
Google is not a search engine, but an ad engine - jlelse
https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1205582897593430017
======
fauigerzigerk
Yes Google spams search results with ads. But instead of using a different
search engine such as duckduckgo.com, we're calling for the government to
break up Google?

That's plain ridiculous. I'm not opposed to breaking up oligopolies, but
calling for the government to fix this particular issue is like asking to be
put under legal guardianship.

~~~
johannes1234321
Many of those people who want to break up Google are not looking at it from
the user perspective, but as a company running some website.

As a site owner you have the problem that people searching for you are using
Google and your site will only come up below adds for your competitor. Even
when searching for your company name. Thus unless you pay a "Google Tax"
(paying for ads) many people won't find you. In some cases even Google
themselves will add features to compete with your service (flight booking is a
relatively recent example)

If splitting up will solve that is questionable to me, though. The search has
to be financed and unless we make it some base service paid by tax or similar
they need a revenue service and ads is the only which seems to be working.

From a "civil rights" perspective to me it is also clear that Google has too
much influence and power. But still fail to see a good way to regulate that.

~~~
BlueTemplar
The same way that Standard Oil and "Ma" Bell were?

Now, one issue here is that Google the search engine cannot be "just split".
The least good, but easy way, is probably to nationalize it (since it's akin
to basic infrastructure at this point.) A better, but harder way, is to figure
out how it can be decentralized...

~~~
scarface74
What do you think will happen when politicians control a search engine? Would
you also want to nationalize the press?

~~~
sampo
BBC is perhaps the most famous state owned media corporation. What happens
because the British politicians control the BBC?

~~~
scarface74
I don’t know. But I do know that NPR and PBS have at times been targets of
conservatives because of the little funding they get from the government.

I’m sure there would be just as much consternation from Democrats if the
situation was reversed.

It also encourages giving “both sides” equal weight whether they deserve it or
not.

------
dmos62
I think until now there's been quite little talk about just how wild wild west
the Web is, so I like the talk about breaking up Google.

The problem is that Google can use its cross-platform cross-product cross-
industry reach to have a significant uncompetitive advantage. A banal example
would be Google hassling non-Chrome users to use Chrome, or a link to Gmail
sitting at the corner of your Google Search screen. As far as the market goes,
that's stealing, because you're getting market share not through competition,
but by bypassing competition.

Google didn't become a behemoth in so many markets just because its products
are good, but because it had an uncompetitive advantage, which is a cryptic
way of saying that they were very big in an unregulated environment and they
used that.

I'm not talking about how Google became big, which is a nicer story about a
great product. I'm talking about how after it became big it became humongous.

~~~
BlueTemplar
Yeah, and once it became big, the government should have stepped in and forced
it to split. Now it's too late, the only options now seem to be either
nationalization or complete shutdown of the monopolies like Search, Maps and
YouTube. And until that is done, the situation is only going to get worse...

~~~
ttoinou
The situation will be worse if you break it up, what do you think will happen
to a nationalized Google Search, a nationalized Google maps and a nationalized
YouTube ? The services will be badly managed and get worser and worser

------
rmsaksida
It's really frustrating when you need to find information about a specific
product on Google but anything you search for yields e-commerce related
results. I don't mean the ads - even the organic results will mostly be for
shopping or review websites. Google clearly tries to push the user towards
those. Sometimes I'm looking for specific technical details and I have to dig
around a lot to find anything meaningful.

~~~
astonex
Nowadays my searches always consist of "reddit + search" to get actual user
reviews or comments

~~~
zcid
I do the same, but it seems that more and more reddit comments are also
astroturfed so my faith in them is faltering. Finding authentic
recommendations at this point is extremely tiring because I have to constantly
be gauging a user's sincerity.

There are too many benefits to fake reviews and few downsides. And it's easy
to spam these fake comments and reviews especially if you have the budget for
a dedicated marketing team.

------
post_below
I don't disagree with the core point, but I sort of hate click bait more.

It's pretty hyperbolic to call Google results a "full page ad". For example,
if I do a Google search for "clickbait", on mobile all I see above the fold is
a dictionary definition stub followed by a wikipedia snippet. There is
actually no sponsored content at all. Even scrolling doesn't turn up any ads.

And yes, of course, there are other types of searches where the first thing
you'll see is shopping results, followed by more sponsored results. And yes I
hate it as much as everyone else.

But I don't think it's reasonable to say it's an "ad engine".

The amount of real estate devoted to monetization has been increasingly silly
for years. It will no doubt get worse. They do have an effective monopoly. It
sucks for the internet that this is the case.

But Google is still an impressive search engine underneath all the
monetization. One where a huge part of the mindshare at the company is still
devoted to organic search. I don't think HN is a place where you can
reasonably hope to get away with claiming otherwise.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
> It's pretty hyperbolic to call Google results a "full page ad".

If I search for "lake district cottages" on Google, the first screen is
covered by an ad; scroll down, and the second screen is covered by ads too.
The third screen is a featured snippet with a map - I have no idea whether
this is paid-for. Only halfway down the fourth screen do I get to a genuine
organic search result.

iPhone SE, Safari, standard text size.

