alt Hacker NewsSure, but then the advertising model is working then, at least for Google and the companies that pay them. If people don't want to read a big heading literally called sponsored results [0] then I don't know what to tell them. Or they just don't care because they're not paying anything to click.
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While true, it's still a user-hostile move. You kinda have to meet your customers where they are. If people are clicking ads without knowing it, that's a serious design problem. Yes, people should learn to read, but the risk of placing too much burden on users is that all it takes is one ambitious product manager to push an A/B test that generates huge revenue wins while enshittifying the product for everyone else.
> [0] https://i.imgur.com/JvEsDpH.png
Wow that is how Google looks these days?
Good screenshot! Ads take up the majority of the space on that page, and are styled to look almost identical to search results. That's a problem for people like me that expect a search engine to primary deliver search results, not ads.