Every Google result now looks like an ad

I've been using duckduckgo and bing for a while now. Google is just a fallback.

I know Google is unpopular here, but the new design doesn't really change ad visibility. Just compare the designs side-by-side [1]. If anything, the new design emphasizes colorful organic favicons.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/fEo0QF9.png

Bing seems lot better lately

My understanding is that the Google culture has shifted dramatically from engineering-driven to money-driven.

It reminded me of the story that got posted about Boeing: https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merg...

I don't know if people will necessarily die, like it did with the 737 Max. But I wouldn't be surprised if the key underpinnings of a participatory democracy gets compromised.

Just use µblock origin, it hides ads from search results.

I used to use google search regularly to search for new websites with the types of things I am looking for. Now I hardly bother going to new websites unless somebody mentions it personally and I navigate to it directly.

I still do lots of image searches. I wonder if those are also heavily influenced by ads now.

Because, in some sense, it is tht ad.

I disconnect from my phone after 6pm or so and if while doing my crossword puzzle I need trivia answered or something spelled out I can ask my Nest Mini and get no bullshit answers most of the time without ads.

On mobile this is even worse. Often the first page and a half of results are just ads. It's so bad that sometimes I've almost stopped scrolling wondering if there are even any real results on the page.

Am I correct that it doesn't say "ad" or "sponsored" at all? Is that even legal (in some countries)?

The redesign is ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE! It's really hard for me to find the actual results! WTF!

Different thought: our expectations are in the way. Let's see it as it is.

If the whole page looks like an ad then maybe we should see it that way. Google search is now for finding which ad to click on. Its now an advertising index. Not a general search engine. They don't want you finding anything but ads. So they've made everything look like ads.

I think I'll stick with DDG. Unfortunately if the whole page is an ad then the whole page is likely irrelevant. No matter how much data they have on me, paid content in my search results are likely not what I want to see.

Them knowing I have fish hasn't helped them advertise to me. Google results don't include who I regularly buy from. Even reading my fish hobby email account hasn't helped them improve. I've already used google search with that google account etc. All the ads were completely useless. Trying to sell me irrelevant items from irrelevant retailers. Wrong fish. Or trying to steer me towards boats. If anything, I didn't find what I needed and dropped back to DDG. I needed information necessary to a sale and paid content is completely inappropriate.

All that infrastructure slowed down and frustrated a sale. So. Not so good.

I wrote a quick css snippet when I first saw it - I use it with the firefox plugin stylus.

https://gist.github.com/navidkhn1/a2eff24419ef8d4ff8b40b6498...

Reminder that almost every Google search bashing thread on HN is most probably injected by DDG. They have been doing that for years and years and it proved to be very effective. It's a amazing that such a mediocre search engine like DDG can be popular only based on rants and accusations on the big guy. But it seems really to be a very effective marketing technique.

Not only that but when I click on a link that pretends to be an actual search result some random shop page opens and wants to sell me shoes or coats or whatever. Only when I press the back button and click that link again the real page opens. Good bye, Google, my search engine is now Bing.

Looks like absolute trash.

DDG is search of choice now, !g a last resort

I remember when Google made a point of being ethical by putting ads on the right rail with a light blue background so it was clear which results were ads and which were organic.

I think that's the point - when everything looks like an ad, then nothing looks like an ad. (Read: ads blend in more - so users are probably more likely to click on promoted links.)

0.02: I really didn't mind the change, I assumed it was meant to allow users to more easily identify "well-known" sites in the results: noticing a familiar icon is a lot easier than noticing a familiar URL. This seems potentially good for both users and sites? I guess it's bad for sites that are currently trying to build up their credibility and aren't yet "well-known"?

In retrospect, I'm sure blurring the lines between ads and search results was probably part of the motivation. But if they modified ads a bit more to further distinguish them and kept the favicons, I don't think I'd mind.

I don't like it, but I'm glad I'm not alone. I thought something was off as I was trying to "skip" the ads and get to the actual results but the "ads" seems to go on and on... Took me a while to realise they are not "ads" but actual results. I guess they are trying to blur the lines between paid and organic content by going the other way - instead of making the ads less obvious, they make the non-ads more ad-ish.

I hate changes like this in general but this one is really bad. Just switch back

To be a bit contrarian, it puts the url at the top, that makes it a lot easier to tell if the result is a spam site, or an official site. Ads are easily discernible because they have an icon that says 'Ad'. I like it.

I have some experience with user experience and navigation design. The new google search experience is horrible. The ads dominate, the scale seems clumsy and the layout and spacing seems awk-wierd. I was on the launch of NEW COKE way back when,Seems like a repeat, Coke did a focus group, taste test and asked "is this new coke was good or better than the old coke." A majority said better, but they did not know the OLD VERSION (classic ) would be no longer available. Deleted from memory. The result was a consumer response that i think has yet to be equaled. Old vs New, if they knew it was an either or the vote would have been different. I appreciate Hacker News and the intelligence that is emitted.

How did this get green-lit? i.e. what story did they have to tell themselves and externally? This seems like an extremely hostile move to users as well as their customers (ad sellers). I simply can't distinguish ads from search results any more. I can't be the only one.

I wonder what the tipping point will be? At what point Google Search revenue will have peaked, pushing Google to accelerate the pace of experiments and new solutions to make more out of fewer users.

Like many around here, I have (re)started using alternatives to Google products last year. We're early adopters, so it will take a while for Google to be affected by a mass exodus, but what will happen when it will start? What medium will they use to fill the gap. The only (currently) untapped options matching Search's reach to display ads are: Gmail, Android, Google Photos. Probably nothing else. What happens for advertisers targeting specifically users like me who end up stopping using Google Search (e.g., how do you reach a high earner from Bay Area if they have completely stopped using Search? Because this, will happen first, and these users are valuable).