~~~
adrianmonk
I tried the same search on Android.

A "featured snippet" covers the first page and more. Tapping on "About
Featured Snippets" at the bottom of its UI tile tells me a lot of stuff about
it, but doesn't say it's an ad; it says they "come from web search listings"
and are highlighted "if it would be useful". I haven't known Google to ever be
evasive about whether something is an ad or not, so unless that's changed, I'm
confident in concluding this is not an ad.

The next thing I see is a tile with a map at the top and three "places" under
it, with a way to expand the list via "More places". This doesn't appear to be
an ad either. Again not identified as an ad, and I presume these are the most
relevant objects from the "places" database that you normally see on Google
Maps.

After that, it's a series of tiles, each for a web site that appears to be
coming from organic search results. So again, not ads.

In summary, when I try the same thing on Android, I get no ads at all
anywhere.

I suppose your results might be different than mine, though. "Lake district
cottages" is a term I'd never heard before, and it appears to refer to
something in the UK. I'm not in the UK, but maybe you are since you thought to
suggest that. (And maybe the ad systems know that and nobody wanted to buy an
ad to show to me but somebody did want to buy an ad to show you. That's just
speculation, though.)

------
euske
What I think would be interesting is to introduce something like "GPL for
Ads". If you have a binary, you should be able to obtain its source code.
Similarly, if you see an ad, you should be able to see who's paying for it,
how much it cost, and what was its bidding/selection process, etc.

This doesn't just apply to Google. All TV ads and paper ads will also have to
provide a way to obtain this information. It doesn't necessarily have to be
accompanying the ads. It can even charge a (reasonable) fee to access that
information, but it has to be accessible to the end user (ad viewer).
Rationale: consumer protection.

This won't directly solve the monopoly situation, but it will force them to be
transparent, and in a long run it will reduce their questionable ads and their
revenue. And the consumer is more informed.

~~~
soared
I very much like the idea and direction, but this is a good idea only in
theory. It would be comparable to every financial firm opening up their
bidding algorithms.

Ad buyers work very hard and spend a lot of money to create the best
strategy/algorithm and that solution would just let a competitor copy it for
free.

Not for search or social ads, but programmatic/display are literally bought by
creating a very complicated algorithm with potentially unlimited variables to
automatically (programmatically) place bids.

------
azangru
I just don't understand the sentiment. I've been googling for things since at
least mid-noughties, typically finding relevant information, and practically
never clicked on an ad. What am I doing wrong?

The loudest complaints about Google's ads that I am hearing are generally
coming from entrepreneurs who want their company/page to be in the top of
search results rather than from people who are searching for things.

------
dreamcompiler
At some point, the slowly-increasing quality curve of DDG's results crosses
the rapidly-decreasing organicity curve of Google's results and you switch.
For me the curves crossed two years ago.

~~~
royal_ts
break out of your bubble. Try using DDG with sth. else than english. Then try
sth. related to programming. Good luck. I'm so tired of people claming that
DDG is better in every aspect, it's not.

~~~
bikeshaving
It’s not better. Specifically, autocomplete doesn’t work as well, and you’re
missing not just google but maps, images, and translations. But it’s getting
better all the time, and at this point you’ll be hard-pressed to come with a
query (even programming related) which doesn’t have the result you want on the
first page. The point of the original author is that the quality of DDG
continues to improve, not that it’s better.

~~~
deng
> At this point you’ll be hard-pressed to come with a query (even programming
> related) which doesn’t have the result you want on the first page

No problem for me, unfortunately. See my post below, but these really were my
first three after switching to DDG.

\- 'debian convert from i386 to amd64'

    
    
       Should show https://wiki.debian.org/CrossGrading
    

\- 'kodi idx white box'

    
    
       Any bug report to idx subtitles showing white boxes
    

\- 'building kodi'

    
    
       https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Compile_Kodi_for_Linux
    

It seems DDG has much more problems with SEO spam, which unfortunately is
rampant for Kodi. However, it's a mistery why for instance the Debian Wiki
would not show up in the first search.

