This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is so stupid. God forbid they actually police their ads for malware. No, instead let's push the responsibility onto the individual, by adding get another "Papers, Please"-esque stamp that very few people will know about and even less will actually use.
Hard pass. The day I saw them promoting malware above legitimate search results is the day I turned on ad blocking for my entire org, and a stupid little pay-to-verify badge isn't going to change that.
/end rant
The "Papers, Please" comparison is perfect!
One way they make money. One way they'd need to spend it. It's against capitalism to do the latter.
Ddg already have this for some sites.
Light theme screenshot
Excellent example choice lmao
It's the best example in my opinion, because it is full of fake versions of popular piracy sites because Google hides the originals.
And it is the only site I know ddg shows certification every time.
We regularly experiment with features that help shoppers identify trustworthy businesses online[...]
I like that Google calls their users "shoppers" /s
To be fair, I think there is a "shopping" tab when you perform a search through them.
inb4 they hand these out for anyone whos paying
8 bucks a month
Now if they could just stop putting ad results above the app you search for in the Play store.
TIL people use the play store for stuff besides just a rare update and apparently browse it...
I don't even mean browsing! Just trying to install something.
I search for "NordVPN" (because all the cool YouTubers use it!) and the first result is "Norton 360" with an install button.
It's a "sponsored result" and it's easy to install the wrong thing if you're used to it actually finding the thing you just typed in.
If I put Firefox. I get duckduckgo. Okay, maybe not so bad and pretty obvious. But I've had these things for apps that almost look like the legitimate one.
that might be useful i guess if google hadn't shredded every tiny piece of trust we had in them
Yeah that'll fix it's completely broken search.
It's not broken, for google. It does exactly what they want, which is to help them gather data and manipulate people.
At work, we discussed this as a future issue in about 2000, when we saw it gaining major search share.
Yeah we are not google. It is broken.
Yeah, but google controls the money, so we don't matter. Lol
Yeah, we all know that. It is still broken.
this is a good idea to hotfix a stupid problem.
And what problem would that be?
Getting 4 sponsored links and an AI overview before I get to the search results.
It's basically all the shit Yahoo did to lose their search dominance.
Fun Fact: the current head of Google's search is the same guy that was in charge of Yahoo's search right before they folded their own search and just started licensing Bing.
That is hilarious. That explains a lot.
I can't see how a checkmark is supposed to fixes these Problems. Aren't the sponsored links not already marked as such?
You can disable the AI stuff and other nonsense if you do a "web" search, it's in the list with images, videos etc. Theres also a thing you can add to a search url to do it - &udm=14.
Could also not use google
My solution.
Their search results have been shit for about 10 years.
So who do you use? Because I haven't found a properly functional search engine in years.
I assume SEO spam/misleading ads?
Stuff that could probably be better done by vetting advertisers and improving the search algorithm.
Malware disguised as legitimate software getting served as ads.
Just a few months ago people were shown faked websites for obs studio when searching for the original. They should vet whose ads they're serving instead of just certifying certain corporations.
Finally something that is a positive. This is well-needed nowadays.
Why? Google should just police their results. Offering a fake Microsoft in your results means you failed providing the service you claimed to offer.
This is either pay to play.. and that means google will earn money from fraudsters. Or it will look at certificates.. just aite matches certificate.. must be good.
Decades worth of whack a mole could have been used to train an AI to actually help here.. but we made a glorified word guesser instead.
Rare W from Google