The required scale of any alternative is critical. Compensating for Search revenue decline is no easy feat. So much that, until now, nothing else generates anything even close to Search's revenue. If you talk profit, it's even worse as YouTube is probably not as profitable as Google would like (YouTube Premium anyone?) it to be.

So, the future will probably come from outside of Google's own properties, and that is why they are slowly killing competition in the ad tech space (3rd party cookies & Chrome). That is why they have been trying to diversify and are wisely enough pushing very hard with GCP and other proven revenue streams like subscriptions (YouTube Music, YouTube Premium, gSuite).

Probably also why founders really left.

It will be an interesting decade, for sure!

Time for duck duck go

Not many posts get close to 3k upvotes on HN.

I'm confused. I noticed this aesthetic change a couple of weeks ago and I wondered what was causing it. So now when I saw this post, I turned off adblock on the search results page to see where the ads are, and I still can't seem to see any ads.

The sidebar is blank. The main page has results from "Places", "People also ask" and "images", interspersed with the normal results (which now look more like the old ads), but I don't see any actual ads, even with adblock off. For those of you that have the new look and see ads, where are they?

Is it too much to ask for a real URL, not some garbage link?

I made a Chrome extension a few months ago to fix the design, you'll find it here: https://github.com/attio/google-ad-fixer

I'll try and submit to the Chrome Store, let's see if it gets in :)

Did some Program Manager needed a promotion at Google? Looks like it.

I personally dislike such changes, which no one asks for. Either people are just pushing their BS through Google higher ranks or they have no clue how their users actually feel and use their core product.

...

Such an idiotic move by Google. You really should switch back for your own sake.

I've been in this A/B test for a couple of months now, so I've had time to adjust, and I still hate it. I've just become so used to seeing the complete URL in green. The complete URL! If you hover over the results, you'll see that they like to take bits like numeric components or the query string out.

This is part of Google's attempt to de-prioritise the URL. Their destructive AMP service confusingly shows you Google's domain instead of the website's — and as they can't fix that without losing out on tracking, they're trying to change what the URL means.

Thanks for ruining the Web, Google.

And it is hideous and much harder to quickly scan for relevant returns (all that empty space).

Others have mentioned that this is almost certainly the result of a long course of A/B testing.

The problem with this kind of aggressive A/B testing is that it's a game of "how far can we push the user?" So instead of having enthusiastic fans, they have people who begrudgingly use them. Sure, Google picks up an extra nickel here or there, and I'm sure some PMs got a raise. But I don't know any strong Google boosters any more, and there are hordes of people ready to switch over once something tolerable comes along.

(And from the comments, it seems like many of you have already found tolerable replacement search engines. I think I'm going to join you.)

It's been clear for a little while that Google no longer cares about giving the best experience with a lot of their tools and is just focused on maximizing revenue. More and more, Google is the modern equivalent of Microsoft in the early 00s, still good enough that most people use it, but each successive "version" piles on more frustrations than benefits. It's so ironic that Google has become that which they most despised when they started.

The dominance of Google and Facebook is turning the web into a toxic waste.

Pure uBlock Origin filter syntax:

    www.google.com##+js(remove-attr.js, onmousedown, .rc > .r > a)
    www.google.com##.rc > .r > a:after:style(content: attr(href); display: inline-block; font-size: 14px; color: darkgreen; white-space: nowrap; width: 100%)
    www.google.com##.rc > .r > a > br
    www.google.com##.TbwUpd
    www.google.com##.B6fmyf:style(right: 0px)

(submitted 4 days ago as a Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22072706)

Investor Driven Design is the best summation of these changes.

I was using ddg on and off for the past year, going back to google for specific searches.

Their last changes are total crap. Designers/product-managers who came up with this crap are so out of their depth I have no idea how they got their job in the first place.

Needles to say I've been completely relying on ddg for the past weeks that now I really find there's no need for google search. So I'm kinda happy they did this honestly. Hopefully it drives more people away from google.

I miss altavista and the original google layouts. I guess there's always startpage.com

Not a solution for Google's larger product direction problem, but there's a zillion ways nerds like us can filter out this crap from search results. There's a few brand new browser extensions aimed specifically at stopping this. And if you use an ad blocker, here's some rules: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-fix-googles-ugly-logo-filled-s...

In the long run this kind of fix-up is a losing game. But maybe it'll bring you some visual peace for now.

It's pretty simple to just use UBlock Origin. Firstly, I don't usually see any of the doubleclick ad results, because they get filtered out, and secondly, if I do click on them, it redirects you to a warning page first.

Friends don't let friends use the internet without an adblocker.

I used to think it was just me not keeping up with the cultural change. Then Amazon made their search result unusable by interlacing each product row with a product advertisement row. Browsing visually just looking at pictures became insufferable.

I then installed Stylus, a firefox extension that allows you to add a few lines of CSS to any website. I dont do webdev, but the level of CSS it requires is minimal. I just made filters for all the websites with these toxic features.

I wish there was a repository where people could share their CSS corrections with each other to make the web saner.

For what it's worth, Bing doesn't make the distinction much clearer. Ads have a tiny little Ad icon, but both the background and the text look just like regular search results.

This GreaseMonkey userscript worked for me to revert the search results to their previous style:

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/395257-better-google/code

Unironically switch to Bing

So interesting how Google can tweak just a few lines of code/HTML on a template and generate so much more in revenue.

This is a good time for education to step in and ramp critical thinking and deduction to the max.

Google is about as evil as they come now. They’re taking the role MS did in the 90s.

The right question is: How should ranking work in a distributed search engine?

