Indeed. The reason I used the google homepage in the first place was how uncluttered it was. Adding ads and disturbing that quality seems like a phyrric move.
They have less eyeballs, I presume. Their competition is FB + IG + Whatsapp + whatever it is today's young people spend their time on. They could have made YT as socially engaging as Instagram but they failed along the way.
No, I have not, but I find quotes like the ones bellow (taken from the article) as pure lies told to their investors:
> The company wants to make it easier for users to discover and buy new products because they shop in spurts while watching TV or sitting in the bathroom
No, no-one in the under-40 target is sitting in front of the TV and then is deciding to shop for stuff, almost everyone in the under-40 target is sitting on their phones (mostly on FB + IG + Whatsapp) even when watching TV, even when in the bathroom, and it's in there (on FB + IG + Whatsapp + other social networks) that the buying decision is made. TV is for the older-than-40 audience.
Because they appear to be obsessed with growth at nearly all costs. Which each passing month it looks more and more likely that short term thinking has began to drive how Google acts and reacts.
This has been getting more and more clear for a while. I had already lost a lot of respect after Google decided to become a defense contractor, but this is just greedy and antithetical to the values that made most of us start using Google in the first place.
Google has been selling garbage ad placements for years which has been an obvious revenue boosting game, but nobody seemed to care.
Let’s hope Google gets its priorities back in order. I had thought Schmidt leaving the board was a good thing, but he seems to have been pushed out by those whose incentives are much more short term.
Companies can be hijacked by people with the wrong incentives.
They have had many years of revenue growth that exceeds eyeball growth. They did that by slowly pushing organic results down the fold in favor of ads. That trick is played out now...there's little real estate above the fold left to cede to ads now.
So, to maintain revenue growth that exceeds eyeball growth, they need new tricks.
In my experience with Google search, it rarely gives me useful results on the first page. So much so that I've developed a bit of muscle memory. When I have to resort to doing a Google search, I have to consciously stop myself from immediately clicking to get the next page of results.
For some years now I have the feeling Apple is investing in / helping DuckDuckGo. The most obvious indications are that DDG was added to the list of search engines in Safari, and DDG uses Apple Maps (example [1]). I bet Apple is using DDG to weaken Google while officially keeping a distance.
I also bet Apple is not interested in running a search engine themselves. They would either have to muddy their brand by allowing questionable results, or filter everything that is not family friendly and risk being seen as the big censor.
Now that they've used DBM, DFP, and AdExchange to cement their U.S. ad monopoly, they can only get more growth by shutting down the flow of money to the rest of the internet. So they need more inventory of their own to compete with that of their clients' (e.g. other websites that use Google Analytics, DFP, GCP, AdWords, etc).
I would love to see an estimation of the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted by companies (and by consumers who buy their products) on Google ads.
Time to install a mobile browser with ad-blocking capabilities. Suggestions? I haven't used Firefox on my phone in years, but I remember it being slower than a snail
I was a FF on android fan for year but wouldnt take the initial super long page loads anymore. The first webpage of the day was taking 10+ seconds to load, almost like it was fighting with DNS. I switched to Kiwi Browser and have been super happy. Fork of Chrome, lets you use any extension you want, no tracking and nightmode
> I'm always concerned with an app that routes all my traffic through a VPN.
Many of these use the VPN subsystem of Android, but are not actually VPNs -- that is, they aren't routing anything off of your device. Using the VPN subsystem is just a way to be able to filter network traffic without having to have rooted your device.
The only downside is that you can't use such an app and a real VPN at the same time.
Brave browser for Android has served me well since 2017, but I am seeing some AdWords/Adsense crap filtering in every now and then. Still, it's so rare that I find myself having to mention that it does happen.
If you are on android you can block ads entirely by setting a private DNS provider, and using one that blocks ads. For IOS you can use a VPN to do the same.
Looking at the settings in Firefox Focus, it seems that's only picked up by Safari, correct? I guess if I have Firefox Focus installed I might as well just use that as my browser
Yeah, only Safari uses them. The non-Focus Firefox app also has tracking protection built in, if you'd like to have tabs and such.
The main reason that you'd use Safari instead of a different browser is that it has better support for newer standards. Every other iOS browser is powered by an iOS webview, which Apple lets lag behind a bit.
The big difference is that you can block ads, analytics, and other tracking outside of safari using a VPN, or using a private DNS provider for android.