------
skinkestek
Furthermore the quality of the attached search engine (measured as useful for
a sw engineer) has been declining since 2009.

At this point duckduckgo is just as good and less annoying, not because they
are crazy good but because they are about as good as Google was in 2009 and
because Google has been going downhill meanwhile.

~~~
deng
> At this point duckduckgo is just as good and less annoying

I see this repeated all the time and I'm starting to wonder if I'm the only
person who finds DDG results to be _much_ worse. I tried DDG again this week
and turned back within an hour.

Examples:

\- I wanted to migrate a Debian 32Bit system to 64Bit. So I searched "debian
convert from i386 to amd64". Google's top results are the official Cross-
Grading docs from Debian Wiki, whereas DDG points to some outdated private
pages and mailing list posts, with the official Debian Wiki not even in the
Top10. Completely useless.

\- I had the problem that with idx-Subtitles, Kodi would show white boxes
instead of the proper text. So I searched "kodi idx white box". Google points
to bug reports for my exact problem, whereas DDG shows pages for "fully loaded
Kodi boxes" and "Best adult addons for Kodi". Again, completely useless.

\- I wanted to build Kodi from source. So I searched "building kodi". Top
Google results is the building instruction in the Kodi Wiki, DDG again shows
obscure pages for the Titanium build and Steamlink ports.

This is all done in Firefox in private mode, so this is not because Google has
tracked my behavior.

~~~
soraminazuki
Here's some quick search results from DDG:

[debian migrate to 64 bit][search]

1st result:
[https://wiki.debian.org/Migrate32To64Bit](https://wiki.debian.org/Migrate32To64Bit)

[kodi subtitle white box][search]

2nd result:
[https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=335337](https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=335337)

[kodi compile][search]

1st result: [https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-
TO:Compile_Kodi_for_Linux](https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-
TO:Compile_Kodi_for_Linux)

Are you sure you aren't over-exaggerating DDG's supposed incompetence?

~~~
deng
Thanks, you're actually proving my point: DDG is only successful if you use
the exact wording used on the pages. Google is obviously much smarter, since
it uses a semantic model that determines that 'building kodi' is the same as
compiling it, that 'idx' refers to a subtitle format and 'converting' and
'migrating' are similar things.

~~~
soraminazuki
> DDG is only successful if you use the exact wording used on the pages.

IMHO, your search keywords gave subpar results for an entirely different
reason. For instance, the search terms you chose for your first two examples
are overly technical considering the average users of Debian or Kodi. As for
the third example, the term "build" is ambiguous because it's also frequently
used to refer to binary releases. I was able to find the right results from
DDG because I chose keywords that aren't confusing, not because I knew what to
search beforehand. It's not so hard.

~~~
deng
Yes, there are people out there using "overly technical", "confusing" and
"ambiguous" search words. I'm afraid any company who wants to rival Google
with have to deal with that fact; that's pretty much the whole problem of
search in a nutshell.

~~~
skinkestek
Yet Google still manages to dtive me nuts to the point that I enjoy using
duckduckgo :-/

------
perspective1
The US government has no authority to break up a monopoly just because users
don't like its ads. Google continues to provide a valuable service, and your
cost is the ads you're served that you don't want. Google's not a charity. I'm
tired of opinions about "user hostility" and so on from tech people about
valuable services as they ramp up user revenues. If you don't like Google's
ads, use DuckDuckGo or Bing.

~~~
anaganisk
There's another perspective to that, my clients, if google is spamming with
ads how will i be able to reach them over search? Google had become somewhat
too big, that me not using it, does harm too. But indirectly.

------
jcfrei
The US doesn't have a great history when it comes to the effectiveness of
breaking up monopolies. The breakup of the Bell system just resulted in
regional monopolies for example. How would you break up Google? Into search,
sites, youtube, android (devices) and cloud hosting? Search and youtube would
just stay monopolies on their own but they couldn't cross-finance android
development and google sites anymore. And I don't think Android would be a
worthy competitor to iOS without Google's ad billions. Stricter regulation
with regards to privacy laws and online advertising would probably work out
much better for the consumer.

~~~
josho
Or break up search into a utility that provides crawling/indexing service,
that provides an API to third party search result providers. Similar to how
many power companies are split up.