More and more I'm bypassing Google and going to places like Reddit, Quora, News Hacker, Stack Overflow to search for what I need. I honestly think there has been a decline in value in the top search results. Hard to pinpoint but definitely an increasing gut feeling. On average, the top search results I receive are heavily advertised with lots of clickbait or content that is on multiple pages of a slideshow. Just overall poor quality.

What did you expect from the advertisement company?

I'm pretty sure ad providers liked the changes because they are getting more traffic to their websites. So, the actual clients are happy why so much dislike towards a new change.

The most disappointing thing for me in this thread is recommendations to install ad blockers. This thing is harming the web the most because instead of focusing on the issue (bad UI) we just supporting such behaviour by using websites with bad UI.

p.s. I'm in risk of being downvoted because of just expressing unpopular opinion about ad blockers.

Add this filter on ublock origin: google.com##.xA33Gc

Not sure about the facts underlying the analysis. In my search results (and it's important to remember that it's possible you get different results than another user, due to launch experiments and trials) the ads do not have icons. They say "Ad" in bold text. The "organics" results have icons.

For people who are suggesting DDG, At the risk of exposing my unpopular opinion, I kind of like personalized results. In fact, I prefer it. It improves the searching speed a lot and Google exactly knows what I had on my mind. Isn't this why still everyone prefers Google?

I think its time for mozilla or another provider to launch their own fully open sources web search. its been a while google has has a serious competition.

I wonder - if there is a some economic theory that predicts, that in the end the only economic feasable solution for any company is to completely ruin there most important product and commit a sort of sepuku of trust.

Google proves more often that it transitioned from being user-centric to being money-centric. It'd do anything to make more money.

At the same time, they've also made filetype icons (like pdf) less visible, which is hugely annoying when you're searching for a specific document. The canonical versions of legal filings and government documents are usually in pdf, because their publication is a legal fact, so it matters quite a bit even if you don't care for pdf from an interactivity/metaphorical point of view.

Also, Carthage must be destroyed: the vertical created by ownership of the database and user interface is a Bad Thing about the web and HTML. Yes, it can be made consistent for everyone which is great from an adoption or branding point of view, which in turn generates more economic activity, but it becomes worse and worse for consumers of the service over time as providers move toward extraction of economic rents.

On the other hand, perhaps this speeds evolution. I foresee distributed and (quasi-adversarial) search networks with much more client-side intelligence, somewhat like Archie and Veronica search engines in the pre-web days.

I think this is a deeper problem, one with the limitations of personalized search itself. In the initial days people were picking up relevant stuff from the search results offered by Google and the feedback was helpful to improve the search index. Nowadays, people click whatever is the first result so the only feedback obtained is that results are great. Everything is so highly optimized for clickability that users are just not able to think and provide feedback.

I changed the favicon to a black "Ad" text and Google didn't really like it that much--they gave the site a manual penalty.

Snapchat is the worst app I ever use

My assumption here is that this decision is one where someone had an A/B test that showed people are more likely to click on an ad when the content is structured the way it’s shown.

Which comes at the cost of a good user experience, where the feature PM didn’t truly ask: “does this deliver any value to the people using the search?”

Always trying to remember the wonderful excerpt[0] from Ken Kocienda’s “Creative Selection” on A/B tests - just because the data shows the outcomes are more significant does not make that a better experience.

[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/kocienda/status/11134509457051770...

Yesterday, I created a quick browser extension to put URLs back in the search results, and Google rejected it as "spam".

    > Your item did not comply with the following section of our Program Policies:
    >
    > "Spam and Placement in the Store"

Clearly not spam:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search-engine...

https://github.com/codeselfstudy/search_engine_show_me_urls

Something that's kind of related is that I feel I'm finding more and more duplicate websites and straight up malicious websites on google. They are often repeated across many domains and I usually see them on more literal search results (like searching with quotes).

By malicious I mean websites that destroy the back history, create alerts, flash the favicon, etc. By duplicate websites I mean websites that take content from something like stack overflow and puts it on a website with ads.

For example here's how I found it as I was writing this:

I wrote "stack trace" in search to get some auto complete results for something to test.

I see "stack trace #0 main thrown in" as one of the suggestions and search for that with quotes.

I get 2 results, one website that looks legit, and one website that's malicious website, something that redirects me to a website that looks like facebook telling me I won something. It also destroys my back history.

They also kinda build the web though

This makes me close to switching my default search engine to Duck.com. If it stays it will push harder.

In other news, duckduckgo's growth draws a perfect exponential curve:

https://duckduckgo.com/traffic

Google gives results that aren’t ads? Wow, I thought they were just an ad search engine.

I noticed this on a co-workers screen recently and my immediate thought was "what dodgy search extensions have they been installing?". Now that it's on my results as well I can't help but strongly dislike the change for some reason. The icons are both very small and very distracting at the same time and don't aid in adding authority or any important meta information about the site.

The changes seem to have added enough noise to make parsing the page annoying, but maybe it's one of those things you brain learns to ignore after a while.

Plot twist: Google insiders concerned with the consistently unethical practices of the company are working in secret to undermine the viability of their primary revenue stream to save the world from google.

... Fiction aside, since so much evil is done by accident and indifference it's only fitting that some heroics be done by similar mechanisms.

the quality of the results is going down, not to mention the suggestions... it seriously looks like the suggestions were made up by their PR department. Everything is going downhill, use DDG

At this point GOOG is just another legacy company ready to be disrupted

So interestingly, depending on what you're looking for, Google is actually not the best search engine to use.

At this point DuckDuckGo is best for keyword searches, Google is good if your searching for concepts and links sorted by popularity and similar subjects.