Firefox on mobile is really good these days. With tracker-blocking enabled it usually performs better than Chrome for me. Most of the time these days websites are slow because of all the trackers and ad traffic.
They also have some cool features like being able to send tabs between different devices.
What would the default ads be on a search homepage considering there are no "keywords" to scope it to? I'd imagine non-targeted billboard-style ads by default with some targeting at the account level? Would it include retargeted ads?
Edit: nevermind, it's not on a blank search page, it's embedded within some news-feed style UI, so it's probably just straightforward google mobile ads
Since google tracks customers they can target a lot without keyword searches. I can imagine the homepage click price would be high for “pregnant women over 45 with an income over $100k” and stuff like that.
> The gallery ads are part of an effort to make search results more visual.
By distracting from legitimate results?
Like others will say here, I finally switched to DDG earlier this week. It’s good enough and you get accustomed to doing a !g pretty quickly when needed.
They often lag behind the Google and even DDG results by a while, so search anything time-sensitive first with DDG then with Google if you still can’t find it.
The basic version is free, you can download data state by state (country by country when you are traveling) so it doesn't need a data connection on the road (but online search is available if you do have a data connection). It does routing for cars / bikes / pedestrian and has decent turn-by-turn instructions that you can configure to your liking. The underlying data comes from OpenStreetMap (hence the name of OSM + and(roid)), so if the data is wrong you can fit it yourself.
You can get an iPhone 7 for a lot less than that too if you wait for a sale from a retailer like Best Buy or a cell carrier and not from Apple directly.
"In Maps, ads will now appear in recommended search queries, on routing pages and during navigation"
Ugh, this is sad and clever at same time - during navigation screen is on all the time and one usually glances at route from time to time even if it is just "straight ahead" for couple of kilometers. Moreover ad will be potentially visible to all passengers as well.
Cynically, yes, but this is how humans follow directions anyway. Are your friends giving you an unpaid ad when they say "head down main st, past the Burger King"?
That's how you navigate if you had absolutely nothing to follow but word of mouth and need to remember every step, vs. a highlighted line on a map you just chug along without having to think more than a turn ahead, which you are reminded of anyway.
That's a terrible practice for me. The way my brain works, street names are far more useful than landmarks, particularly if those landmarks are businesses.
They already do this heavily in India. Mostly due to a lack of good road signage. Landmarks are what defined navigation. Where I live (Bangalore), we have junctions named after KFC and Sony, cos those stores have been there for so long.
"How much to route traffic off the interstate past my business?"
on a serious note - the Telsa in-car mapping app uses google map tiles, and they are choosng what businesses show up with icons when you look at the map.
It's pretty telling when you search "bar" or something in a given area and the most commercial places pop up with icons and names, obscuring a sea of minor red dots that are also in fact bars. And moving the map tiles doesn't automatically research either. Unless you thoroughly scrubbed an area, searching and researching for "bar" every half dozen blocks, you are only going to gleam a small % of the places in that area.
At least they haven't brought this corporatism to google earth desktop yet. I can pull up on the map every single bar and restaurant in Los Angeles in one search if I wanted to.
This is actually the reason I stopped using Google Maps for most of my navigation. It used up most of my 5 gb monthly allotment over the timespan of a week of travel/driving.
I typically only use ~500 mb of data per month otherwise.
A lot of places outside of US (like Tokyo for example) simply don't support offline caching mode, which makes google maps a real data hog when you travel.
Yes, that's what I've done for my home city, but it's not especially practical when travelling, when compared to other mapping apps that let you download entire countries' map data at once.
Why has nobody else mentioned this? This is how google's gonna either get slapped with lawsuits, find that folks switch and make openstreetmap.org suddenly usable, or even both.
Aaaaand none of that matters. Not many people enjoy sitting there, mapping stuff, so openstreetmap is not going to get any better without corporations contributing to it like they do with Linux kernel.
Lawsuits doesn't matter much as well - with Google's power they can either:
- Afford a settlement, bunch of them
- Make the litigation to take long-long-long time
- Lobby for some law to protect them.
Nobody ain't gonna switch to anymore. Folks that are ok with Apple maps are already using it and besides Apple maps there is no huge competitor. Here we Go maps are good for navigation but they don't know anything about business around you so good luck finding anything that you don't know precise address for.
Even folks on iPhones who use Apple Maps have Google Maps installed. For me it:
- I just drive around to a place I know about: Apple Maps
- I need to find a place by name: Google Maps
- I go to bush: Here we Go maps a maybe Google Maps because I can download them as well.