Then DuckDuckGo would have access to rebrand googles search but keep its
privacy benefits, while other providers could compete on other search value
add.

~~~
post_below
If a company in tech has to give their technology to competitors, what
motivation do they have to invest the resources to keep iterating and
improving? When I hear the "utility" idea I realize that a lot of people, even
in tech, don't understand how big a challenge search is.

The technical complexity difference between power distribution and internet
search is so large that you can't compare the two.

Motivation to keep improving is vital in search. It's a decades old arms race
between quality results and black hat algo gaming. And it plays out on a
dataset that's always growing, and that growth is always accelerating. If
iteration slows down even a little, black hat wins and everyone else loses.

Your suggestion would effectively kill Google, which is maybe the goal, but
unless it applied only to Google it would kill the searchability of the
internet along with them.

Remember Altavista? It would look like that.

Which is not to say there aren't regulatory answers to Google's dominance.
Forcing a firewall between their interests (i.e. search and advertising) would
be a start.

------
zarkov99
Larry and Sergey are probably spinning in their graves, I mean private
islands. Google has become what they so despised.

~~~
rorykoehler
Looking at their earliest investors I don’t think google ever intended to be
what they said they were.

------
spicyramen
Mmm this is nonsense, from economíc perspective most of the money Google
generates comes from search. What are you going to do? Have a single search
company, other one a browser? To match technology that Google has developed
through the years is close to impossible. From both business and Tech
perspective there is no easy fix. Let the world runs as it is.

------
haolez
I'd prefer to let the market fix this when something better appears and gets
traction. Giving more power to the government is the go-to solution in third
world countries. The US is supposed to be better and much more mature as a
nation.

Disclaimer: I live in a third world country.

~~~
Finnucane
That is actually how anti-trust regulation is supposed to work. Competitive
markets for goods and services tend to produce better results, or at least,
that is the line we hear in Econ 101. But capitalist growth tends to
concentration of wealth and power—success grows toward monopoly. So government
must wield the hammer of anti-trust to free markets.

~~~
haolez
Sometimes it's government policies themselves that unbalance the market and
allow the proliferation of monopolies. I'm not sure it's the case with Google,
though. Would appreciate a comment from someone more informed.

~~~
post_below
The answer is no. There aren't any significant policies (related to internet
search, crawling or intellectual property) which create a barrier for little
guys but which Google has the resources to handle (which is usually how
regulation stifles disruption, sometimes by design).

Don't underestimate the EU though, given some of the ignorant tech regulation
they've already passed, it could happen at some point.

As Bing has demonstrated, Google's dominance in search is a result of superior
technology and a huge lead. Even a company with the resources of MS hasn't
been able to do anything but follow behind and create almost good enough
copies at each step.

Although to be fair that's what MS has always done so maybe a more nimble
company might have a shot some day.

In the near future AI and machine learning coupled with computing advances
could be a way into search for competitors if G doesn't get there first.

------
DenisM
In my view 90% of the Silicon Vally is either Entertainment and Advertising,
or IT support for such. Uber and ABnB make for some exception.

I’m not hating, just saying we need to know where we stand in the grand
scheme.

------
lorec0re
I'm so sick of this continuous ranting against google, if you dont like big G
services/product use something alse! but please please stop busting our balls!

~~~
jtdev
I don’t use Google for search, and I don’t use Chrome for browsing... yet a
large number of calls go to google ad network endpoints from within my home
network. It’s no longer a simple matter of opting out - google’s intrusive
practices have become so pervasive that end users have to go to great lengths
to detach from the Google surveillance apparatus.

------
dang
Url changed from [https://jlelse.blog/links/2019/12/google-ad-
engine/](https://jlelse.blog/links/2019/12/google-ad-engine/), which points to
this.

------
danr4
Can there exist such a search engine that can stay objective in the long haul?

I'm not particularly mad about Google putting ads, since the world is waking
up and I believe in the future it will be obsolete.

But as I see it, the problem is that all search engines have this issue where
the more volume it has, the more lucrative it is to game it. Let's say
DuckDuckGo becomes vastly superior and widely used, what's preventing it from
becoming another spam machine where SEO is the name of the game.

As I see it, there's no really good solution here. Maybe some open source
indexing algorithm and a different search engine for different types of
content.

~~~
claudeganon
Yes. There are well-funded university and scientific CS departments across the
country that could design and maintain such a system, free of these influences
as a technology iniative. It’s how the internet was built and where page rank
came from originally.

~~~
scarface74
Indexing is easy. It’s a solved computer science problem that you just need to
throw hardware at. Ranking and relevant searching is the hard part and is
partly influenced by adding usage data of millions of people.