So a bad person can steal favicon of say New York Times and trick users clicking their fake links because eventually users will get used to establishing "credibility" of brand by recognizing the favicons? (granted the bad person is great at SEO best practices and their search results show up at the top)

isn't the google star dead already ?

I don't get it. They say "Ad" on them don't they?

The picture of the search results doesn't even show any ads in it.

They're turning the web into a close system, just like Facebook did (kind of), so that later on, when it's too difficult for anyone to leave this closed system, they can also start charging sites just for appearing in the "organic results" -- just like Facebook did.

Many don't like Google's new design. Rather than resort to hacks, try an alternative search engine. There are many and you might even find one you like.

https://www.qwant.com/

https://www.ecosia.org/

https://duckduckgo.com/

https://www.startpage.com/

https://swisscows.ch/

...

They are still distinguishable (ads have an "Ad" badge as opposed to a favicon). But yeah, new design seems to push them closer to the same format.

If you must use Google, I suggest you use a couple of settings in uBlock/Adblock as detailed in this 4 day old Lifehacker article [1]

From the article,

- To remove the favicon: google.com##.xA33Gc

- To remove the URL: google.com##.iUh30.bc.rpCHfe

- To remove the arrow next to the URL: google.com###am-b0 and google.com##.GHDvEf.ab_button

- To remove everything: google.com##.TbwUpd and google.com###am-b0 and google.com##.GHDvEf.ab_button

[1] https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2020/01/how-to-fix-googles-ugl...

Remember when Google was good?

One of the main selling point when they introduced ads was that they would be clearly marked as such. The ads were on the side so that they couldn't be confused with the search results.

This was sold in contrast to all the other "bad" search engines who would first show a page of ads that looked like search results.

Can someone explain to me which of the five links in that image are ads so I can have the "aha, sneaky google" moment as well?

https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/

It's a little confusing to read now, so for context: at the time Google published this, it only put ads in the sidebar to the right of search results. This post was written to criticize the practice of putting ads atop search results, which competitors sometimes formatted almost indistinguishably from organic search results.

Does everything look like an ad, or do ads look like legitimate results. I feel like this is a crucial distinction.

Yeah, Google now shows organic results with similar styling with a favicon so you can only tell the difference by the "Ad" shows next to paid ads. Everyone should switch to DuckDuckGo which shows search results with a favicon and ads in the same format distinguished by and "Ad" next to them. Or maybe Bing which shows the search results with ads mixed in (conveniently distinguished from organic results with an "Ad" mark).

Google is now an “ads search engine”. Eek!

Duckduckgo is just a better user experience. Search results are almost always good enough (sometimes better), and you can easily fall back to Google by adding "!g" to the search.

Let’s face it. This is largely a first world problem. In a few months we will soon forget that this is a new design and will shriek when someone shows us the old design. I am thinking of all the ink that was used up when iOS7 was launched with flat icons

I've been using a local Searx[1] instance for web search for a few months now, and besides it needing an update when APIs inevitably break, it's been relatively pain-free.

What I like the most about it is that I get a unified search results page for all engines, which avoids some of the profile bubble, and that the UI is always consistent, avoiding these scummy redesigns A/B tested to infinity and implemented because it increases their revenue.

[1]: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

Would like to hear anybody from Google (anyone?) try to defend this as "not being evil".

For a long time I have dismissed the perrenial chant that starts every time Google does something someone doesn't like that they're now "evil".

But this really seems to be 100% pure user hostile and directly in conflict with Google's mission to "organise the world's information".

Google is an ad network with a search box as the bait. Of course everything looks like an ad, it's by design.

I've been stuck with this for two weeks now, and it's bad enough that for the first time ever I've considered using something other than Google. It's just so much harder for my eyes to read, I feel I can't glaze through the results like I used to (and I believe the old search would often give date for things like stack exchange and Reddit, which helps with a wide variety of issues).

I'm pretty sure for the layout itself I'll eventually just get a tampermonkey script to make it look like the old, but this is the first thing that has truly made me look for a Google alternative. They have severely damaged their main product, in my opinion.

Like someone recommended , https://www.startpage.com/ appears to be a solution. Going to give it a try;

Really, just use duckduckgo.com.

Go to your Firefox' settings and change the default search engine, there, done. See if you care in a week to change it back, I promise you that you won't.

Ok. But who in their right mind still uses google search directly?

And Ads look like Normal result.

Journey of Google Ads from Being Ads to Being Normal Search Result: https://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2019/06...

Source: https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-goog...

A new search engine outside the hands of Google is overdue. It feels like a huge ad machinery.

They really couldn’t care less about their reputation could they?

hm

I really hate AMP. To the point where I started making an iOS browser that’s sole purpose was to bounce me from AMP links to the original link and delete the history step in between. I wish Apple would offer this in Safari - a simple ‘ignore AMP pages’ check box.

AMP is google worst attempt yet at taking over the web. It’s so user hostile. It breaks lots of sites with its fake scroll and fake back button at the top of google news. I hate it soo bad!

Huh... I thought it was just me. I have a rather atypical setup with my privacy extensions and browser settings, so I just assumed that one of them was changing the DOM to make it look like this. Just yesterday I was searching for some ISP offers and clicked on an ad result. Well.. I think I just need to get over my lazyness and finally host searx locally.

ISSUE-345: ADS SHOULD NOT LOOK LIKE SEARCH RESULTS

Fixed by making search results look like ads.

Thank You Google... My Life is Better With You.

I'm going to voice maybe the unpopular opinion here... Disclaimer:I don't work for google, nor am I rich or part of a big corp.

Thinking of what google has given us... mostly for free (yes yes I know we have paid in data and privacy...)

