Comment by mrweasel
4 hours ago
> Since when have we considered ads something helpful?
At some point Google ads where genuinely good and helpful to me. If you needed to buy something, and you didn't know who sold it or what it was called, the Google ad engine would yield better results than their search.
Now Google also broke that part. All ads I get are for Temu, Fruugo and other weird sites that I guess does drop shipping, maybe some marketplace stuff. It's the same sketchy sites that's return for almost all searches. It's rarely the "brand sites" that you trust who shows up first in the "Sponsored products" section.
I am old enough to remember a brief period where search engine ads were sometimes helpful because you could search for a thing and get an ad for a thing and click and buy a thing. That went away quickly once the optimizers discovered they could earn money by SEO-maxing, charging the premium and then just ship you somebody else's goods and make you pay for the whole thing and their profits. And it became the red queen game, where if you don't SEO-max, nobody is even going to know you existed.