layout. You can have the &#x27;strongest SEO&#x27; in the world and Google still decide if they put 1 ad or 9 in front of the result.Strength of SEO is irrelevant to the ads. The only thing Google hate is when sites manipulate themself to rank higher and offer a worse user experience.

Google hates strong SEO sites, because they won&#x27;t make them any money. So that&#x27;s a clever way of pushing them further down. I wondered when all results on the first page will be Ads only.

It slowly moves a little bit more each day.Not useful results will change habits.

I use duckduck go on mobile because it doesn&#x27;t prevent me from saving images.

It has certainly got some mainstream attention recently:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jack&#x2F;status&#x2F;1199783221162053633?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jack&#x2F;status&#x2F;1199783221162053633?lang=en</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.my&#x2F;twitter-jack-dorsey-duckduckgo-search-google-2019-11&#x2F;?r=US&amp;IR=T" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.my&#x2F;twitter-jack-dorsey-duckduckg...</a>

Might be now? I just swapped my default search to DuckDuckGo.I have been having several issues with google search recently, this just seems like a good time to make the jump.

Why not just use Bing then? Why drink the same wine from different bottle?

&gt;Thanks for ruining the Web, Google.When does the mass-migration to DuckDuckGo go mainstream?

They could fix this for publishers who point a subdomain that way.   Or url rewrite the address to the publishers.

Perhaps so, but I still find it highly objectionable.

They can track it with a simple js onclick handler, or a simple redirect on their server, that&#x27;s not the problem. (They do both btw.) The problem is that they want to track what I do on the links I already clicked - which is absolutely none of their business.

&gt; and as they can&#x27;t fix that without losing out on trackingTracking what users click to as the result of a search is critical feedback information for training your models&#x2F;algorithms, it&#x27;s not just about &quot;hey let&#x27;s see where this user goes to fine tune ad targeting for them&quot;. And, AFAIK, every search engine out there does it(?)

Just FYI, Startpage was recently acquired by a shady company.

There are alternative search engines of course.I use StartPage which has the benefit of local results (but can be fully anonymous) but still uses Google search results. 
DDG is a great alternative, but isn&#x27;t for me.
And then there&#x27;s Bing

Just wait until their feedback forms get ads.

I&#x27;m sure a sentiment analysis bot looked at it and added a &#x27;-1&#x27; somewhere in their databases.

It&#x27;s funny to think that, of all the products Google kills on the regular, the one thing most everyone wants them to be done with (AMP) is probably gonna stick around forever.

&gt; I still hate itI left a strongly worded feedback on their form

&gt; Thanks for ruining the Web, Google.Wow...

What a bad thing this AMP is... it is very hard to go directly to the website. Good that only shitty news outlets use it though

It&#x27;s likely a distaste at the culmination of a lot of anti-customer moves that Google has made over the last few yearsBarking side, indeed

Google gave us a lot, but that does not mean they should not be criticized. Without emotion I can say that using Google is far worse today than it was in the early 2000s. Besides delivering the results in a much more readable format, at that time we were able to search specifically in forums and there were a lot of advanced features like &quot;linkto:&quot; that are not supported anymore.The problem I see is that Google does not care about us Geeks anymore. They are 100% focused on consumers now, and that sucks a lot.

that&#x27;s a rather simplistic and faulty argument. there are plenty of things wrong with &quot;lure and then abuse&quot; scenarios, and it isn&#x27;t really an argument at all to say &quot;but look at all the good the lure phase did&quot;.

Google has done away with most of its original competitive advantages. Its biggest advantages now are its name recognition and its size. If Google had started off with paid search results and what-you-search-for-is-not-what-you-get we&#x27;d probably all still be using Altavista.

&gt; Thanks for ruining the Web, Google.So, they helped make the web a far easier place to look around on things for a few decades and one layout change and you call them that they ruined the web?It&#x27;s easy to be on the barking side.

It&#x27;s not just ruining the web, it&#x27;s essentially dishonesty. Or if you are a pragmatist: lying.

