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Comment by benologist | Hacker News Reader

Google has a website full of garbage, knockoffs, fraud and spam too, that they make ludicrous amounts of money advertising and shield with fake customer support and email loops. It's an anomaly that these companies are allowed to keep the profit without tax or liability.

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Google makes a lot of money from its keyword protection racket.

Many users will type, for example, "facebook" into their address bar. The browser searches Google, and whoever bought the ads will be on top.

Facebook can't allow any other company to come up first, and so they pay.

Many, many ad clicks work this way, and I consider it to be a dark pattern at best, but similar to fraud at worst.

Isn't the same reason Google was fined in India lately?

http://indianexpress.com/article/business/companies/abuse-of...

Would you ban all ads related to brand names?

I think facebook feeling the "need" to buy those ad slots is their own problem.

OK, try a company other than Facebook. What about a company with many competitors buying ads against their name? Or a small company fighting ads from counterfeiters?

I'm not suggesting a solution to this. The core issue is that most ads are bad for users, and an ad business can never be truly harmless to its "product" -- the users.

> OK, try a company other than Facebook.

Not much difference in my mind.

> The core issue is that most ads are bad for users

That's true even if the ad is for "potato", though.

I'm not ready to call the very concept of ads a racket, even if it's generally negative.

Google does this too for their own products, I'm just wondering what the CPC would be internally

Are there public numbers for this?

No, but individual sites have sometimes published their own data about, so we know it happens and is expensive, but not the aggregate numbers.

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