As a user, I'm still baffled that the interface to view and manage the apps I have installed on the system - which is 90 out of 100 times why I'm opening the play store - is tucked away in some obscure corner of the app.

The other 10 times, it's because I want to install some specific app that I already know and I just want to get to the page of that exact app - either through a direct link or through the store's search.

There were exactly zero times where I opened the store with the motivation "gee, I really feel like installing a new app, but I have no idea what it should be... Let's check out the recommendations!"

Yet this seems to be what the entire UI is optimized for.

Just opened the App Store to check. There’s an ad for chrome on the home screen. I click search and before I start typing search suggestions pop up. The first one is for chrome. I type Firefox and click search. The first result is chrome.

This is also true on Apple's app stores, to be fair. I didn't know this until I got a MacBook Pro recently and my assumption that Apple's controls would be tighter than Google's was proven quite wrong when I opened the Mac App Store for the first rime.

> Does Apple do that on the App Store?

Yes they do. Their search already sucks in normal circumstances—I remember searching for “Pinboard” (the bookmarking service) and had to scroll by thirteen pinball (the game) apps before starting to see Pinboard apps—but you can type in the exact name of the app you want had have an ad for a competitor above it. Not only is it allowed, it’s encouraged.

I usually use the app store in Fedora and am used to finding what I want and having it installed within secounds.

Occasionally, I help people with their Mac's, and it can easily take half an hour to get something installed (finding their password etc), and on iOS, there are ads that buries the real results.

Then I am reminded how spoiled I am in the Linux world! No ads and quick access to a large selection of open source and commercial programs, no accounts or logins!

> Does Apple do that on the App Store?

Yes. In fact, I often get sponsored stuff before Apple’s own apps, when I’m searching for the Apple app. I’ll also get things like games, when I’m looking for development or productivity apps. It’s crazy.

One of the things that I do, each morning, is take a long walk, listening to music.

I’m an Apple One subscriber, so there’s no limit to the music from the catalog. I don’t buy individual songs. It’s already been paid, so they aren’t selling me anything.

I use the “Discovery Station” playlist, which gives you random songs, based on your preferences.

It used to be quite good, but lately, it’s been stuffing weird pop songs into the playlist. These are ones that I’d never listen to, otherwise. I will tell Siri that I don’t like the songs, but they keep coming, anyway. I often dislike up to five songs in a row; at which time, the phone gives up on the station, and starts feeding me random songs from my library.

This renders the “Discovery Station” pretty much worthless.

It’s fairly obvious that the playlist has been corrupted by paid results.

Pandora has always done the best job of selecting relevant unknown music for me, but the limit on skips (even for paid accounts), makes it worthless. Undiscovered music is frequently obscure for a reason, so I can sometimes skip a majority of the selections. I’ve always been puzzled about why Pandora never got borged by Apple or Microsoft. They were excellent, a decade before the AI hype bubble was even a broken rubber on the drug store shelf.

Same thing happened to me. I wanted to get "Fit Notes" - a free and ad-free app. I searched for it and the first result is some adware/subscription-based crap. I skip over. I scroll down part the "Sponsored: Related to your search" section with a whole bunch of others. I am still seeing more paid/in-app-purchase/subscription-based apps.

At this point I thought that the app didn't exist for newer versions of Android.

It turned out that it was the second result, just above the "sponsored" one. It looked so much like a part of the first result that I just skipped over it.

Learned that App Store does this too during a recent MFA rollout.

What really surprised me was that when instructed to install Google Authenticator, a significant portion of people (I'd estimate close to 50%) would search the exact name and then proceed to reach to install the sponsored top result with a completely different name until I stopped them.

I wonder how much this can end up contributing to the Kleenex-ification of a brand or a term. You search for firefox and random other browsers come up. Now browsers in general are associated with the firefox term. Of course, when it comes down to it, there isn't much difference between browsers anyway, the UI is different but they all need to work with the same websites, and people have been using specific application names in place of the type of data/work ("Excel file" being used to refer to a CSV).