Unless I misunderstood, that is something you disable in each (google)app that has that &quot;feature&quot;.In Gmail for instance: settings: General settings:Open links in gmail.
Turn on for &quot;faster&quot; browsing.Default is on. Tip: Use firefox focus instead as the default browser to open all links. If the link warrants further look copy the url to your main browser.The above has nothing to do with amp.But to not detract, amp truly is a plague.

Semi-off-topic, but I recently found out that there is an even worse version of AMP, called Google Web Light. Running Firefox on an ARM device (e.g. Raspberry Pi), the results speak for themselves [1].Notably, there is absolutely no way for the end user to disable it, short of spoofing your user agent.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;googleweblight.com&#x2F;i?u=https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;&amp;hl=en-US&amp;f=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;googleweblight.com&#x2F;i?u=https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;...</a>

Its been enough to make me change my iPhone&#x27;s search default to DDG. I&#x27;ve been using it for about a month and I&#x27;m surprisingly happy with the results so far.

&gt; there is no way to turn off this feature on any browser, chrome or not.Here is a way for Firefox: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;amp2html&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;amp2html&#x2F;</a>

google amp is a plague on the internet and should have been shutdown by regulators. it is definitely anti-competitive. i am sick and tired of our government completely slaving to the big tech companies when it comes to regulations and anti-competitive behavior.google amp on mobile overrides behavior on mobile, even on android, so instead of web links opening up in the respective and selected default app, it opens up the amp link within google search or the browser. there is no way to turn off this feature on any browser, chrome or not.

&gt; This is part of Google&#x27;s attempt to de-prioritise the URLAnd people wonder why phishing is a thing?

The thing which I use Google most for is typing some random place’s name in and it gives me that little card which shows how busy it typically is, what time it’s open, directions, contact number, etc. DDG just gives me a search result and 90% of the time that’s not what I want. I’m looking for information, not a list of URLs.

I hate to be that guy, but have you considered moving to another search engine? For example, DuckDuckGo is very decent once you adapt to it. And for the few cases where you absolutely need Google to read your mind, just add &quot;!g&quot; to your query and you&#x27;re automatically there.

&gt; I&#x27;ve been in this A&#x2F;B test for a couple of months now, so I&#x27;ve had time to adjust, and I still hate it.I have been trying to switch from google to duckduckgo for years but its only the past few months that I have been successful and I have google to thank for that.

Google is satanic.
They a mirror of the Soviet Union. Google also works with 3rd party websites to blacklist IP addresses so you can never post on a forum . And people always say you get blacklisted because you spam. I think that&#x27;s bull crap . I think people get blacklisted for their political beliefs.

I&#x27;ve been in this A&#x2F;B test for a couple of months now, so I&#x27;ve had time to adjust, and I still hate it. I&#x27;ve just become so used to seeing the complete URL in green. The complete URL! If you hover over the results, you&#x27;ll see that they like to take bits like numeric components or the query string out.This is part of Google&#x27;s attempt to de-prioritise the URL. Their destructive AMP service confusingly shows you Google&#x27;s domain instead of the website&#x27;s — and as they can&#x27;t fix that without losing out on tracking, they&#x27;re trying to change what the URL means.Thanks for ruining the Web, Google.

(tangent) i really hate what browser extensions have become.

&gt;I noticed this on a co-workers screen recently and my immediate thought was &quot;what dodgy search extensions have they been installing?&quot;.My legit first reaction when I saw it last week on my daily driver was &quot;I wonder what extension is trying to cash out&quot;.

I noticed this on a co-workers screen recently and my immediate thought was &quot;what dodgy search extensions have they been installing?&quot;. Now that it&#x27;s on my results as well I can&#x27;t help but strongly dislike the change for some reason. The icons are both very small and very distracting at the same time and don&#x27;t aid in adding authority or any important meta information about the site.The changes seem to have added enough noise to make parsing the page annoying, but maybe it&#x27;s one of those things you brain learns to ignore after a while.

