[cout]

I feel like the turning point for me was when Google removed the ability to always exclude certain sites from searches. I had a number of sites configured Ty always be excluded because the results were always useless. Ever since, the list of useless sites in my search results has been slowly creeping up.

[Quekid5]

Yup, same for me.

It really seems high-quality search is fundamentally in opposition to serving ads, alas. (At least once every page in existence probably serves ads via the search operator's network.)

[LaundroMat]

That's exactly what Brin and Page said in the paper where they presented Google...

"[W]e expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers"

and

"[W]e believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."

Both from The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (1998)

[dmvdoug]

have they ever addressed this in later years? Like, what was their justification for Google becoming the AdMonster it did?

[Quekid5]

They're now richer than god. Why would they care about anything other than money? Societal rules don't affect them very much at this point.

[liveoneggs]

Yes but you can't hear them because they are on yachts

[dmvdoug]

Sounds like a job for the orcas…

[Quekid5]

Lol, hope springs eternal :).

... but more seriously: Yeah, their reasoning (now) isn't exactly going to be unbiased and/or unblemished by their own experience. They probably have the most extreme survivorship bias ever. (Not their fault, they just do because of whatever factors got them into the position they're in.)

[wpietri]

Totally. Advertising is fundamentally about distracting someone so you can put money in your pocket without regard to the impact on that someone.

I have a lot of complaints about, say, McDonald's, but they make their money through giving people something of value to them. Advertising legitimizes the making of money in a way unrelated to value delivery. (The same is true about a lot of finance.)

When you combine that with up-and-to-the-right numerical goals and standard executive incentives, over time you pretty much guarantee what Doctorow calls "enshittification". Delivering value becomes at best a side effect of the system.

[AlecSchueler]

Aren't McDonald's one of the biggest advertisers in the world? They sell poor quality food on the basis of brand recognition.

[praptak]

That's unrelated to the point GP is making. The point is that they are not incentivized to put poison into burgers to get money from the poison industry.

[courseofaction]

Well put. Ads are the poison of information.

[symonda]

This is a good point. The problem is that it is very hard to make a living serving high-quality results which is likely why ad-funded search still dominates. The vast majority of the world will likely never want to pay for search on its own.

There are, of course, a few relatively successful paid general purpose search engines but these serve a niche demographic if you consider the world-wide scale of google et al. Possibly specialized search (we build one) will be able to thrive in the future, but these engines also serve niche markets in the end.

Thus, the real competition to ad-based search is not high quality search and that is likely why search results don't get better.

[paradox460]

I've used uBlocklist to filter these things since Google removed that feature