> It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademarks (+/- some reasonable edit distance).

I get the intention here, but how do you limit the collateral damage? (Or do you not care about it / see reducing the ability to advertise as a positive?)

There are a lot of trademarks, and they have to be scoped to specific goods and services, but Google has no way of knowing if you're actually looking for something related to that trademark.

e.g. doing a quick trademark search, I see active, registered trademarks for "elevator", "tower", "collision", "cancer sucks", "steve's", "local", "best", "bus", "eco", "panel", "motherboard", "grass", etc. etc. I'm not familiar with any of those brands, but that's just a small sample of the fairly generic terms that would no longer be able to be advertised on.

> It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademark

this was one of the biggest problems of AdWords from beginning on: You could do brand-bidding unlimited, even today you see it every day: Search for brand X and competitor Y will show up with same words

I agree it's a bit perverse, but the problem predates Google. People do the real world equivalent all the time. When there are big conferences for specific companies, rivals buy up local ad space on billboards and subways.

That has caused some companies hosting conferences to pay for some of those ad spaces in advance.

I don't agree. If I search for "leatherman" it seems totally reasonable to give competitors a chance. I generally think brand recognition is too powerful. If there is another high quality multitool on the market for a better price, why shouldn't I know about it?

Paradoxically, the people who pay for adfree experiences would be the most valuable targets for ads, so I suspect any pay for no ads arrangement will be temporary at best.

Check out kagi; adfree search

I refuse to pay for ad free YouTube + otherwise I'd watch even more of it. The annoyingness of ads is a pretty important brake.

> All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads

This isn't true, there were many other ideas. It's just that only KPI was how much money they can make, thus ads won. Companies don't have an axis of ethics or morality.

[dead]

Been using DuckDuckGo for almost 2 years now - couldn't believe it at first, but results are at least as good, if not even better than Google.

I used Kagi for a year or two then switched to DDG. It's fine. I do not miss Google at all.

In the early days they werent a publicy traded company and Brin/Page did not get exposed to the taste of being ultra-wealthy.

Steve Jobs looking back now is incredibly rare - someone who was wealthy but had the spirit of innovation to keep going again and again.

When it comes to anything tech related, the HN crowd are trend setters.

And.... the world is crying out for a google alternative. If it ever appears, the tech savvy people will be the first to move, followed by everyone else.