Much harder to visually pick out which are ads versus not now imo which is probably why they did it

They are still distinguishable (ads have an &quot;Ad&quot; badge as opposed to a favicon). But yeah, new design seems to push them closer to the same format.

(And OT, or maybe not, as far as I can recall, AdWords was still CPM back then)

Excellent sleuthing -- makes sense that the message is so old.  There&#x27;s no way they would produce something like this today.

OOPs - I did the same thing before reading your post...

The google books link appears to have died: &quot;You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book&quot;(I&#x27;m fairly certain that I have not viewed anything from this book, nor any book for that matter, this year.)

Imagine the sheer sociopathic effort it took to overtake Google. The power plays, the backstabbing, the greed. Oh, to be a fly on those walls.

Your link is gold. A historic artifact.Amazing how clear the writing is, how simple the message. That’s, like, totally not the corpspeak Goog emits now on a daily basis.So, let’s do some digging.Earliest version of url dates back 4+ years.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20151213182805&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;honestresults&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20151213182805&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.googl...</a>Things were a little better than, but not by much. This has to be earlier.Ah, here is:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.ca&#x2F;books?id=oNT3AwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA289&amp;lpg=PA289&amp;dq=%22Why+we+sell+advertising,+not+search+results.%22&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=I6_PmXD7O5&amp;sig=ACfU3U1QNk3FhKRMOa69ghaxkVA47C_nXg&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwiU8cDumZXnAhWRoJ4KHVD5DbQQ6AEwBXoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=%22Why%20we%20sell%20advertising%2C%20not%20search%20results.%22&amp;f=false" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.ca&#x2F;books?id=oNT3AwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA289&amp;lpg=P...</a>This page is from a book by Douglas Edwards, employee number 59 published in 2011.The content of OP url, written by same, is dated March 2002.That company no longer exists. Goog should remove it from their website.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;fiK4E" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;fiK4E</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20151213182805&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;honestresults&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20151213182805&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.googl...</a>

Oh my god, that page is going to disappear soon now.

Vendors pay for placement throughout google&#x27;s interface and search results, even if the &#x27;list&#x27; of links is still &#x27;organic&#x27;. For example, the placement of buy links for movies, flights, hotels, etc. Now with instant articles, google places content higher if it allows google to track and advertise within the article.

No, at the very beginning, Google only had the ads in little yellow boxes over to the right. They were very distinct. Then they started putting ads above the search results, but they still had a yellow background. Then they got rid of the background, but the results were still fairly visually distinct from the ads, and there would only be one or two ads above the search results. Now they just put this tiny little box that says &quot;Ad&quot; next to the ad, and they&#x27;re no longer easily visually separable from search results. Also, very often the first screenful of results is entirely ads. The overall experience has massively degraded.The other thing I&#x27;ve noticed is that more and more of the top results are from garbage content farms. Filtering this kind of crap out was the original reason Google existed and everyone switched to them, but they&#x27;re failing at it now. IMO Google is overripe to be replaced with something better.

The post was written to criticize &quot;paid placement&quot; search engines like Goto.com&#x2F;Overture (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.searchenginewatch.com&#x2F;2002&#x2F;03&#x2F;04&#x2F;how-overture-goto-works&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.searchenginewatch.com&#x2F;2002&#x2F;03&#x2F;04&#x2F;how-overture-go...</a> for details). I believe Google has put ads above search results for as long as AdWords has existed (since 2000).

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20151213182805&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;honestresults&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20151213182805&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.googl...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;cPQmHB0.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;cPQmHB0.png</a>

And even that can be considered excessive for what it is. Sad.

You can tell that&#x27;s old because it&#x27;s only ~200kb...

