[Quarrel]

I have various issues with google and the way they approach these issues, but they're not in the same galaxy as Altavista.

Google surpassed Altavista because it fundamentally bought a better way of indexing with it, and survived to dominate because it paired that with an incredibly insightful path to revenue.

Are memories really that short? (Am I really that old?)

We can argue around the edges, but I think any modern search engine user would be amazed at how bad bad bad search engines were for the basics of answering your search query, before google.

[jacquesm]

Google made a big hoopla about other search engines including paid results in their listings. Google would never do such a thing. Until they did.

[amscanne]

Google clearly marks ads as ads. I believe the criticism was that search engines of the past would allow paid results to appear organic.

Has Google started doing this and I’m unaware?

[jacquesm]

Google was never going to add any ads in their SER section at all.

So that went away. Then they kept on fiddling with how the ads are marked to make it harder to spot the ads, including using colors already in use for other UI elements in organic results. Then they started advertising their own properties in advantageous positions (at the top) whether or not the results were all that relevant, and did not mark these as ads.

[amscanne]

> Then they started advertising their own properties in advantageous positions (at the top) whether or not the results were all that relevant, and did not mark these as ads.

Where and when did this happen?

I recall the early days of Google, and they always had the ads appear first. I agree that it used to be very clearly delineated from the rest of the results, and that this has become more subtle over time, but as I far as I know they have never been disguised or hidden, which is what you’re asserting here. Can you provide a specific example or screenshot?

[NicoJuicy]

Altavista was, surprisingly enough, just a non-monetized demo for their hardware.

It wasn't a full search-engine, although it looked like it.

It was more like a very popular demo.