[lambdasquirrel]

remember the banner ads in search engines before google came about? or how you usually had to go through ten pages of results in order to find what you wanted?

google was an intentional step away from the kind of “engagement” that so much of social media represents — and FB epitomizes. the problem with your argument is that it loses sight of what is really at stake here.

[pessimizer]

> remember the banner ads in search engines before google came about? or how you usually had to go through ten pages of results in order to find what you wanted?

Not my memory of Altavista. Also, when I google any book ever written, I don't hit any link not trying to sell it to me, just showing me wikipedia copy, and/or trying to trick me into something completely unrelated until around the tenth page.

[whatever_dude]

> Not my memory of Altavista

I moved to Google from Altavista _specifically_ because of how shitty the experience had become.

It was good during the days of digital.altavista.com but they quickly started adding a lot of noise to the point where the actual power of a search was relegated to a small search field and a bunch of hard-to_parse results. Maybe they were not banners, but it was still a lot of crap.

I think Google quickly learned that lesson. I was expecting them to pivot to a website full of gunk but it didn't really happen. For better or worse, they found other ways to make money.

[sumeno]

What are you looking for when you search for a book?

[watwut]

Not him, but in no particular order:

* reviews, * analysis (historical context, more about author etc), * other peoples thoughts about that book, * free legal copy on Guttenberg, * I am bored and dont care what comes out as long as it is interesting (which excludes selling places due to them not being interesting).

[sumeno]

I just don't see the behavior the op is describing.

I tried searching for the last 5 or 6 books I've read, in every single case the results that came up were Amazon and Wikipedia, but also Goodreads, the authors website, at least one review or article about the book, and several had wikis.

In the main results I never saw more than two places to buy the book (unless the authors are selling it directly through their site, I didn't check). The bar on the right side of the page did include additional places to buy the ebooks, but it also includes places to borrow the ebooks, which is a cool feature I didn't even know existed until now.