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by woefblaf123 1215 days ago
I use an adblocker of course, but Google's top results are basically paid ads. An adblocker doesn't block them because they come from google themselves.

You can just pay google to be on the top for certain search terms, regardless of the actual relevance of your website.

So I'm calling them ads, but they are technically paid searh results. Indeed DDG is also pretty bad lately but I still consider it better than Google. It's just that the quality of both has gone down a lot due to these practices.

1 comments

Are you saying that the top results in Google are paid results even then they don't have any markings/boxes/disclaimers indicating this is the case? I mean nothing surprises me anymore, but you'd at least imagine various regulators wouldn't be too happy about that.
Funnily enough, my adblocker blocks this page. In any case, the adblocker(s) I use (ublock origin in browser, pihole on the network) seem to block Google ads/paid search results. It does still clearly seem to be their policy to label all paid search results:

| This is a search result, not an ad. Only ads are paid, and they'll always be labelled with 'Sponsored' or 'Ad'.