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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • The more you scroll, the more ads they can serve on one page. So if you scroll to the bottom, don’t see the results you want, you’re likely to try to reword what you were searching for which will bring up new results and more ads. When you think about the fact that 4-5 of the first results are ads generally (if not more) and you have to scroll past those to get a result that isn’t an ad, you recognize that they are maximizing time spent looking at ads because that’s what they are selling to their real customers (the ad services for whom they aggregate).

    This scenario makes it more likely that you will click on a sponsored result, backtrack, scroll some more, not see what you’re looking for, re-word your search query, click on maybe another sponsored result, backtrack etc.











  • Part of the problem is that Google now defaults to “All” (web, shopping, news, video, etc) instead of defaulting to Web only and allowing you to select if you want video, or shopping or news etc. That’s a lot of what I see complained about most.

    This is first and foremost because Google is an ad aggregation company and they literally want to keep you on the page longer to serve you more ads.

    The second problem is that the SEO for Google is so abused at this point that it’s laughable. Search engine optimisation was useful until companies and people started trying to hack it in order to have their results show up before competitors. Because large competitors also have money, it’s no longer enough to just pay to play.







  • They counted comments and the number of upvotes (or what have you) in an attempt to stop trolls and bad actors. If you didn’t have enough comments you couldn’t post anything to the message boards and therefore could really engage with the message oars above a certain level. I remember that some also used to limit the number of comments any one user account could make per day, especially new users. It’s been 20 years or more at this point and I don’t remember those blogs or message boards, honestly.