• kibiz0r@midwest.social
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    1 day ago

    They’re an ad company that just happens to offer search as a way to show ads.

    Their ideal scenario is one where you search forever and never find what you were looking for.

    • magnetosphere@fedia.io
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      1 day ago

      They’re walking the fine line between being shitty enough that you have to refine your search multiple times (thus allowing them to show you more ads), but not being SO shitty that you give up and never come back.

      • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        21 hours ago

        This has been effectively proven by email chains made public through court proceedings. Former head of search left sometime around 2015 because the ad team was being allowed to make search worse to pump their numbers.

        New head of search was the guy who ran Yahoo’s search department while they got eaten alive by Google, and he had been working Google’s Ad division after he left Yahoo.