Every time this comes up, I don’t understand what the alternative is supposed to be.
X (Midjourney in this case) may/not be trademarked in the user’s country - so what makes X so special that Google/others should rank this one over others? Does this mean X owns the keyword and other related searches on Google forever? That sounds worse than domain squatting!
Speaking of, quite often, X.com is already registered, so companies buy getX.com or just non-.com TLDs. Now which one is the right result for searches for X? The pre existing one or the new company? What if they’re in different industries?
Almost all SaaS companies have multiple comparison pages or blogs/articles/etc that mention and compare themselves with competitors - specifically for SEO to show up in those searches. Should this also be banned?
I could go on, but I just don’t see a situation where Google can solve this satisfactorily for everyone, without becoming opinionated and picking/choosing/preferring one competitor over the other. As such, they’ve gone for the easiest model we have in modern day capitalism - put it up for auction and let the market figure it out!
The issue you're describing is ranking results or ranking between promoted/ad content.
The problem more at hand is unless you're paying big bucks, they can and will place content that at best is another competitor, or at worst is genuinely trying to harm your users.
Ads being inline and as close in appearance to regular results as google can legally get away with is the problem. There are heavily misaligned incentives at play, ones that enable a lot of malware and phishing attempts.
Yes, I understand that you/others think this is an already solved problem - my point was that as time passes and the world grows, it no longer is - they can’t exactly solve it satisfactorily for all.
I don't think it was ever a "solved and done" problem, but at least Google kept putting tremendous efforts to lead the arms race and bring a decent solution for most people. It wasn't perfect for everyone of course.
I think they could still keep up if it was a priority to them. It's complicated, but they have a lot of the best minds of our generation after all.
I’m acutely aware that any topic related to Google Ads invites the blind fury of HN. I don’t want to excuse their shitty behavior, but I also dislike the illogical and irrational posts and threads that pop up about this topic on a monthly basis and make it to #1!
However, if you are to make this argument - please note that for OP and all the commenters in this post who tested this, all of them got the official Midjourney page as search result #1. Unsure why we’re discussing this at all then?
X (Midjourney in this case) may/not be trademarked in the user’s country - so what makes X so special that Google/others should rank this one over others? Does this mean X owns the keyword and other related searches on Google forever? That sounds worse than domain squatting!
Speaking of, quite often, X.com is already registered, so companies buy getX.com or just non-.com TLDs. Now which one is the right result for searches for X? The pre existing one or the new company? What if they’re in different industries?
Almost all SaaS companies have multiple comparison pages or blogs/articles/etc that mention and compare themselves with competitors - specifically for SEO to show up in those searches. Should this also be banned?
I could go on, but I just don’t see a situation where Google can solve this satisfactorily for everyone, without becoming opinionated and picking/choosing/preferring one competitor over the other. As such, they’ve gone for the easiest model we have in modern day capitalism - put it up for auction and let the market figure it out!