Hey, even the founders of google knew in 1998 that the ad system can hurt them:

"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98].

It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], 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/pub/papers/google.pdf

I hear ya.

This thread has made me realize what I don't like about the ad model Google uses (as well as others) beyond the noise.

It totally disconnects the user, such that the user is not actually cared about.

I got that academically but reading the vociferous defense of the fake "how many results you get" figure, I now see that it is inherent. That bit of information benefits no one. It doesn't serve the user. So why keep it? Branding. But its a lie. It's a little lie in terms of who it hurts, but it's common lie. So what else does Google not care about due to the model it uses?

> Other search engines provide just as good searches.

That's just plain false. Perhaps better stated is you're tolerant to the results provided by alternatives.

I tried DDG for a few months and found myself having to re-run my query on Google 60-70% of the time. It was an annoying experience.

> That's just plain false.

I think it's subjective. If 90% of your results are ads, then it's not actually better. What I believe it boils down to is what you search for, and slightly how you search. Personally I'm at a point now that if DDG can't find something, then neither can Google. The difference is that Google will yank out the primary keyword, if it thinks that will yield results, but those are obviously always wrong.

Some things are unsearchable on bother DDG and Google, topics like weightloss, have just been SEO'ed to death and are no longer available online. Others maybe two ads on DDG, but an entire page on Google.

I've used DDG for 5+ years. Its results used to be mixed, but for the last 2-3 years, its results are good. I only fall back to Google for less than 2% (1 in ~50) searches, though I do rely a lot on DDG's !bang searches that redirect to specific sites for different technical topics. But I don't see that as a failing of DDG. When I do fall back to Google, it's for "needle in a haystack" searches.

Try DDG browser on your phone. That was what got me over to the other side. After few unsuccessful attempts on the desktop.

What's wrong with ads? What is another better system?

It isn't a problem with ads. The problem is the misalignment between the business model and the product, and also the misalignment between the business model and the main users of the system.

Another better system? Look at the early days of Google, they never would have gotten off the ground without very generous support from academia and specifically their university. What if it had been kept a university-based product?

And yes, it could have reached its current search capacity and still remained a Stanford-based initiative. Stanford has the resources. We might not have gotten any of the other google products out of that, but Google seems to cancel them all anyway, so I don't see a huge difference.

Does Stanford actually have that kind of resources? Based, say, on Randal Munroe's estimation of Google's capacity?

You can get a better estimate from Google's CapEx in it's financials.

Stanford's endowment is ~30 billion. Google's CapEx is ~20 billion a year and has been for the last 4 years or so. You can weasel about exactly how much of that is attributable to search as opposed to other initiatives, (but even if you look back a decade to when Google was mostly search, it was running a CapEx of ~5 billion/year). So even making pretty favorable estimations, you'd be looking at Stanford being bankrupt around now.

For some products it's obviously a fine system. A majority of people will never pay for a search engine, or social media, so ads are a good way to pay for those services.

Where I think companies, such as Google or Meta, goes off the deep end, is the amount of money you can realistically extract from advertising, without compromising your product. Both Google and Meta (much to my surprise) are extremely wealthy, but at the cost of what I'd call decency or morale. Both could have fine products and successful business, but somewhat smaller, and be financed by ads.

If you look back that the original Google ads, where they not successful? They certainly seemed to pay the bills back them. My point is: If your company is financed by advertising, you need to accept that there's a limit to your potential growth, if you still want to be view in an overall positive light.

Yes, there is a limit on how many ads they can show to you without deteriorating user experience but sometimes they just don't care. They think like this: Q2 results were weaker than expected, let's show more ads to users in order to boost our Q3 results.

Conflict of interest. Search and ads must be separate entities. Meaning, Alphabet can certainly sell ad space, but via a separate broker.

Ditto Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, etc.

Giving money to businesses in exchange for goods and services?

Subscription, typically, to align customers with users.