People need to realise that Google is unstoppable machine right now with _enormous_ resources and they can do almost whatever.
Recently EU slapped a "huge" fine on Google. So what? What happened? Has anything changed?
The real solution is for corporations who depend on navigation services is to pay people to contribute to openstreetmap like it happens with Linux kernel right now. Freedom for people, tool for business, all win.
OSM has better data in certain aspects. The big problem with OSM is not about the data, but that it isn't designed to be used as a map. When someone visits osm.org, it is very barebones and the search feature doesn't work very well to find places unless you know the syntax. The team working on OSM themselves say that OSM is not a map, but instead a database.
Anyway, Google would never have gotten the data that it has without the contributions of the people. And the dedicated mappers in my city have all turned to OSM now. Hence leading to better mapping in terms of road data, bicycle paths and other features that businesses do not care about mapping.
I agree with the search, but being a map is where OSM shines.
When I visit google maps a see a bunch of colorful boxes and notable locations, I have no idea why it chooses the notable locations it does but it appears to be either paid or some sort of SEO shenanigans, a local curry place is list but one of the biggest train stations in the country isn't (Southern Cross in Melbourne), recently they've also tried to cover the map with the "explore" panel.
When I look at the same area with OSM it shows the train station and shows me the street names with the street names all those colored boxes (buildings) are information, without them they're just noise.
And when you zoom into Google Maps, the colours for "built-up area" and "open space that isn't a park" get more and more similar until they're almost indistinguishable, so from certain point on all you're seeing is a bunch of streets against a featureless grey background, which I find rather irritating.
> dedicated mappers in my city have all turned to OSM now
That's very encouraging to hear! It motivates me to push more for using OSM in client projects, as it's the best alternative to Google Maps, especially if the latter starts showing ads.
But there are very good mobile apps that use OSM data. In my experience, OSM data can be excellent in some areas, and dismal in others. So, literally, YMMV. Fortunately, OSM data is excellent where I live, so I use that.
Depending on the place name and how obnoxious the popup is, it may be yet another thing for someone to be reading at a bad time, which could cause a collision.
With road signs and billboards, the road is still in your peripheral vision, but with many car/cupholder mounts you have to look down enough to where you can't really react to a car coming at you from the left or right.
Waze started doing this and it’s annoying, but I’m already looking at waze so it’s typically when I’m stopped or during some other period where I think it’s safe to look at my phone while driving.
I feel sorry for the advertisers as it’s dumb stuff like showing me an ad for “there’s a kfc nearby would you like to eat here” when I’m driving to a business meeting at 10am.
But how likely are you to use Waze when you are half heartedly driving around to a destination? I mostly use Waze when I care about finding the fastest route somewhere (because I feel it has some of the most up to date traffic info), which is when I would least want a detour to some other business along the way.
And sometimes for driving long distances to get notifications of things along the way (like speed traps). In those cases I guess I could use ads for where to stop and eat but since Waze only shows ads when stopped (as far as I can tell) the likelihood of it showing me something relevant at the right time I’d want to grab a bite to eat while cruising down the highway seems unlikely.
The only value I see in it is reminding me that oh yeah there is a KFC around here maybe I should try it next time. And maybe they have some way to show attribution there (after all they have location info so maybe they can see how many people go to that business within a certain number of days of seeing an ad, or after a certain number of exposures to the ad).
It's ridiculous on a smaller phone, on my SE these ads for fast food and gas takes up most of the screen. Also ironic considering waze is a pretty locked down app regarding preventing the driver from being distracted and fiddling with it on the fly. If I'm hungry I'll punch something in, and if I need gas I'll stop at any of the half dozen stations on the side of the road, not because of a waze ad. In fact I'll probably start subconsciously avoiding these places that are ruining my navigation experience.
I really, really, really wish there was serious competition to Google Maps. That's the one Google product I've had to repeatedly come back to because there's nothing even close in terms of functionality available for Android. I was hoping Here WeGo would be an alternative, but it's kind of a joke. I'd install Apple Maps if I could. I'd trade in my Pixel for an iPhone if it didn't mean losing real Firefox, NewPipe, and root-level ad blocking.
I could agree with all 3 of those points, but I'm mostly thinking of the latter. The iOS browser engine isn't bad, but it has security quirks with things like iframe navigation and it still somewhat lags behind with PWA features. As a web developer who likes to tinker, I just don't find it ideal to be saddled with the browser engine that comes with iOS.