I just searched "Firefox" in the app store. The top result is Google Chrome with an Ad indicator (Google paid for higher placement). Second is Firefox.

Results may vary:

Searches for Amazon, Temu, Shein - result in each being listed in the promotional panel and then as the first result.

For Firefox: Chrome is listed in the promotional panel and Firefox as the first result (below it).

The promotional panel has a different background colour and “Ad” badge, but is otherwise identical to other listings.

Two results fit on the screen: the promotional panel and the first listing. Diverging from Google is that the ad result is obvious and doesn’t push the search result out of view.

Sometimes it's not even close, I went to download the PAX Australia app and the top result was Revolut. I'd love to know the set of circumstances that the algorithm picked them to sponsor there.

I’ve stopped using either the play/app store to search for apps. I search kagi and then click-through to the appropriate app store.

As a curiosity, this is a common strategy for advertising! But people still disagree whether it is the best investment. You can generally win on your own name with comparatively low bids, because it is obviously the most relevant search term, and relevance is often factored into the price you pay for ad placement. So you may choose to bid defensively, to stop competitors from advertising on your name. Even so, the obvious counter-argument is that the person searched for you _explicitly_ by name, so how likely are they to click on your competitor's ads? I don't have a ton of experience, so perhaps some orgs make the decision in a data-driven way, but I suspect most make the decision in a mostly faith-based way.

Try searching for chrome using ma edge.

It basically intercepted said search and gave me an ad saying to keep using edge.

Thinking back it seems unbeleivable so I searched.

https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-wind...

> Does Apple do that on the App Store?

I believe so - and it seems the devs know it happens, bevause I often see a paid ad for "Chrome" if I search "Chrome"

Testing this with Aurora Store and the search terms actually give me the correct results. Another reason to use that over Google Play Store

The Santander bank does the same when you enter the address of a broker while doing a transfer. They show an ad for one of their investment funds

It is same on PlayStore and AppStore.

You would be surprised to know Apple started this in AppStore before Google on PlayStore. I assume it is because Google wanted to be safe from Antitrust lawsuits (Follow Apple rather than going there first).

> Amazon

Speaking of amazon... By god amazon search is horrid for this.

If you search for HP laptop you get a whole bunch of sponsored Lenovo's at the top of the page.

Apple is even worse. Try searching for Grok in the app store and it will be almost impossible to find due to some deal they have with OpenAI.

Same on maps as well. That has actual annoying consequences where you end up at the wrong place.

On play and app stores if you search for Microsoft Authenticator, which I imagine most people working at a company would be doing, there's an Ad first, which is rather annoying for a security application

I find it's still not that difficult to have that "special power", but you have to adapt your tools. Before the only tool you needed was Google, now you need to know which one to use for each type of request.

I mostly juggle with Google, Kagi, and various LLM (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity... but the differences matter less).

Google deliberately made search worse so users do multiple searches for each query so they can profit off showing more ads:

https://journalrecord.com/2025/02/20/is-google-making-search...

Right? Google is dog caca now. Myself and everyone I know keep getting sent to AI-written garbage nonsense slop websites, or for some reason, to the Hindustan Times

I have found both perplexity and Claude.ai good enough. Since I pay for claude because of development, why not use it as search engine as well? So maybe the future is multi provider?

> I didn't thought of that as a special power. I thought it was natural, like driving a car, or speaking English.

You’re clearly taking for granted any learnt skills which you have and projecting them to others. A substantial portion of the world population can’t speak English, and I suspect the grand majority of humans don’t know how to drive a car either.

I know you have to turn the wheel to turn the car and that I should keep to the right, but that doesn’t count as actually knowing how to properly operate a car.

> I genuinely think Google is finished as a search engine for the web.

Google Search is garbage, but highly unlikely to be "finished". Millions of people still find it useful, and Google is adopting "AI" on the results page just like any other "AI" web search service. The reason the UX is not good is, first of all, subjective, and second of all, because Google is in the advertising business, and they've found it more profitable to corrupt their results page and deal with any negative feedback, than to deliver clean results like they did decades ago without the profit.