1. Really good search results: I remember the day of the search wars. AltaVista was the best there was and it was kinda crap. But but but I hear you say.... the results are worse and the ads blah blah so use another search engine then. For the most part they deliver on what they promised.. Organising the worlds information and they do it mostly for free for you.

2. Maps: Holly hell I don't want to live in a world WITHOUT IT !! I'm the type of person that gets lost in a mall. I kid you not. Yea I had a very expensive(for me at least) TomTom but Google maps has been free and always in my pocket.

3. GMail: When last did you have to delete a mail ? I freaking love GMail. There are few companies so good at spam protecting a 10 year old email address ! Sure there are things that can be better... ironical for me I wish it was search-inside-gmail. But apart from that Gmail is amazing they almost never down and never crap. GMail got there first with the big mailboxes and not too crappy UI. Thunderbird is a mess and slow. I save so many digital stuff(forever) just by emailing it to myself. Its Free - You bloody ungratefull fools !

3.Chrome(Browser). As stated I come from a time of the browser wars and Netscape and though Netscape was nice for the time. Chrome again blow it out the water... It just took us to the next level. Fine right now most modern browsers are at this next level but again Google got their first and again its free.

4. ML and Data-Tools. Maybe I get a bit specilzied here but TensorFlow is a fantastic.. yes its awkward to program but keras is a nice layer on-top of it. But Google did the ground work and still pushing the boundaries. Guess what yea... TF is free. Every had to pay for a "Delphi-Component" or any fancy Borland Compilers ?? Blessed you lucky stars ! Thanks Google !

5. Targeted Ads: Yea I get ads can be anoying but all these amazing planatary free service as mentioned above needs to be paid somehow... Guess what I like personlized ads compared to shitty ads about hair shampoo for women ! I watched "normal free to air tv" the other day, and q generic ad break came on... Lol it almost felt cruel to watch this advertiser just blasting it's un-targeted ads at me that will never buy fancy hair shampoo to the masses. If I type in plumber by god I want to see plumber ads in my area.

5b GoogleAds: Still the cheapest way to promote your business. Can you imagine going back to the old day... Printing 5000 flyers paying some kid to delivery it for you Try working out your CPL on that ! I always try to look for new advertising opportunities for my small business from newsletters to billboards the money they want to charge is crazy !! And most of the time untraceable ! With GoogleAds if I spent 1k on ads I can pretty much make up a spreadsheet model and deduce how much I will get for it. Try doing that with a billboard, flyers, school newspaper, BingAds( awful ), newsletter.radio or SMS.

Balancing the products and balance sheet of a company as big as Google must be a nightmare I don't want that job. Most comments here about Google ruining this and that... well its easy don't use their products go be unhappy on another platform. My life is truly easier with Google in my life !

Thank You Google.... You Are Like A Long Marriage... Your Not Perfect And Neither Am I... But My Life is Better With You. Thanks For All The Freebies And Advances.

Anyone here have a pro-Google stance? Because at this point I'm vehemently against the company and most of its products.

There's no good replacement for Calendar or Docs/Sheets as of now, that I'm aware of. Microsoft's suite as mentioned by therealdrag0 is an obvious alternative, and perhaps less advertiser-oriented, but still not a great in-browser option IMO.

Especially when considering the interoperability of the "platform," it's clear Google is streets ahead of the competition.

It's a shame that the best featured tools in this space are also not open-source, and used (probably) to mine massive amounts of data.

I'd be ok if you mined my data while I'm on your servers, but only if you allow me to host my own version of your software for when I don't want to be on your servers.

One of the responses on twitter links to another twitter thread: https://twitter.com/johnny_makes/status/1218668895655079936

This one explains very well how I've recently come to feel about Google Search. I still remember when they were new and everybody flocked to them because they had the cleanest search with the best results. These days I barely see any results anymore because I'm automatically parsing them all as ads.

Because that's what they did here: organic results look more like ads now. So my automatic ad blindness filters them out. Whenever I search on Google, I feel like I'm only getting useless results, so I switched completely to DuckDuckGo now (I've used it before, but only occasionally; from now on it's going to be my default everywhere).

The FTC has spoke on this before. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/business-blog/2013/06/...

I believe nearly all the search engines are still guilty of this one.

I also think firms should be able to buy "blank space." For example facebook or amazon could pay NOT to have an ad above their result. Maybe they already do, I dont see an ad when I search facebook, however I do see an ad for amazon above the top amazon result. Google should just be smart enough to see the top result and the ad are the same link, and handle the situation more appropriately, like tucking the ad text underneath the result, or signifying that the top result owner has paid to hide ads. I have to say, I dont find these results differentiated ENOUGH from the ad. https://i.imgur.com/8Dhr1mj.png

Total aside, but since we are talking google. It's funny how they have worked so hard to make sure that relevant results show up correctly but if you are paying for ad space, they don't care (sure they have relevancy tests but not if the advertiser is dumb enough to spend too much money). For instance, a search for an intravenous needle tip might show an ad for Barb's cross-stitch needle tip (total made-up example). They know that the result isn't relevant, but Barb is spending so much money they don't care. Seems like there should be a solution to this. Or at least to let Barb know she is doing it wrong.

I've been wondering what it is about Google Search results recently, in that they seem _substantially worse_ than ever before. I hadn't quite noticed what the difference was, but I was really surprised, remembering how Google Search results used to be the very best. Now I know what the difference is: making normal results look the same as Ad results.

"Don't be evil" :)

As a small business owner who doesn't run a whole lot of ads and relies on organic traffic, this is really scary. I could be wrong but as a consumer, I prefer clicking on organic results than ads for the most part. Now there is no difference. If my potential customers also think the same way, we would be screwed. Google, please don' do this.