All iOS web browsers are forced to use the Safari web engine, unlike on Android where the Firefox Preview (Fenix) and Firefox Focus are using a mobile-optimized version of Gecko called GeckoView.
Also, iOS Firefox doesn't allow the installation of add-ons.
if Google Maps becomes too difficult or terrible to use, and there's a better competitor, users will naturally switch to the alternative.
Unless you guys can start something better, you'll just have to use Google Maps?
I don't think Apple Maps or any other service has a good enough data or feature set right now or forseeable future, outside of the California or US geographic area.
Either Google Maps raise it's developer API pricing to support all their investment into the service, and I'm sure it's not cheap to support, especially with their streetview efforts, or else ads go into the consumer side.
For a long time we enjoyed the free ride from Google Search's desktop revenue.
Sygic, Tomtom, iGo, Garmin (HW) are very solid maps with good coverage in Europe and nearby countries. They have big POI databases, more or less good search, usually good UI (and optimized for driving). They primarily lack traffic (e.g. Sygic has maybe 1% of what Google has for traffic info), social info (reviews, pictures etc.) and maybe some general polishing. But if people will decide to switch then these particular features can be added and covered. But no way people will turn from ad infested spyware to pay for apps. 20$ vs 0$ - the answer is clear.
I'm betting this is going to appear the same way as it does on Waze, which shows fast food logos along your route, as well as popup ads whenever you're stopped. Annoying, but not intrusive enough to be considered a driving distraction, IMO.
IMO they are pretty distracting. When I'm stopped is when I glance at the screen to see my next move, and these popups persist for me when I start moving unless I close them. Pretty ironic considering waze is the most fussy navigation app regarding not letting the driver get distracted, unless it's profitable I guess!
I'm already considering ditching the Gmail app as it displays ads at the top that look just like new e-mails (I was an Inbox user before); although I am not quite sure what app to switch to.
Sadly there isn't really an alternative that even approaches Maps. There are a lot of 'ok' alternatives but Maps is just in an other league in terms of POI, Navigation and UI.
As someone who disabled GApps on my phone and uses only OSMAnd, I've found it acceptable for me, but know others would not be satisfied.
At least if/when I search and fail to find, I remember and add it later when I get to a desktop. Slowly, OSM should end up being able to serve my uses well enough, and hopefully others too.
As an investor this makes me wary. How much short term value are they gaining by sacrificing user satisfaction? Google's UX is pretty top notch today and they don't really have any relevant competitors. With this move, they are creating space for differentiation along better UX and potentially losing out a share of users over time.
Simply avoid using google services. They are pathetic. Let's see what the European Union says about this aggressive advertisement. Especially the Google Maps thing will obviously trigger our consumer care responsibles.
You're here; therefore, we can assume you're a high-value consumer to advertise to. When enough people take the $1/month option, advertisers will be primarily advertising to consumers with low purchasing power. As that happens, the cost of advertising on Google AdWords nosedives, and Google is left making substantially less money.
Maybe most people aren't like you and I. But I don't think anyone at Alphabet is willing to risk adding complexity to potentially earn less.
This ignores the potential fallout as the message can be distorted from "Optional payment for Google Maps" to "Google starts collecting money for Maps", and finally to "Google Maps costs $X".
I get down voted often for saying iPhone is cheaper, like the old man said, price is what you pay and value is what you buy. Android and Google are expensive.
I got a 128gb SE for less than $250 shipped on ebay, graded at B condition but I couldn't find a scratch on it, not even by the ports (yes, plural :^) and the battery is at 95% health. Just as quick as an x in real world use, the screen repair is way cheaper, and I could stretch the battery life two days.
I love the size too, the last one handed iPhone and I forget it's in my pocket.
It's only expensive if you want to pay extra for a status symbols. I have a 5500mah Android phone with a great screen and hardware that costed me around $150
For the sake of argument, let me point out that you don't have to install google play services on Android device. (Unlike Apples's world, here you actually have a control over your phone)
Google had a massive multi-quarter campaign to get people to install their Google App recently across all possible mediums...now it's clear it was tied to this ad-push.
I am from India and sometimes jealous of China and Russia for having good local Google alternatives, Baidu and Yandex respectively. Google has more than 95% search market share in India and there is no competitive product even close.
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