This is a carefully planned, tested, and executed design decision, just like anything they do on the SERP, and not some arbitrary sign that they don't know what they're doing anymore.

The possibility of a new player disrupting the dominance of a trillion-dollar corporation that has built a highly optimized index of the entire web over decades, by leveraging technology that requires vast resources to run, is highly unlikely. Not impossible, but highly unlikely. Google could improve the search UX tomorrow if they wanted to.

> The only problem is that we don't have a solid contender yet.

Sure we do. Kagi offers a much better UX, and I haven't had the need to rely on external results for nearly a year now. I haven't tried Perplexity, but I imagine it could be good as well, depending on the quality of its index.

But these are relatively niche services catering to an audience that cares about these things. The sad reality is that most people simply don't, and will use whatever search engine is set as default in their browser. Which is why being the default is worth paying millions, and is literally keeping companies like Mozilla alive.

It absolutely is. I fear for the older generations and less tech minded people who google their bank, and get some random phishing site. Or similarly google what should be libre software and get some random malware on a site that looks 'close enough'.

Lets call it what it is, a cancer, one that literally enables countless bad actors and purely for a search engine's own profit. In theory theres a time and place for ads, but maliciously inline and disguised as the actual results people want arent it.

You also should just stop using Google Search. DuckDuckGo is solid, or if you don't want to use search results from Bing's index, I've been very happy with Brave Search.

If you're trying to do anything in terms of official documents, there's a middleman charging more. I searched for "passport application" the other day and it was 4 ads of people offering this service.

My dad was trying to get an ESTA visa a couple years ago and ended up paying twice the actual price, because he can't discern what's the official site or not.

Strong agree but unless it gets built-into the browser, the average net denizen simply won't do it. The number of times I've seen a friend of the family try to show me an article on their laptop while casually trying to shoot down the pop-up ads like they're playing a marketers version of Missile Command was astonishing.

And EVEN if they do install a blocker, 9 times out of 10 it'll be AdBlock Plus and not uBlock Origin [1]. You know, the one that allows companies to PAY to have their ads whitelisted.

This doesn't even cover browsing on a smartphone which unless you're running Android Firefox which supports browser extensions, you have very few options.

[1] Notice I said uBlock Origin and NOT uBlock.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

The FBI agrees with you: https://www.pcmag.com/news/fbi-recommends-installing-an-ad-b...

Indeed. I got my credit card phished after buying tickets from an 'official' local museum website, it was the first result on Google. Later on I realized that all five top results were scam sites, the real one was 6th. They eventually fixed it.

Absolutely. I cannot use anything online anymore without pihole + ublock

Let's be more precise about what ads actually are, based on how the ad industry works today: malware

All of the ad links are broken by our firewall at work. People complain but eventually they learn to skip the ads. Absolutely a security risk, search ads are second only to phishing emails as a threat vector.

Adblockers are a safety risk of their own - you’re giving @gorhill admin-level access to your browser.

I’ve started asking ChatGPT to give me the right link. I can’t imagine they won’t start embedding ads too but so far, it’s been pretty clean.

I feel like there’s at least some country in the world where the legal regime would be amenable to ruling against Google if they were taken to court over trademark squatting by the trademark holders.

Can you in principle sue people buying these ads for trademark infringement? (I realize in practice the answer is that it's not worth the game of whack-a-mole.)

This is not allowed and the advertisers are on borrowed time: https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en

You can bid on competitor's keywords, but not use their trademarked name in the copy, especially not in a deliberately confusing way.

But I don't think Google moderates this very proactively.

Google SERPs are personalized. Likely OP is a Midjourney user which is recorded in his targeting profile.

When OP searches for Midjourney as a Midjourney user, Google’s algorithm infers he might want to consider an alternative because why would an existing user search for the product they’re already using.

We see evidence supporting this given no Midjourney ad showed up for a direct keyword match query; and only alternatives triggered.

This is kinda like Amazon retargeting you with alternative toasters after you just bought a new toaster. Most people think this is stupid. Well, the most likely cohort to buy a new toaster is a person that just bought one because they’re not satisfied with their purchase.

