Google is Broken

Okay, I know it’s a funny way of putting it. But really, it is.

Have you not noticed? It used to be, when you were looking for something, you could just find it in Google.

That is no longer the case. Recently I’ve been doing a lot of market research and other web digging, and Google just isn’t as good as it used to be. My sister told me about this shocking phenomenon earlier, and I was, naturally, skeptical. But now I am becoming more and more aware of it – you just can’t find everything you are looking for on the first page of Google.

I wonder whether this is an inevitable evolution of every search engine (after all, they were not pioneers in this market), or whether this is bound to happen to every search engine which is overly populated and over-used.

I’m still giving it a chance though, just because it has been so good to me over the past couple of years. And I’m a late adopter (I’m very loyal). But not for long. They must do something and regroup. Otherwise… well, competition is always out there.

Why do we dislike online ads?

Why do we dislike online ads more than TV commercials?

Mainly because we tend to act together – people like to behave as a group. I would say “herd” but that might sound a bit harsh. As Aristotle has put it, a man is by nature a social animal.

People also don’t like it when they get unsolicited calls (I hang up as soon as I realize that it is not personal) more than they like advertisements they encounter online. We fast forward commercials on TV if we can, or just use that time to take a break from what we are watching. But the negative feeling towards these TV commercials is not as strong as it is on the internet. Some commercials we might even like, and show our friends – “hey you have to see this one, it is so cool” style.

I believe it’s because we see every advertisement when we are alone surfing the web. Just like unsolicited phone calls. So it is not personal on the one hand, and we don’t feel like we’re part of a crowd on the other hand.