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by bgia 1615 days ago
This definitely hits a nerve. Google does that nowadays and I cannot count how many times I have clicked by mistake on these suggested links that show up after all results have already loaded.
5 comments

It's hilarious to me how much Google is hammering on content layout shift as a web vital for ranking websites when they're one of the most annoying offenders. I can't tell you how often I have accidentally clicked that "People also search for" box that sometimes loads in beneath the first result, when I am actually trying to click the second result.

It's infuriating, and makes me wonder if anyone at Google actually uses their own product.

There's an extension [1] and a ublock filter [2] for this

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-people-also...

[2] google.*##[id^="eob_"]

I feel like this is a symptom of google etc not having enough real competition. If google and twitter were scared for their survival they wouldn't allow slack like janky sites and disrespecting the free speech of their users as much as twitter does.
Twitter IS scared for its survival though, they just have truly incompetent product leads (+ all the damage from Dopesey's leadership).

Google is only playing deaf while revenue keeps coming.

I don't know which one is worse.

It happens when you click on a result, then hit the back button and want to click the next link. Then, just before you click, the suggested links appear.

Maybe they measured clicks and thought this must be a really useful feature.

It's not an accident at all. I'm sure some sites are moving content around to make it likely you'll click on an ad. Other forms of click fraud are rife:

This site has ads that cover the content

https://tonyortega.org/

and when you try to close them you will frequently click on the ad instead of the tiny close button. Back in the day the Scientologists would have reported him for click fraud but today they are a shadow of the terror they once were.

"Suggested searches" are not ads. I'm pretty sure Google does not financially benefit from a user mis-clicking on suggested searches.