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.

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homebrewer 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sometimes it's good to live in a region that no one cares about. I just searched for Firefox in the Android Play Store application, there were no ads, and the first result was Firefox.

I also don't get any ads in American and UK podcasts for the same reason (except for those read by the host, but there are few of those and they're easy to ignore).

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oefrha 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

On iOS App Store at least, my observation is they just show you a random irrelevant ad at the top if there’s no one specifically bidding for the term. Well that’s my assumption for why I get irrelevant <app with deep pocket> ads when I search for obscure terms. But maybe they don’t show an ad if there’s no bidder at all for garbage spots in <country>?

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xp84 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's interesting. I wish it were more practical to use a dedicated VPN for some less-developed country just for my podcast client.

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smcin 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can you tell us which region are you in? (Iceland?)

Does anyone publish a scorecard of search results vs Google region settings?

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pitched 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Podcasts are normally plain mp3 (or similar) files that get downloaded as-is off an rss feed, as far as I understand. I don’t think anyone gets extra ads outside the sponsored/host-read ones.

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jsheard 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The big podcast networks like iHeart are able to dynamically splice ads into episodes, so they can be targeted based on geoIP or whatever other signals they have on you.

	▲	zbrozek 9 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I want a self hosted proxy for podcasts that strips the ads and compresses the audio stream harder before my phone downloads it.
	▲	pitched 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I listen to a lot of Stuff You Should Know and haven’t noticed. TIL I’m exempt from their targeted ads too!

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rchaud 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Everyone posts to centralized RSS feeds these days. The company that owns the feed creates duplicates of the uploaded file, inserts ads into them, and serves a version of the file containing ads localized to the downloader's country.

If the same podcast is uploaded to Youtube through the uploader's official channel, it won't contain those ads and you're better off downloading that.

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thenthenthen 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean Google payed Apple 20 Billion to be the default search engine…see: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-01/google-s-...

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balder1991 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Same here.

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apprentice7 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I did the same and my first result was NordVPN, lmao.