Disclaimer: For the love of all that is good in the world, if you go and downvoat someone who posted this article, I will find you.
You may or may not have come across this article entitled:
Google will start ranking pages with intrusive ads lower on search results
If you listen, you can hear a faint roar of applause coming from the general public. Drown it out. This is not, in any way, a good thing.
What Google is doing here is exactly what they did with search manipulation to cut out any bad searches about Hillary Clinton , just under a fascade that people will get behind. Everyone hates intrusive ads, so, upfront, this idea sounds great. But, the problem is that what's really going on is the public giving Google the green light to disappear any website or search result that goes against their ideology.
You will begin to hear things from Google like:
"Oh, you don't see many search results about XYZ (sites that conflict with Google's ideologies,) because those sites have intrusive ads."
regardless of whether those sites have intrusive ads or not.
Another problem brought up by @SuperConductiveRabbi, is that Google will probably also disappear any site that doesn't exclusively use Google's Adsense.
Search results are now blatantly not going to be based on search relevance, instead it's going to be based on some arbitrary criterion setup by Google themselves.
This is all around bad news. People should be careful about supporting this.
TL;DR: Google is going to use this policy to censor any website that goes against their ideologies or possibly even site's that don't exclusively use Google's Adsense. This is censorship pure and simple.
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BreesusLovesYou ago
I sort of agree, but I stopped using Google years ago.
duckduckgo.com doesn't bubble
OhBlindOne ago
I don't use Google, either.
Could I ask what you disagree with?
BreesusLovesYou ago
Just the idea that everything is always nefarious. I agree that Google is probably using this to nefariously frame their search results. But at the end of the day if they set a precedent that spambot ads are punished that's worth some non-zero value.
I would like to see a search engine that doesn't manipulate search results but also does punish spambot sites. Google isn't going to be that because they lost my trust a long time ago, but the general concept if taken at face value (which I don't for Google) isn't worthless.