Yes, I can. I get deevid as a first result occupying the whole screen (on mobile) as it lists the sub-links, too (one of them being a sub-link to the "AI kissing generator")

Then comes PixVerse, a sponsored result for a google play app.

Then difuss.me.

Then comes midjourney.

Yes, I see something similar for the query "Midjourney": 4 sponsored results from Deevid, Artlist.io, Lovart, Pollo AI (see the screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/ESM3xtJ)

Finally Midjourney. Unlike in the article I have never visited Midjourney.

It was number 1 when using the "Web" link, it was also the number 1 when I clicked "all"

Not sure why they get very different result.

Just tried on my own on google, I get the Midjourney official site on 1 result, followed by Wikipedia about Midjourney. I am not a midjourney user.

Same. On an android browser, not signed into any Google accounts. Got the legitimate result at the very top.

here's my repro: https://imgur.com/a/p0wBgWy

That's when you are not logged into Google, they will show some organic results before the ads.

Seriously, all I get is Midjourney links and links to midjourney official accounts on a number of other platforms

Going incognito, the first link is a sponsored ad for... midjourney

I searched on DDG, first result was www.midjourney.com the second result was the Wikipedia article about midjourney.

Wondering if OP has malware that’s injecting results into the search.

In a "private session" tab I'm getting on the first page:

- the official site - their subreddit - their Discord server - Wikipedia - Facebook - LinkedIn

I showed Kagi to my partner yesterday and she instantly became addicted to it.

Going public puts too much growth pressure on companies.

You can't be happy building great products and thinking long term, nope, you've gotta show higher growth in the shorter term too.

Hey freediver,

I bought a kagi shirt in the initial batch, got it, and then after one wash it unraveled. Your support team was great and gave me a coupon for a replacement shirt, which I ordered, yet it never shipped. Could I get that shirt :D

Kudos for Kagi. I stopped using Google and gladly pay Kagi for search to not show advertisements or junk.

If Kagi ever starts showing ads to me, a paying customer, I'll ditch it too. If I get the feeling that Kagi is selling my search history, I'll ditch it too.

Keep being awesome, Kagi CEO

How is Kagi for non-US folks? I've tried switching to DDG a while back but the experience for me, living outside the US, was not great. Sure, programming related searches were pretty good, but everything else was not.

Does Kagi have a better localized experience?

And we thank you for it! I've been a paying customer for about a year now and I can't remember the last time I purposefully used Google search.

Kagi is so good

And we are very grateful

How will you fight the inevitable slide that happens if you ever got on top? I’m convinced Google started with the absolute best of intentions before the money and greed turned them into a horror movie villain.

Yeah but you're now filling up Hackernews threads with advertising, so.... same evil?

Market momentum probably. People "Google" things. People don't "Kagi" things or "DuckDuckGo" things.

I question why Instagram is so popular. I don't use it but my wife does and she constantly runs into errors and bugs. It's a multi billion dollar company and suffers from the sort of issues that beta software does.

They got to their position first, got the market share and then enshittifed from there.

Had to dig up this link, 1999 review[0]:

"Google (www.google.com) is a pure search engine - no weather, no news feed, no links to sponsors, no ads, no distractions, no portal litter. Nothing but a fast-loading search site. Reward them with a visit."

[0] https://i.redd.it/uea6u7c4oje31.jpg

My memory says that wasn't such a big selling point. When Google first came out it blew all other search engines away in terms of result quality.

If, back then, Yahoo and Altavista were minimalist and Google was a garish nightmare of ads and flashing gifs and nested banners and affiliate buttons, I would still have happily used it for the results.

Google's search interface is still reasonably clean IMO. Nowhere near its minimal best. Yes there are ads and "sponsored results" and shopping frames and all that crap, but they really aren't everything that's wrong with Google Search.

Quality of results and inability to specify queries beyond vague suggestions are the worst things.

Straight from the horse's mouth:

> ..."we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

- "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page[1]

They weren't wrong!

