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from the if-they-had-only-listened-before dept.
Marketoonist ran a story about marketers saying, "Oops, our bad."
The Interactive Advertising Bureau issued a remarkable mea culpa last week about the state of online advertising. In response to the rise of ad-blocking software, IAB VP Scott Cunningham said digital advertisers should take responsibility for annoying people and driving them to use ad blockers:
"We messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience....
"We build advertising technology to optimize publishers' yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession. Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty...
"The consumer is demanding these actions, challenging us to do better, and we must respond."
Nod to pipedot for running this story.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 26 2015, @10:05AM
No fair being rational!
I'm accustomed to using Google, after years of using it. It's irrational, but it's what I turn to. Ehhh - maybe I need an attitude adjustment. Yeah, I know Duckduckgo works - I've used it off and on.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Monday October 26 2015, @04:36PM
yes use duck duck go , or ixquick. Not perfect, but what is.
Google made a change in the past year or two that simply made it harder to get the results I wanted. Searching with quotes and other symbols and operands simply stopped working. This mobile first ranking system is of zero relevance to most of what I search for and if i paid for the service I'd be upset. Instead, I am powerless to even complain about it and expect anything in return. It's not like my opinion matters, nor those of many others.
It's bad enough when "they" correct my search to be something I didn't search for, so I am now cautious to make sure the results they gave me are even relevant, but over all -- I can't even be somewhat granular and get a very specific wrong answer. I get wrong answers in general, or even worse, some blog where the guy asks a different unanswered question that gets linked to in numerous other search results.
That they are so in your face about the ads and and data collection is reason enough to avoid them--giving me poor on a desktop because sites are ranked mobile first... makes it hardly worth the cost of free that I am paying. If they do it differently than how I described, then ok I am wrong, but it still isn't worth the price and it's unlikely I am going to resume using it regularly. And yes I realize what I am saying. It is like the woody allen joke about two old ladies at a restaurant they frequently visit--one comments that the food there is terrible, and the other one says yes and the portions are so small, too. Ladies, why do you go there, and if the food is bad, why are you complaining you don't get enough of it?? You can ask me the same of the google search engine.
Even if nothing is as good as google's search engine used to be, I have come to believe that I am right back to where I was in the late 90s -- using multiple search engines because none of them are really very good at finding what I am looking for.
Mind you, it's mostly job or IT related stuff. Maybe if I searched for celebrity news I'd get all of my wildest queries answered for me. I don't know. But since I am not in the market for that and I already am poisoning my well, I don't want my well to start mixing poisons like that. Then it would be truly worthless.
To that end.. uh does anyone remember the program Copernic? It used to search all of the search engines you defined (or a list of them as defaults) at once, and would do its best to use your parameters (like the options google removed to make their search that much easier to use on a mobile, I guess).
After a while it started to become ad driven and then finally disappeared when Google started to reliably deliver the same useful results Copernic did, without having to install something to do it.
So, to go full circle back to how I used to do it efficiently... does anyone know of such a product that can span multiple engines and deliver the top 5 results from each? Without the low, low cost of my immortal soul being repeatedly harvested in exchange?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 26 2015, @04:57PM
Actually, yes - I do vaguely recall Copernic. And, a quick search found their home page - https://www.copernic.com/ [copernic.com] It appears that they are just a "desktop" search now. Another product, "on the go" is a private cloud search engine? I guess they surrendered the internet search, and restricted themselves to a niche market. I can't even imagine using a hard drive catalogueing application - it's pretty much built into any *nix distribution, if you understand how a file system works.