It sounds financially absurd or foolish but someone should work on search, Google can't stay the Monopoly for long

don't see why ppl are surprised about this from an ad company. its not a search engine company and never as been, despite having a large search engine...

It’s interesting, Google is moving completely pay to play if you also look at the ad tech movement right now.

Google has always preferred you just give them a dump truck of money and have them run the ads where they would prefer.

With Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) they generate the ads and the keywords you bid on. Which means you can basically agree to pay Google X amount per month and they will run ppc ads for you.

The part that you won’t find online, since most of these guides come from agencies that want you to pay them to manage the ads, is that these DSA search ads actually work really well, in some cases outperforming agency work.

It could be preferential treatment internally for its own generated content or maybe google just knows which specific copy to show, URL’s to link to and which keywords to surface the ads under, better than any human can.

Either way, it’s starting to paint a bleak future for the web and even as a marketer, it’s not one I’m excited about.

Just like Facebook introducing the "big coloured square with text on" statuses - users give their attention to big coloured squares with text on them, and thus the adverts they were previously accustomed to scrolling right past.

Yes, I think Google reached "peak search" awhile back, and we're now on a downward trend. The search results are increasingly degraded by commercial intervention, by Google and its paying customers. There has always been a conflict of interest between Google and its public consumers, and Google is now leveraging its near-monopoly market position to shift the balance of that conflict to its financial advantage.

time to move away from big evilcorp.

Im done with google.

will use duckduckgo.

Startup elevator pitch: We will do for search what Google did for search. (Joking, just use DDG)

RIP Google.

That's just truth in advertising. Just because they're not Google's ads doesn't mean they shouldn't be shown as such!

I had to check Google to see what the fuss is about... yup, that's pretty bad.

yes, the new design is very bad, those icons are very distracting.... please get back the old design

censor me, rephrase into some kind of classy english accent, or whatever, but sometimes things are wrong and nefarious and should be called out as such, plain for all to see: fock google.

I hope they are only A/B testing. If not, will likely jump ship to Bing, that offers rewards.

My issue isn't so much with the ads being prioritized; it's with when the ad link goes. For example, I often search for something vague because I can't remember the name or the site. When I use Google, the first or second ad is almost always relevant to what I wanted or exactly what I wanted. However, clicking the ad takes me to some sales-pitch link on the site that I don't care to go to. Instead, I'm trying to get to the log in page or front page, or whatever. This forces me to scroll down to the search result of the same name, or just go back up to the omnibox and type the domain in (now that I know what it was).

Even worse type in "What to watch" and now Google pushes its own app on you and pushes down legitimate web results for this search in favor of their web app solution for this search.

As an independent app dev I find this unconscionable.

I expect to be fed web results that are not tainted by Google's own offerings especially not in the form of an web app that pushes other independent results halfway down the page.

It's actions like this that make it clear Google is a threat to the web at large and this threat needs to be neutralized or we will all pay down the line.

Google is a Trillion dollar company for a reason

Googlexit, anyone?

How is this not breaking the internet? Im glad and annoyed they did this. Giving DDG another chance.

Is this a boneheaded PM decision? Having a button to revert to old search layout would have been a safe bet. Unless or this is a mandate from above...

First time in my life I've ever wanted to stop using google.

Anyone have an extension to CSS it back to the way it was?

Perhaps it's worth quoting Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in the original paper on the Google search engine:

> "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. ...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. "

(http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)

At the time they thought this was a bad thing...

With each AdWords display change, Google's been adding billions of dollars to their revenue by confusing and fooling their users and blurring the line between the content and ads.

A visual guide: "A (mostly comprehensive history of Google's ad shading and labeling" https://i.imgur.com/0RxdzBE.png

Google also broke accessibility of their search results with this change. Now instead of the page titles, screen readers only read the entire URL. If they don't fix this soon, I'll be permanently switching to DDG.

Funny I didn't even notice the change. I guess after switching to DuckDuckGo a couple months ago, I haven't felt a need to do a google search.

I admit it's weird seeing a sudden change to how search results are displayed, but I think the use of favicons help draw your eye to brands you trust so I don't mind it.

If this helps ads mix in with real search results, maybe the ads need to be changed to stand out more? I feel people are focusing on "favicons = bad" instead of "ads looking the same as search results = bad".

I've been getting these sorts of search results for a few months. They're actually what convinced me to move to DDG

Suddenly favicon optimization is going to be the hot new trend, and some nonsense far will impress us all with an atrocious one that catches the eye. Bright red arrows, green arrows, red stars? Hmm what will it be!

I do think that Google has done a lot of work to objectively add value to the results page of most search queries (eg pulling data straight from websites like Wikipedia, giving better page previews, etc).

However they are an ad company - and they ultimately benefit from blurring the line between an advertisement and a "real" result. I do feel like it is harder to find certain types of results as a "power user" though, and it feels like the quality of results rapidly drops off after the first page. I am not sure if the fault lies with Google or with spammy websites hacking the SEO.

I wish Google had something like duckduckgo.com/lite (also ddg.gg/lite) for the atypical "power user." It's nothing but text results. I find it really useful for certain types of searches and when you don't want to be bothered by how "busy" the Google search results page has become.

Wow, it’s amazing how a company can stray so far from its humble origins and original ethos.

It’s an interesting study. I remember Google before Gmail. It was a different time with such promise for a better web and better world.

What a shame it’s becoming such an irrelevant piece of junk. Then again, where else could it have went ?

What a shame.

It's an example of a product regressing in quality over time. You can't even search properly using double quotes now. I have to deliberately append 'reddit' or 'stack overflow' to most queries to get decent answers now.

