I’m not sure what your comment has to do with mine because I wasn’t discussing anything in the article, simply replying to someone else’s comment.

To be clear I understand that the article was incorrect, and I had my suspicions when I first saw it too (which I posted in another comment).

My comment is in reference to Google Search’s general degradation of user experience and quality of search results over the many years. Sponsored results that are hard for the average people to notice are sponsored, and they take up half the screen. SEO spam, quora spam, specific searches returning general results, etc. There is still a wealth of organic and original content out there. I just never find it through search.

Most people don’t understand how bad Google has become. It’s like not noticing how tall you’ve grown until your grandmother points it out.

My interpretation was this + in terms of the actual “sponsored” results work by matching “kids clothing” with advertisers who match for that term, and Google “changing” it into “$brand_name kids clothing” which seems entirely obvious when spelling it out.

I haven’t used Google as my primary search engine for many years but occasionally I do run a search on it. While the quality of results is extremely low, I never noticed anything obvious like a generic search term only returning results for a specific brand + that search term like the original article implied.

It seemed like a giant misunderstanding of how it all works from the start but made for a great headline.

How does any of this fit into the reality that you can pay $1 per 1000 captchas for a real, actual human to solve them? It seems like so much effort is put into this cat&mouse narrative with bot makers, ignoring the reality that sometimes labour is actually much cheaper.