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Comment by dustingetz | Hacker News Reader

Google has taken a lot of criticism on HN and elsewhere for an apparent perverse incentive, to direct searchers to content farms with adwords, instead of the original source (like StackOverflow or Amazon reviews).

I'm skeptical, because spammy-ad clickthrough rates are already low and trending lower, and I speculate google has great incentive to send people where they want to go lest their competitors get stronger.

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Google also has a decade+ of track record of choosing the right long-term thing for users instead of short-term revenue: 1) not running annoying punch-the-monkey banner ads in the early days when everyone else was doing it. 2) not running pop-up ads when everyone else was doing it. 3) little-known fact: if the Google ads aren't ready by the time your search results are ready, you just don't see ads for that query. We don't delay your search results in order to show you ads.

It just wouldn't make sense for Google to suddenly abandon that (very successful) strategy and say "let's keep spammy/low-quality sites around and send users there because we make money off the ads." We make more money long-term when our users get great results. That makes them more happy and thus more loyal.

Regarding #3, why are these two things coupled in terms of page load? With all the js stuff you guys are doing now with instant, it seems like you could load up the ads on the right a split second after the search results and no one would notice or care...but I'm guessing you've tried this and it didn't test as well :)

Great question. The "don't wait for ads" policy has been around since ~2001, way before AJAX became common. In theory you could make it so that the ads loaded when they were ready, but that could also generate a visual "pop" that I imagine would annoy many users.

My preference is just to enforce a hard time deadline. If the ads team starts to miss that deadline and revenue decreases, then they're highly motivated to speed their system up. :)

The definition of 'low-quality' sites can be rather subjective, can't it? I personally get no value out of Mahalo or Squidoo but I know others actually do.

While I might not love eHow's process and tactics, I'll admit that I've benefited from one or two of their easy-to-read articles. (Though I'll often second source that information.)

I think Google's in an interesting pickle to decide whether results should be: fast food or fine dining.

Google could serve up 'fast food' in results (e.g. - farmed content) and it would likely be 'good enough' for MOST people. Plenty of folks will eat fast food even if there is a better alternative down the road.

I'd like to see more fine dining results, but I'm not sure I'm in the majority there. Quality for the early-adopter might look different than quality for the late-majority.

If the algorithm is leveraging user behavior as a signal, doesn't it follow that popular and familiar sites and brands may gain more trust and authority?

Is Google thinking at all about search in this way?

Although a google with perfect results would kill itself because the ads would be pointless.

disagree. counter-example: if I google "philly events" and google sends me right to philly2night.com, I certainly want to see ads selling me event tickets.

A perfect search would show the pages that the ad points to as the first organic results if they were, in fact, the most relevant.

Are you seriously claiming that the ideal search engine when given "Philly events" should guess which event in Philly you actually want tickets for and send you to that event's webpage?

If they partnered with Facebook, it wouldn't be too difficult.

I didn't say that you'd enter a text search. I was speaking to the goals of the search not the specific modality. If Google were able to fulfill the goals of the searcher (as they claim to want to) then ads would be unnecessary.

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