A little while back I started experimenting with changing the user agent string and found that there are actually many different variations of Google’s search UI that are currently accessible. For example, I was surprised to find that by setting the user agent string to Netscape Navigator 4, I could get a lightweight, no-JS version of Google that looked like it was from the early 2000’s. By using a user agent string from IE6/IE9, I could get a version of Google they looked like it was from around 2010 (the former with a simple white navigation bar, and the latter with a more complex black navigation bar). I found it interesting that these UIs seems to be almost frozen in time: many of their navigation bars contain some outdated links that either redirect or 404. I assume this mean that old browser versions are stuck in time in terms of Google search UI also.

Many of these UIs don’t have the controversial changes that Google has recently been implementing, including adding favicons and hiding full URLs.

I also found that there were several different mobile UIs for Google with different navigation schemes and search box styles.

I implemented what I found in a simple Firefox extension that changes the user agent string for Google searches [1].

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...

Google changed their results page? I didn't notice. uBlock Origin does wonders I suppose. For me their results look the same as always. Youtube as well, barely any ads slips the tight net my ad-blocker has.

from today on I officially set my default search engine to ddg

Yelp has also done this. It's very (or rather, isn't very) noticeable on mobile, where it takes some attention to see if you are in algorithmic or sponsored results. Looks like Overture/Goto.com was a bit too early, and a bit not-monopoly-enough.

Hey Google, Don't Be Evil.

Spot on. I find myself having to concentrate quite hard now to distinguish between ad and result.

This is a horrible decision. I find it jarring and disorienting, like I made a mistake and am at some non-Google search engine or something.

I'm almost at the stage that I almost instantly scroll to the bottom and read up the results as I'm finding most of my clicks at at best near the middle and more often finding it's the second page onwards.

PSA: You don't have to use Google.

Why don't they put the icon and url underneath the title? Seems like its around the wrong way!

People are still using Google?

This pushed me over the edge to switch to DuckDuckGo. So far so good.

Someone needs to fix Google! Non profit based search engine?

I thought I was just going crazy. I asked friends and they didn't agree. It actually looks at lot like duck duck go. I never liked their UI, but if I am faced with a privacy destroying goliath and a terrible UI or a privacy-protecting company with a horrible UI...well I think the choice is obvious.

Google took queues from Reddit and fucked their UI. That's why those top UI/UX grads get paid the big bucks I guess.

I've been using DDG for a couple of months now (longest streak ever, I usually go back to Google but the !g options helps). Anyway, I don't see what is different and the same from what ads look(ed) like? could I have become so desensitized so quickly? Is it the missing of that green URL? Hmm, didn't even notice although it's there on DDG.

Completely agree. I haven't used google for so long I thought I'd mis-typed it and got some click farm thing.

My impressions were the same as that tweet. I'm not happy with the new Google search results. At all. I can't tell what is what. Is it an Ad? Is it a page? Is it...? So I've now told people who contact me to avoid Google's home page and use DDG so they get the results they're after. Feedback so far is they prefer the DDG replacement instead of Google. "Fixed" is what one person said. Their POV was that Google's result page was now "broken". (These aren't tech savvy people, either)

I also read in one of the follow up tweets that we now apparently have a form of "banner blindness" where we skip ads because they are deemed not or less relevant. This theory might be right. But Google's solution is not wise: if we associate ads as less relevant and fade out attention when we see Ads versus results, what happens when the entire google results page looks like ads?

I know a lot of Google's own employees read this site and sometimes respond to comments, maybe even ones who had something to do with this change, so it would be very interesting to know what they think. Presumably its own employees use it to search too, so they would've also noticed the decline in result quality? I wonder if there's any discussion about this on their internal channels ("why can't I find info about X?" "what happened to the URLs?")... or do they get a special internal version of search that works more like it used to for everyone else, so they don't notice?

imagine still using google in 2020

Very much a way to mitigate the FTC's requirements on making advertising more distinct than organic results.

It is an unpopular opinion but I believe Google is dying. They have been for a long time. The cancer is that nothing other than search ads generates the revenue and margins they need and the margins on search ads are now down 90% from where they were in 2010.

Personally I'm long on Microsoft/Bing as a candidate for the surviving English language web index. My prediction (which isn't shared by many so don't be surprised if you disagree :-)) is that once Google's dying becomes mainstream and they start heading into ground that Apple will buy their assets, keep Maps, Search, and maybe Waymo and throw the rest away.

I guess that's a nice job for adblockers, to rewrite the search results pages into something that doesn't look (and isn't) ad-ridden.

Another way every Google result now looks like an ad: they're all SEO-spammed with hilarious shoehorned references to various years from 2017 to 2020.

Even though I want them to have more ad cash, DuckDuckGo isn't vastly better: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=buy+printer

Bye bye google. Hello duckduckgo

Good thing I stoped using google search last year :)

Actually I’ve stopping using google for EVERYTHING, except one old legacy throwaway gmail account. I must say, it feels really good!

Seems a search engineer exodus is imminent.. What good is your best work if the world does not get to see it? Can not write this in a resume.

I wish there was a way to directly help Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yandex improve their search results. I've tried both, and it's just not the same.

Google I can bang in cryptic queries like > centos 7 tuned no daemon

and get the 3rd link about how to run tuned in a no daemon mode. Bing/DuckDuckGo have the article at around 7th or 8th place, but prefaced by a lot of "while technically not wrong, not what I'm looking for" links. It's even worse for more niche errors or code snippets.

We cannot, as a healthy internet, let Google control so much of the web.

Something that's kind of related is that I feel I'm seeing more and more spam websites and straight up malicious websites on google. They are often duplicated across many domains.

By malicious I mean websites that destroy the back history, create alerts, beeps the computer (not sure how that works) and other nonsense about virus infections.

Try using search engines like Qwant. Give others a fighting chance.