------
dghughes
Maybe not the entire Internet but certainly the Web is an advertising machine.
People are often berated "How dare you block ads" in your browser taking money
away from websites. As if ads were the sole purpose for anything to exist.
Even if you do block ads your mere existence as a user is valuable data so I'm
not sorry for blocking every advertisement I can.

In the early days of the Web or even just the public Internet in general the
Ineternet was an infrequent pastime. If nobody was using the one telephone
your entire family owned you could surf the Web, maybe. Even then you only
used your dial-up account to briefly use some of your limited hours per month.
Most of the time people with computers were offline.

From my point of view advertising has really ruined the Web and the Web itself
has made people less computer literate. People use maybe a half dozen websites
and that's it most probably use a tablet. I know back when I had my first PC
in the early 1990s you had to be much more aware of configuring it. That
wasn't a bad thing it really meant you learned about how the computer and OS
worked. Being aware of its operation meant you were able to fix it, and your
data wasn't stored anywhere but your PC locally at best on a floppy, or dozen.

I know people would counter with the "free" services we use like webmail,
streaming video, search engines. I'd pay for it if they were cheap enough but
even then your information would be right back in the hands of a large
corporation.

It's to the point now where the Internet is vital for government services. If
anything governments are going to have to offer cheap (or "free") Internet
access, email, and other basics.

------
AstroJetson
I guess they are one of the last to figure it out? Next up "Sky is blue!"

------
Spearchucker
Used to be borderline militant in avoiding anything Google. I've calmed down a
bit in that I no longer preach at my girlfriend about it. But I have to this
day not used any Google app or service other than when mandated by work. And
never ever on my own hardware. And yes, still using Windows Phone. I also
admit, to my shame, to feeling a bit smug about it.

------
tyingq
No surprise. Larry and Sergey said pretty much the same, themselves, some time
ago.

 _" The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to
providing quality search to users."_

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

~~~
dehrmann
I used to work for a company that ran a vertical search engine
(products/shopping). Search results were essentially results for ads. One of
the engineers demoed a project where you change the weighting of relevancy and
yield in the results. The internal complaints of bad results were mostly
explained by yield optimization.

The company ~died when Google started removing aggregators like this from its
results (the Panda update) and doing product ads, itself.

------
evilmoo
Blog spam of:
[https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1205582897593430017](https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1205582897593430017)

~~~
rmsaksida
Indeed. OP should have linked to the tweet instead as his blog post is not
adding anything.

~~~
jlelse
I added a link to a list of alternatives for Google services. I wanted to link
to it, but then forgot to actually do it.

------
s17n
DHH's point that Google is just an ads engine is only true for searches of a
commercial nature. If you're searching for something like a programming
problem or a snippet of poetry or whatever, it' still an amazing search
engine.

So when he says it's "a catalogue with a search engine attached" I think he's
exactly correct, but I don't see it as negatively as he does - it's great that
the money from Google ads is being used to fund the continued development of
one of the most important contributions to society ever (and I don't think
it's just for "PR purposes", I think that having the best search engine is in
fact the core of Google's long term success, so their incentives are aligned
well).

As the owner of a commercial enterprise, I think DHH comes off as entitled and
whiny here. The period of time where you could get free traffic to your
business from search was a brief historical anomaly. Advertising isn't going
to be free.

------
zadeh
Why can't they be both?

~~~
vortico
Some people are unable to classify things on a spectrum. You're either a
programmer or you're not, a company is either evil or good, piracy either has
no effect or a full effect on software sales, NPM is either a disaster
bringing down the JS ecosystem or the reason it's great, the economy will
either fail or become booming in 2020...

IMO non-spectrum thinking is one of the largest falacies in thinking and
debates in the modern era.

------
dvduval
If other search engines had the same data available as Google, they could
offer similar search results without ads. This includes the auto complete
feature, and much more. No other company is in a position to ever catch up in
terms of data collection and utilization.

Google has become so important for advertisers that in many cases there is no
similar alternative. The percentage of users searching Google is such a high
percentage, as well as the primary way people search for product X or Service
Y that failing to pay Google can make or break their success.

------
Dwolb
Sure thing - this is going to happen because their incentives aren’t fully
aligned between users and their own long term vs short term goals.

It’s fascinating to watch. It feels like the aging of any industry titan.
First they were innovative, lean, and mission-focused. It seems like they’ve
been progressing to a bloated company fully concerned only with short term
profits.

