When I search for "midjourney" without an adblocker a bunch of times, I'm getting:

- No ads, with correct midjourney.com as the top result, about half the time

- A legit ad for midjourney.com with the title "Your Imagination, Unlocked", the other half the time. It's the only ad, and the correct midjourney.com is also still directly below it as the first organic result

So both seem fine for me. I've never seen ads on Google with the kind of formatting shown by OP either.

Obviously everybody's search experience is different, based on geography, profile, who else is running ads for those keywords, Google runs different formatting experiences as A/B testing, etc.

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Palmik 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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ocdtrekkie 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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Marsymars 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

I wonder what Google execs do - like I really have a hard time imagining them using Google search as it currently exists. Is there some kind of special internal flag that just gets rid of ads for their accounts?

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mc3301 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'd go as far to guess that the tech-literate people (who would be both less susceptible to clicking on enshitified links and more likely to report or discuss them) have, somewhere in their tracked-data-portfolio, a "don't serve too much garbage to this person, they aren't gullible and they'll tell people we're serving garbage" setting.

Apologies for the weird grammar.

	▲	ocdtrekkie 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's certainly possible, and maybe not even maliciously: Advertisers are refining their targeting to get clicks, the best advertisers will only annoy people likely to click an ad. The problem with giant algorithmic platforms is often things go off the rails simply due to nobody at the helm understanding what the platform is doing anymore.

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rchaud 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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

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.

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tayo42 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

Weird