[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Even when they first turned on ads, it was arguably a net win. I worked AdWords tech-support 2005-2008, and sat in on the “Ads Quality” core team meeting.

They basically had this big money dial, and rather than crank it to 11, they were fiercely protective of the core user experience.

They kept ads mostly to the side (unobtrusive), only served them on queries where there was a high probability of commercial intent, and only promoted ads above organic results if the predicted CTR was extremely high.

I remember being delighted more than once when the ad system surfaced the product I wanted when organic results did not.

Now…? You get all spam above the fold.

The Ads Quality PM back then was Nick Fox, who I just learned became SVP for ads and search last year. Which means he is at least indirectly responsible for the OP. Not entirely sure what to make of that.

I remember when Google Maps allowed you to enter "*" as the only search term, and you'd see every business in the area. Not just a portion of those who had paid for placement. Those were the days...

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

I also am old enough to remember when their motto was "Don't be evil."

I'm old enough to remember when the web didn't exist ... and when I dumped Altavista and Ask Jeeves and co for the cool kids: Google.

I'm fucking livid. Well actually: mildly unimpressed. The cool kids rarely last as such and "do no evil" ended up behind a green tent and a single shot was heard.

Actually, I am slightly stressed over this whole thing.

Google's motto used to be 'Don't be evil'. They've since deleted the first two words.

Yes, things change. In fact, change is basically the only thing you can confidently predict.

It's quite possible that the ads also got taken down, as they were against google ads' policies.

Tech companies routinely monitor social media like HN to take action.

I am highly suspicious tech markets do not see realistic average Google behavior for whatever reason. The pervasive belief in tech that Google Search is even passable suggests people in the Valley or even Austin aren't getting the experience most people do.

I recall a Googler once suggesting to me that Googlers seeing ads might look like ad fraud to advertisers, so I'm not positive Googlers dogfood how bad this is either.

Were you logged in or logged out when you ran the searches?

You don't fall into any desirable demographic for targeting apparently, or you've never leaked enough info about you that would signify you as desirable.

In other words, nobody is bidding to reach your eyeballs specifically.

This could be a market inefficiency. OR, it could be you're actually a terrible lead for midjourney-type products, and the market is working correctly.

Firefox on my phone I got midjourney.com as the first result

Weird

Piggybacking on to provide a screenshot since I also see no sponsored content and Midjourney is my #1 result, well above the fold.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/Oxo4FJl.png

When I search it I see the same thing as OP.

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/hlF6OoU

I get the same results as Op, but on mobile, where there are 4 sponsors above the link. It’s about two screen scrolls to the real result.

> I'm not using an ad blocker

How do you tolerate the web without an ad blocker?

Mine has one sponsored link which is just a course for midjourney. But I don't doubt at all that the OP post is real. This stuff is all dynamically generated. There is probably even some AI deciding how many ads you'll put up with.

Ideally Google would offer some kind of ad free option, perhaps on a higher tier of the Google One plans.

With uBlock off, I get two sponsored ads, and the real site is nearly pushed below the fold: https://i.imgur.com/AkVbvSI.png

Geo targeting or other targeting signals play a role in this

odd, I also don't see any sponsored content any longer for any search whereas I definitely remember seeing what OP has for other searches. But I also now see a tab for AI mode next to ALL which is new... but I also switched to DDG a while ago

search: "coffee is mostly water"

"No, coffee is not mostly water. That appears to be a misconception based on a popular television show. Coffee is actually about 98% water."

Yeah, I was waiting for an actual 9 headed hydra of crap, featuring:

* a whole page of sponsored-yet-indistinguishable-from-organic results

* a confidently incorrect AI snippet

* the below-the-fold top organic results being all content spam

* the first actually relevant result from a reputable source being then paywalled with a "you ran out of stories for this month" overlay on a website I have never browsed in a year

* the 2nd actually relevant result prompting a "login with google" overlay with prefilled identity that gets clicked by accident 20% of the time

* all of the above in a Chrome browser, requiring a quadruple opt-out before allowing you to use GMail without also starting a browser-wide session to keep track of your every keystroke

* or alternatively an app based mobile interface where links can't be copied and pasted to prevent loss of tracking

* something with AMP

This is not even close to everything that is wrong, if anything it should be called "barely the tip of the iceberg of everything that is wrong".