It’ll be curious to see where this goes and if they’ll continue to suffer from
their own momentum. Maybe we’ll start to see newer, niche, nimble competitors
start to pick off chunks of search.

------
prashnts
Quite often I find useful information from blogs or forum posts. I never seem
to get the right keywords to find those in search results.

Another super annoying thing is that “filetype:pdf” is full of spam websites
with same template, such as “we have <almost exact search term> pdf. Click
here!”, while the data sheet I was looking for would be two pages down.

It’s almost like that the content inside the linked results are no longer
relevant to what you search for.

------
rreichman
Competition _is_ literally a click away. The truth is that Google is the best
so people are willing to put up with the shitty ads on some searches.

------
pearjuice
A direct link to the tweet would have sufficed.

------
spazzpp2
No surprise. Also, who can seriously claim that other proprietary search
engines (yandex, Baidu) don't sell uprankings?

------
Fire-Dragon-DoL
What about Amazon search engine, can we use that for recycling? All I get from
it is garbage...

------
marban
Have people forgotten that there used to be search engines that did the same
pre-Google?

~~~
ttoinou
Altavista wasn't as good

~~~
marban
Good enough for its time and Goto.com was built on this very premise.

------
Guest42
Agreed, I used to easily be able to find our local info regarding volleyball
tournaments and festivals, now the same searches don’t give anything even 7
pages down, it’s as though the engine removed the sites from the web

~~~
pixl97
Did all of that move to Facebook and get stuck in a walled garde?

~~~
Guest42
I wish it had. Some of these are pretty important to me and I searched for
them in exact terms.

------
gerash
How come a sensational post like this finds its way to HN front page?

------
tehjoker
Maybe we should publicly fund it search since splitting up Google would not
change the incentive structure.

------
t0ughcritic
Been saying this for the past 5 years seems only when a tech celeb says it it
gains momentum in news

------
fnord77
perhaps we need a nationalized search engine that is independent of financial
motive.

------
RiOuseR
Google bad, my blog good!

------
aSplash0fDerp
When the incentive to monetize crosses the line into manipulating and
exploiting results, users and policy, I think there is a dynamic threshold
there where some folks will consider it heavy-handed capitalism (required for
profitability), where others will clearly see a monopoly. Take the money out
of the equation and look at the product for even wider perspective.

If knowledge is power, the for profit, curated Internet is trash.

Google has turned into a librarian that puts misinformation and diversions
before actual results. I liked them better when they were more like the dewey
decimal system of search, instead of the manic, bipolar curator with low
quality information, just like MSM.

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
> Google is not a search engine, but an ad engine

Google was a search engine, but is now an ad engine.

When I legitimately want to research something, the first few pages are prices
and where I can buy. So infuriating.

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agumonkey
Is there anything to "search" anymore ?

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dboreham
Because: people love to take the Faustian deal.

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mbrodersen
Google is an ad company. What do you expect?

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alkibiades
DHH is obnoxious. someone needs to take him down a peg

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buboard
Google's competition is not DDG, it's Brave

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mriasat
Yeh

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rickncliff
I'm guessing it's some sort of a rule here to have at least one anti-google
link on the front page at all times but I think this needs addressing:

1\. Ads keep the lights on and they are labeled as such.

2\. The Basecamp guy was complaining that ads for competing services are
showing when searching for his service which is something that courts have
affirmed time and again as being pro consumer because it exposes new users to
competing services.

This describes a recent case and links to others:
[https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2018/05/another-
court-...](https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2018/05/another-court-says-
competitive-keyword-advertising-doesnt-cause-confusion.htm)

~~~
spookthesunset
The anti-google (or anti-amazon, anti-FB, basically anti-FAANG) garbage that
gets plastered on HN is really childish and tiring.

Reminds me of all the “M$” bashing back when slashdot was still relevant. I
can recall top comments for articles about larger HDD’s were usually people
decrying “bloated software” or wondering who would ever use all that space.
Articles about LCD monitors were full of people bemoaning the loss of
“superior CRT’s”. Anything new was suspect. Of course all that “M$” anti-tech
bashing eventually made them completely irrelevant and now they are but a
footnote in history.

Dunno where I’m going but besides being “two minutes of hate”, these anti-
FAANG articles totally remind me of slashdot.

~~~
brianberns
I don’t think that had anything to do with why Slashdot faded into obscurity.
Slashdot refused to allow users to post stories, so Digg (and then Reddit) ate
its lunch.

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subject117
Regulation is not necessary. DuckDuckGo is a great alternative. YouTube on the
other hand..

