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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

Every once in a while I'll do a search on Google from a browser with no blocker for something like 'ebay' or some other big brand name and I'm always surprised to see that big brand name has bought ads for themselves, it never made sense since they're always the first search result anyways.

Now I can only assume two things...

1. Some number of those ads were scams 2. Some large number of people just blindly click on the first thing they see below the search box as long as it's close to whatever they search for.

Somewhat related... always surprised to see what search results come up in the IOS app store first for whatever app I'm searching for at the time. It's usually something else, like, search for Uber, first thing that comes up is Lyft.

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If a large brand like Uber wouldn‘t buy (really expensive) keywords like „uber“ some of their rivals like lyft could bid on it. So uber would lose a customer who was really interested in uber to lyft. Exchange company names how you like. Its especially expensive for shops etc.

Google will not change any rules to forbid bidding on brand names because they are making a ton of money of it. Think of something like amazon paying more than $1 for every click just to not loose any potential customer. Adwords is a money burning system.

Interesting note -- Amazon does not allow you to bid for a competitor's brand name, nor does it allow you to use your competitor's brand name as a keyword.

In my experience, you can try, but you'll get 0 impressions. Not sure how this works for very generic brand names though (e.g. "band-aid")

They have some rules in place, try bidding on Fortnite.

I imagine that might be in response to the malware advertising that was going on for fortnite a while back, and how quite a large proportion of the players are kids. As a highly visible brand and a highly vulnerable audience, it makes sense for them to focus efforts there and put in special rules.

I think you are correct in why they put the extra effort in, but the criticism is they should be doing this anyway, for all the ads. Not just because the target audience for a specific keyword is more vulnerable to scams.

Wait ... what ... you can "buy" keywords?

Of course, that's what Google is basically. You search for something and they show an ad related to that. And those ads are not random but related to your search.

Or am I not getting some joke?

Bidding on your own company name is very cheap because your site has a very high quality score for that keyword (ie. Google's algorithms think the users query will be answered by going to that domain).

A high quality score gives you an effective discount in the ad auction. You might only need to pay $0.01 for that ad, whereas your competitor would need to pay $1

>> Google's algorithms think the users query will be answered by going to that domain

That's BS semantics. Their algorithms are based more on the age of your domain and other technicalities, rather than some hypothetical meaning of "search intention".

Today you're much more likely to get directed to some SEO-optimised highly monetised blog content because they bought an incredibly old domain name rather than what you're actually looking for.

I think you're speaking to a point the parent wasn't really making. All they're saying is that being known as the canonical source for a brand gives you a steep discount on bidding for that brand name.

We can quibble about the philosophical role of modern search engines I guess, but the basic idea is just that it should be easy to defensively bid on your own thing.

It’s not philosophical quibbling: Google does whatever makes them more money.

For all it is, allowing competitors to bid against each other just makes them more money. And the truth is that the customers who would click on a Lyft ad for “uber” query would not care if it was Uber indeed - as otherwise they would be intelligent enough to find Uber as a lower match.

So frankly “being the canonical source for the brand is a steep discount” is not their policy and I don’t really see how that policy is even motivated, financially or in terms of user-friendliness.

> Their algorithms are based more on the age of your domain and other technicalities

One of which is "dwell time" and another is "bounce rate". Both those correlate highly with how well the site matches the users intention.

And that's why (e-mail, ad, notification, cookie) popups work that great: because the time it takes to actually see the content is increased and thus is the dwell time.

Bounce is mainly irrelevant as we mostly use Google to find a particular page on a website.

Bounce rate is a metric. If the person clicking decides to stay on your web site after the click-through, then that's a good measure of ad relevance.

It may be that the bidder is an affiliate that gets a commission on your purchase, not the brand owner. They're just trying to get last click on the thing you were about to buy anyway.

I worked in AdWords 12 years ago and this was dominant. Not sure how it is today.

> Somewhat related... always surprised to see what search results come up in the IOS app store first for whatever app I'm searching for at the time. It's usually something else, like, search for Uber, first thing that comes up is Lyft.

When this happens it's usually an ad, isn't it? Unfortunately, ad blockers don't work in the app store.

It used to be that on some web browsers, the background color for adwords and organic search was hard or impossible to distinguish. eBay is paying for placement and it also wants to mitigate potential issues where the organic result is not their site, they have top of page presence (if adblocker is turned off).

By controlling more screen real estate you will get even more clicks to your website. Given the incremental cost for a nav query is so low for the first algo it is a good decision.

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