Prefer DuckDuckGo for searching, if possible. If you don't like DuckDuckGo's results and can't tolerate them, then prefer Startpage to Google, which will give you the same algorithm minus tracking/customization. Even post-acquisition, Startpage is still a more privacy-conscious engine than Google, and their ads are better labeled.

And while I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, quick reminder that unless you're running Lynx or some crap, literally everyone on this blog should have an adblocker installed (preferably uBlock Origin).

I appreciate there are multiple perspectives people have on whether adblocking should be a scorched-earth policy, or whether it's better to just target the worst actors. But disguising ads as native content is abusive enough behavior that you should be blocking those ads no matter where you fall on that spectrum -- and the UI changes here are very clearly, very obviously meant to make ads blend in with normal page results. The 'ad' indicator is meant to look like just another favicon.

I'm seeing people here suggest greaseMonkey scripts, and maybe there's something I'm missing, but I just really don't understand that. Don't restyle the ads, block them! Block advertisers that are abusive.

i'm not as wise as most here, but as a web UX designer, the new "interface" feels odd, awk-wierd, and as many are saying hard to see whats an ad or not. I was around for the NEW COKE, i did the launch event. Coke lost sight of what the changes, tweaks would mean to consumers. In focus groups the subjects where not informed that the OLD COKE would be taken away, deleted, gone. so when asked how it, tasted better the OLD COKE,a majority said better, but better how, and does better mean your taking away my choice?

I finally switched to duckduckgo and its fine! No complaints so far.

I wish there was an easy way to charge customers who are savvy enough to distinguish between ads and organic results different pricing, but until then everyone is subject to the Google tax. Our numbers still show a significant portion of customers come from ad clicks, and we have no choice but to bid on them to stay competitive. I have no problem with companies charging for services, but by decoupling the payment for Google's "free" services from the buyer we're all getting a screwy deal. At least their engineers are paid well though...

It may also be an attempt to work around Ad blocking browsers like Brave.

It’s only a matter of time until they intersperse these organic looking ads into the search results, instead of all at the top and the bottom.

It's funny, because if you run AdSense on your website, Google has very strict guidelines about not misleading users and making a clear distinction between advertisements and your content. However, when Google shows ads on their site, they don't need to follow those rules, they blend them in as closely as possible.

Also, what's the deal with showing an advertisement for the same result that's number one? See the below screenshot.

https://i.imgur.com/f0Kolfv.png

Doesn't this seem wrong? For a lot of people, Google has become a site to not only search the internet, but to simply navigate it. It's normal for someone wanting to visit Expedia to search "expedia.com" or "expedia". They are trying to navigate to that website, Expedia is the first organic result, and yet Expedia is pressured into paying for an advertisement to prevent one of their competitors from appearing first. Even when a competitor hasn't advertised, they're still stuck paying like the above screenshot. To me, this feels inappropriate. Google is getting a hefty payday by simply redirecting someone searching for "expedia.com" to the Expedia website.

Whatever happened to following their own stupid advice about not having more than three ads via ad-sense, not having a bunch of ad's above the fold etc?? I do a search and I see four ad's and more ad's on a map and it's the entire screen. Thanks Google!

I just want compact results again.. searching for coding related stuff I need to be able to quickly scan through a bunch of results to see if it's what I'm looking for.. but now they are so spaced out it's just weird and inefficient.

Funny thing is, this probably did not happen because some PM decided that ads should look like regular results. It is probably an organic result of A/B testing over time, coupled with revenue being an important metric. Small changes that increase revenue get prioritized and over time, it just evolves into this eventually.

I might just switch to Bing because of this.

This is why I adblock. I had adblock disabled for a minute and started clicking ads by accident because I really couldn't tell them apart quickly. Terrible.

It seems like the only difference between the advertising and non-advertising at this point is the “Ad” fav icon. Plus a small (i) info button on the right of an ad.

If websites change their fav icons to “Ad”, effectively all results look like ads.

Doesn’t achieve a lot, but it does highlight an obvious flaw in their design. It could force a change, but most likely they would just filter the fav icon.

Woah it's quite flagrant.

Personally I wouldn't know I have been using ddg for the last few months and I highly recommend it.

stop using google, fools

This was the endgame. Ever wonder why the original release of Chrome combined the search bar and the address bar?

Nobody bookmarks/memorizes domains or URLs anymore. Google == the web, as far as most people are concerned.

90% of the time I search for something, I end up on Wikipedia, StackExchange, or HTML versions of documentation/code repos like Github. So I started just searching Wikipedia etc. directly. Next step in taking back my sovereignty is to get in the habit of cloning git repos and ripgrepping the code/docs instead of relying on Github (another monopoly getting bigger every day).

(Advertising companies HATE him!)

Any CSS wizards that could come up with user injected CSS that would move or highlight ads appropriately?

Is GreaseMonkey the best for that, or is there a nice lightweight alternative more fit to purpose?

Well this is Google you're up against. We techies complain every now and then about Google's practices, we hate it and end up moving on and we find ourselves using them again and again.

They already ruined the web with Facebook by riddling their search results with ads, being part of the ICAAN and having their own TLD, and then introducing AMP. In this case for this ad search result problem, uBlock Origin wipes these ad-links anyway. No need for these other funky hacks suggested in the Twitter thread.

It's also funny to see some Twitter users in the thread who have a website only for me to see on uBlock Origin which reports usages of 'Google Analytics'. Looks like we will all go back to spreading Googleware once again.

Google is now a spam search engine

I just switched to Edge and didn't bother switching out the default search engine (Bing of course) and for most things it works just as well as Google. Ironically, Google is better at searching for .NET related errors ;)

So that is what is going on with my search results.

I hate it. It makes me feel dirty.