Microsoft was caught testing way too many ads on its Bing Search results page. I saw 9 ads and only two organic/free listings on the page for a query on [garage door repair].
This is what Google and Amazon already do, why are they singling out Bing?
Use an advertisement blocker on either site and the entire experience seems foreign.
I’m sure both people who use Bing are furious
I do, too, and I hope they increase their own search index to reduce the dependency on Google/Microsoft. I love the great search experience but I hate that I’m (indirectly) giving those companies my money.
I’d love to use Kagi but I’m too poor for their pro subscription (and I use too many search queries)
Ew.
Next up they might test making the whole first page for ads, and the pages after that for search results.
Hell, why even have organic search results at all? Just rank results by how much each site owner is willing to
bribepay. A protection racket for the 21st century.“That’s a nice website you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if it got no visitors.”
well you’d think at some point people would stop using their bullshit search engine.
Good idea, you now quality to mod r/anarchocapitapism
While I don’t mind laissez-faire in principle, that not my favorite anarcho-flavor and I don’t wanna :)
I am empathetic to wanting to be left alone. I am disturbed by their desire to tear down systems that protect others out of some a historic notion that we would be better off with out them
Yup. I consider myself pretty laissez faire, but I too have my limits, which are way before I get within shouting distance of ancaps. I believe in Piguovian taxes and lean a bit Georgist for a tax baseline, which is already pretty far from ancapistan.
I do like that Georgists are grounded in reality and try to address observed issues.
This is Bing we’re talking about, the website owner may not even notice.
Satya the creep testing boundaries
Two of the ads are for the same company, and that company is also one of the two organic results.
Do people actually use Bing??? Apart from the ms reward
Yup! It provides the results for DuckDuckGo.
It’s a lot better nowadays than Google, so I do, yeah.
It also has zero ads for me (turned off my adblocker to check).
duckduckgo is mostly based on bing results so you could try that too.
What a waste of bandwidth, energy and time.
I just turned off my adblocker and can’t get a single ad on Bing no matter what I try. The link there has zero ads for me.
I did look at the article, and in my opinion those aren’t “ads”, but I don’t even get those either anyway.
Gross but also… kinda curious from an A/B testing perspective to know when the user drop off happens. Kind of like, what’s the pain threshold before someone stops using shitty software. The answer really should be zero but the average user… ugh, it’s probably fucking 8 or 9 and we should be ashamed.
Too bad is Bing so the sample size is too small for any meaningful results.
i feel bad for all the 10 bing users