This bit from the 1998 paper by young researchers Brin and Page, in which they introduce a novel search engine called &#x27;google,&#x27; is also fun and instructive:&quot;It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.&quot;<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;infolab.stanford.edu&#x2F;~backrub&#x2F;google.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;infolab.stanford.edu&#x2F;~backrub&#x2F;google.html</a>

I searched for &quot;google search advertisement&quot; in the period 2000 to 2005, looking for screenshots of how Google ads have changed in style and placement over the years. Turns out the first result was this page... oh, the irony.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;honestresults&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;honestresults&#x2F;</a>It&#x27;s a little confusing to read now, so for context: at the time Google published this, it only put ads in the sidebar to the right of search results. This post was written to criticize the practice of putting ads atop search results, which competitors sometimes formatted almost indistinguishably from organic search results.

Google is an ad network with a search box as the bait. Of course everything looks like an ad, it&#x27;s by design.

Google has been the search champion for close to 2 decades, and are seen as the pinnacle of SV innovation. That&#x27;s the starting point of any conversation about Google, because the victors get to write history.That&#x27;s why &#x27;ppl are surprised&#x27;. To many, Google&#x27;s ethos is still &#x27;do no evil&#x27;, an absurd mantra for a for-profit enterprise whose business model relies on developing ever more effective ways to spy on people&#x27;s behaviours for the benefit of their advertisers.What&#x27;s rapidly

don&#x27;t see why ppl are surprised about this from an ad company. its not a search engine company and never as been, despite having a large search engine...

I had to check Google to see what the fuss is about... yup, that&#x27;s pretty bad.

I admit it&#x27;s weird seeing a sudden change to how search results are displayed, but I think the use of favicons help draw your eye to brands you trust so I don&#x27;t mind it.If this helps ads mix in with real search results, maybe the ads need to be changed to stand out more? I feel people are focusing on &quot;favicons = bad&quot; instead of &quot;ads looking the same as search results = bad&quot;.

&gt; it feels like the quality of results rapidly drops off after the first pageInteresting -- I&#x27;ve been playing with Google search this morning, and it&#x27;s behaving much like it did when I stopped using it: there is only a very low chance that I&#x27;ll get a relevant search result before the third page.

I do think that Google has done a lot of work to objectively add value to the results page of most search queries (eg pulling data straight from websites like Wikipedia, giving better page previews, etc).However they are an ad company - and they ultimately benefit from blurring the line between an advertisement and a &quot;real&quot; result. I do feel like it is harder to find certain types of results as a &quot;power user&quot; though, and it feels like the quality of results rapidly drops off after the first page. I am not sure if the fault lies with Google or with spammy websites hacking the SEO.I wish Google had something like duckduckgo.com&#x2F;lite (also ddg.gg&#x2F;lite) for the atypical &quot;power user.&quot; It&#x27;s nothing but text results. I find it really useful for certain types of searches and when you don&#x27;t want to be bothered by how &quot;busy&quot; the Google search results page has become.

I think the point is DDG has the exact pattern you are all whining about: the organic results have icons and the ad says &quot;Ad&quot; instead.

Are you seeing something else than I am? DDG looks lightyears better than current google now, at least on visual clarity side

Even though I want them to have more ad cash, DuckDuckGo isn&#x27;t vastly better: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?q=buy+printer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?q=buy+printer</a>

Ublock Origin will fix the problem. Why spend more effort on cleaning after Google than necessary?

If you&#x27;re going to run an extension to fix the search results, I&#x27;d suggest an ad blocker.

Here&#x27;s some userstyles I made for myself to help get rid of some of the visual clutter. I use it combined with uBlock Origin though, so it&#x27;s likely not perfect. I use the Stylus extension for Firefox.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;keb&#x2F;8a51c42daeb4c230e7f76664e62f9f42" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;keb&#x2F;8a51c42daeb4c230e7f76664e62f9f42</a>

Any CSS wizards that could come up with user injected CSS that would move or highlight ads appropriately?Is GreaseMonkey the best for that, or is there a nice lightweight alternative more fit to purpose?

I think that&#x27;s the point - when everything looks like an ad, then nothing looks like an ad. (Read: ads blend in more - so users are probably more likely to click on promoted links.)