In their defense it does feature a bunch of other invisible things (lack of cached results, lack of direct links you can obtain with a right click, etc)

I'll be honest....

I'm puzzled why OP did a web-search (i.e. used a business to find) 'midjourny' rather than simply entering the known URL.

How times change.

They seem to classify users in a way that puts technically-proficient users in a separate class to regular users.

One class receives a more traditional experience.

The other receives whatever they're currently pushing. For example, my Dad's Gmail has a much higher "ad email" : "real email" ratio than mine. Also, the styling of an "ad email" line is far more subtle than what I receive.

I checked with my technical friends. They all receive similar experiences to what I do. But my parents and other people I help with their personal tech receive the ad-heavy version.

My conspiracy theory is that they're trying to detect journalists, lawmakers, regulators, and more, in an attempt to avoid being forced to push ads less aggressively.

Mine looks slightly similar: my top result is the Wikipedia page for Midjourney.

I've pinned all results from wikipedia.org, which is a killer feature and why I'm paying for Kagi, instead of giving away my data for free to Google.

I’m still amazed that Kagi search results are basically on par with Google’s (and without the ads) in all my comparison tests that I’ve done. And Google has orders of magnitude more resources.

What has Google been doing all this time?

I love Kagi, been using it for over a year now. Sadly I haven’t been able to get anyone else on board, even with gift subs.

Serenity, thanks.

Android Firefox and its various forks (I use Waterfox) have a setting that allows zoom on all sites.

You can usually force enable zoom in browser accessibility settings.

Yep. Its a shit website, talking about a shittier website.

Fair point, but I'd argue that "Google informed [you] of a perfectly viable alternative that might be cheaper" isn't what happened. What happened is "Google offered you Honda first, for no other reason than Honda paid them money to do so".

If you squint they may look like the same thing, but their subtle difference is important. One is a tool suggesting "Hey I see you're trying to do A, but I think B might also fit your needs", and the other is "You want A? Ok, I'll eventually point you towards A, but only after you consume this message from our sponsor."

Google's not genuinely thinking "Hey this will help the user more!" and building that into their tool - it's an ad platform that mimics being helpful, in the name of growing profits.

(That's fine for them to do btw; They're a company and they need to make money somehow.)

Okay, then show those ads to people who google “midsize SUV” or “AI image generator”, not people who google the specific product by brand name. Sending people who google “midjourney” to competitors’ websites makes as much sense as sending people who google “midsize SUV” to bicycle websites: the user already made their preference very clear.

> If I may offer a devil's advocate perspective.

The devil doesn't need advocates. https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3145446/the-devil-doesnt-ne...

There are clear and obvious ways to show advertisements without making those advertisements look like top search results. You know this. Google knows this. There's no reason for anyone to pretend otherwise.

In my view a lot of this hinges on how well the results are identified as ads, and whether they’re vectors of fraud.

I’m not inherently opposed to ads that are relevant to a user’s search query, but I am opposed to watering down their visual differentiation until they look just like regular search results. Once upon a time Google put ads on a yellow background labelled “Ads”. Now they’re “Sponsored results” and they look mostly identical to the rest. This is simply not about providing interesting and relevant alternatives, but about tricking the user into clicking the ad so Google can charge the advertiser.

What I truly can’t abide, though, is the volume of fraudulent and malicious advertising circulating their network. Given Google’s $100 billion profit in 2024, the amount of fake/scam versions of real websites that they allow to appear in search ads, or deepfake Elon Musk bitcoin giveaways they allow in YouTube prerolls is a calculated choice, not an inability or lack of resources to prevent it. At the end of the day it would eat into their profit if they were to make it harder to post deceptive ads.

Not really, its just a condemnation of the amalgamation which is unable to be perceived as different from the user - it shits on the organic search in their mind and anyone saying "well our search is still good!" is completely missing the point.