It quickly turned Google into the biggest / most valuable internet company of all time ever, and it still wasn't enough for them.
I've had adblockers running for as long as I can remember so I'm blisfully unaware of how bad it is now... mostly, I don't have adblockers on my phone and some pages are unusable.
Ads done right is the least bad way of supporting free stuff for people who don't want to pay the cost. But people with ubo punish all sites regardless of whether they do ads nicely or not.
You are right now writing in a thread about upcming future where promotion is embedded in the content so that content itself is one big ad disguised as whatever. Do you really think it's a better alternative to clearly delimited and unmistakeable ads?
Read your own link:
> For example, entering the query "buy domain" into the search box on Google’s home page produces search results and an AdWords text advertisement that appears to the right of Google’s search results
> Google’s quick-loading AdWords text ads appear to the right of the Google search results and are highlighted as sponsored links, clearly separate from the search results. Google’s premium sponsorship ads will continue to appear at the top of the search results page.
what is this instinct? anyone that’s over the age of 25 would know
"The rules were you guys weren't going to fact check."
The instinct is about pointing out factual inaccuracies. What they wrote is either correct, or not. If it is not, and someone knows better they can and should point that out.
If you, or some other commenter, have a fuzzy feeling that google is worse than it used to be you are free to write that. You are perfectly entitled to that opinion. But you can't just make up false statements and expect to be unchallenged and unchallengeable on it.
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