I don&#x27;t like it, but I&#x27;m glad I&#x27;m not alone. I thought something was off as I was trying to &quot;skip&quot; the ads and get to the actual results but the &quot;ads&quot; seems to go on and on... Took me a while to realise they are not &quot;ads&quot; but actual results. I guess they are trying to blur the lines between paid and organic content by going the other way - instead of making the ads less obvious, they make the non-ads more ad-ish.

Nice! The results look much better without favicons, I&#x27;m going to install this too.

I also have one I submitted over the weekend. They haven&#x27;t taken it down yet :). Mine is just geared towards my dislike of the favicons, not distinguishing the styling of the ads.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;hide-google-search-favicons&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;hide-google-s...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;hide-google-search-favico&#x2F;minacgnadopeelfnhjhlmoobniogpded" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;hide-google-search...</a>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Jtfinlay&#x2F;gsearch-hidefavicon" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Jtfinlay&#x2F;gsearch-hidefavicon</a>

I made a Chrome extension a few months ago to fix the design, you&#x27;ll find it here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;attio&#x2F;google-ad-fixer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;attio&#x2F;google-ad-fixer</a>I&#x27;ll try and submit to the Chrome Store, let&#x27;s see if it gets in :)

And it is hideous and much harder to quickly scan for relevant returns (all that empty space).

Not a solution for Google&#x27;s larger product direction problem, but there&#x27;s a zillion ways nerds like us can filter out this crap from search results. There&#x27;s a few brand new browser extensions aimed specifically at stopping this. And if you use an ad blocker, here&#x27;s some rules: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lifehacker.com&#x2F;how-to-fix-googles-ugly-logo-filled-search-results-1841062453" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lifehacker.com&#x2F;how-to-fix-googles-ugly-logo-filled-s...</a>In the long run this kind of fix-up is a losing game. But maybe it&#x27;ll bring you some visual peace for now.

&gt; Adblockers are mostly useless, companies pay them to whitelistuBlock Origin is open source and doesn&#x27;t accept donations or payments to whitelist ad networks:- Github: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uBlock&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uBlock&#x2F;</a>- Manifesto: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uBlock&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;MANIFESTO.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gorhill&#x2F;uBlock&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;MANIFESTO.md</a>

&gt; Adblockers are mostly useless, companies pay them to whitelistIf your adblocker doesn&#x27;t offer you an easy way to add your own blocking rules, you&#x27;re using the wrong adblocker. Relying solely on third-party filter lists is never adequate, and at times using them at all is more trouble than they&#x27;re worth. Conflating the adblocking software with the third-party filter lists you&#x27;re subscribed to is always a mistake.

Adblockers are mostly useless, companies pay them to whitelist and the browsers manufacturers (other than the little guys) seem more inclined to make it less functional. I try at home to use a hosts file (ie a manual pihole) but it breaks so many websites I can&#x27;t find some combo that blocks ads but doesn&#x27;t break functionality (I still can&#x27;t comment on reddit any more).With Google putting ads inline coming from them it gets really hard to filter without causing even more issues (and most people use Chrome so they can figure out things out from both ends).

It&#x27;s pretty simple to just use UBlock Origin. Firstly, I don&#x27;t usually see any of the doubleclick ad results, because they get filtered out, and secondly, if I do click on them, it redirects you to a warning page first.Friends don&#x27;t let friends use the internet without an adblocker.

This GreaseMonkey userscript worked for me to revert the search results to their previous style:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greasyfork.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;395257-better-google&#x2F;code" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greasyfork.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;395257-better-google&#x2F;code</a>

Even easier you can use the &quot;bang&quot; commands in DDG when you do wish to use Google, e.g. !g.E.g. &quot;search something !g&quot;.Stopping using Google by default is a big deal if enough people do it.

Really, just use duckduckgo.com.Go to your Firefox&#x27; settings and change the default search engine, there, done. See if you care in a week to change it back, I promise you that you won&#x27;t.

ecosia.org .. plant some trees while you search for pr0n!

A new search engine outside the hands of Google is overdue. It feels like a huge ad machinery.

Every Google result now looks like an ad