10yrs ago if have said yes… however, I feel like page 1 is only ads and images to ads and sponsored content so I end up on page 2 anyway, so now I have to click a button.
Absolutely, this change makes it harder for people to quickly scroll away ads at the top & for ad blockers to seamlessly hide ads. With ad blockers your first page will be mostly empty & make google more annoying to use.
There sure are a lot of “Google enshittifies Google” articles lately.
isn’t this a good change though?
It’s actually a good change, IMHO. You can just click directly on page 10 for anything that might be related to your original search.
I suspect it is so that they can place ads / AI at the top of every page
If I remember correctly from the good ol’ days, promoted sites/ads kinda stopped after the first few pages and it skipped past most of the SEO crap.
But yeah, I forgot how aggressive Google is with ads and AI now, those bastards.
10yrs ago if have said yes… however, I feel like page 1 is only ads and images to ads and sponsored content so I end up on page 2 anyway, so now I have to click a button.
I remember the time page 2 of google was equivalent to an underground crypt.
How the times deteriorate
Absolutely, this change makes it harder for people to quickly scroll away ads at the top & for ad blockers to seamlessly hide ads. With ad blockers your first page will be mostly empty & make google more annoying to use.
That was the whole point. They’re making sure you don’t scroll past that first page.
At some point they’ll probably just show a full page unskippable ad after you press search. 😄
They are trying to keep up with Microsoft.