We Don't Want to Run This Ad but Forced To
seroundtable.com
seroundtable.com
Opened Google without adblocker - now that's pathetic - two ads on top from Monday and Teamwork companies, then third result is Basecamp. Wikipedia result is below the fold, 8th result.
This is one of the reasons why I dropped Google as main search engine two years ago and opened it maybe five or ten times this year (for non-english highly sepicific queries). Google search is simply not the top one now and privacy concern too.
In many cases Google is just an online ad catalog, not a search engine.
Idk if it was a coincidence, but it seems like that exclusion filter was (and is) overly aggressive.
IMHO, this spawned the era of fake reviews and crappy commission websites. Google forced multiple layers of un-needed middle management, which of course spawned multiple layers of advertising. (Search ads to find reviews site. Banner ads on review site. Commission links to get to actual product page. Instead of just search and click product page.)
The same perverse "layering" system seems to have happened for recipe sites, although I'm not sure why. Search results list tons of home chefs, reviewers, and the crappy sites that think adding 3 paragraphs of shitty narrative improves the quality of their knock-off recipe.
They have 13,099 bangs[0] at present.
0: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-search-tricks-work-duckduckg...
Couple that with how most people click the first link on the page (no accident mind you), it’s just downright extortion by Google.
(Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on search ads. This is coming from my experience buying search ads pre-Google)
Personally, I feel it crosses am ethical line. As a customer if I search for foo.bar and the first couple of result are for rival companies then Google isn't providing me with the service it claims it would. And as a business I would be forced to effectively double spend. Firstly, I would be spending time and effort on SEO to get to the top of the rankings, and then spent again to get to the top of the adverts that are obfuscating the real search results.
I know Google is a for-profit company operating in a free economy, but they still have to be ethical in what they do.
If Google has to be ethical, doesn't Uber have to be ethical?
If Google and Uber have to be ethical, doesn't Blackwater/Xe/Academi have to be ethical?
The problem is not enough people give it enough thought.
> If Google and Uber have to be ethical, doesn't Blackwater/Xe/Academi have to be ethical?
The problem with this argument is Blackwater/Xe/Academi serve a specific niche that inherently straddles the line of ethicality. They're not akin to Google or Uber; they don't have "general purpose" products that everyone needs/wants. Ergo it's not as black and white as Google and Uber (which in itself isn't as black and white as we'd like to think).
Google and Uber have to be ethical because we expect them to be, and Blackwater does not have to be ethical because we don't expect it of them?
Not precisely. Mainly I'm saying we can more easily affect Google and Uber's ethics than we can Blackwater, because we're generally not going after the services that Blackwater provides. Add to the fact that Blackwater doesn't always operate within societal norms, and the issue becomes complex.
Is it ethical to kill someone? What if that someone is killing other people? Google and Uber don't have to worry about that. Blackwater does.
this site lets companies advertise
against us using our brand
Would it be better if some companies would be entitled to exlusively advertise for certain terms?
I don't think so.
I'm not a lawyer so obviously this is not legal advice.
It may be "fun" to discover prices through haggling or learn through research that BogusHandbags.example.com[1] isn't a legitimate dealer in Louis Vuitton handbags but it is work and it doesn't scale to have every consumer have to do it for every decision.
[1] using example.com purely as an example. The operators of example.com are doing a good thing for the internet.
as for users, if ads never got so annoying adblockers would not be so common. (I literally started using one because some sites were impossible to use, as in every link redirect to a new ads page and nothing else)
but then if your ad is slightly more annoying, it grabs slightly more attention, and thus convert slightly better than your competitor's ad. Thus, leading to today's world - it's inevitable in advertising, due to game theory.
The only way to win is to not play. Change the game.
Just try to buy "Google" term to advertise your business (let's say you are Dropbox and want to buy "Google" and "Drive")... Yeah, they had it blocked. But you can buy "one drive", which is unfair albeit legal. It's not as the terms in dispute were "project", "management", "time", "team". It's the brand name, which incidentally in the case of Basecamp has zero relation with what they're selling.
If Google wanted a fair play they would come with something akin to the Trade Mark laws built in house.
Said by someone who has no idea about trademarks. Trademark. For what class? For what country?
Most trademarks have only a few classes. So you may be allowed to sell stuff because trademark XYZ only covers shoes. You can't sell computers with "Apple" brand but nobody can forbid you to sell apple (to eat). Who owns a brand? Budweiser beer is owned by Budweiser USA but they don't have the trademark in most European countries. This would get extraordinary complex very quickly.
And TP's business model is to build that queue of dissatisfied people so that you have to pay to compensate for it.
We are already used to seeing the number of reviews next to a rating score, but maybe we can add an additional "total number of customers" or a percentage of reviews-to-customers.
How does paying them result in positive reviews?
"Oh man, don't go to any of the restaurants on that street, they all look terrible."
So this is what happens when the competitor pays more for ads on your own name than you do.
> base camp, noun, a main encampment providing supplies, shelter, and communications for persons engaged in wide-ranging activities, as exploring, reconnaissance, hunting, or mountain climbing.
Meanwhile from https://basecamp.com/features:
> Basecamp combines all the tools teams need to get work done in a single, streamlined package. With everything in one place, your team will know what to do, where things stand, and where to find things they need.
I'm not sure 'basecamp' as a generic word has anything to do with project management, or any of the other things that basecamp.com product offers.
Now, if I search without an ad block for something like "screws" I get
1. Two ads that look like search results (same 3-4 line excerpt, same links into internal results, same "more" dropdown), except for a little box that says "Ad". This takes up 1/2 of my screen.
2. A full-screen height worth of map and links to physical stores (have no idea if they're paid for or not)
3. My results
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20871677
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874268
and direct link to twitter thread:
My analogy is the yellow pages, which is two things: A vehicle for ads, and a reference list of phone numbers. The sections are distinguished, by white/yellow pages for business/personal numbers, and with ads standing apart and looking different on the page. And YP never screwed with alpha order. They can make their money on ads and you can use the phone book for its raison d'être: a list of businesses/people.
As they should. If your product is an alternative to $bigbrand then this gives you the best visibility.
> When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own brand name, you’re forced to pay up if you want to be found. It’s a shakedown. It’s ransom.
No. Your brand is the first actual result. You might argue that four is a bit much or that it should be clearer that these are adds (can you even see those when running an ad blocker?), but "our competitors are running advertisements" is definitely not a shakedown or ransom.
It was my main reason for switching to duckduckgo
If the first page of DDG doesn't yield results it's about a second's work to do the same search, but with !g appended anywhere in the query.
If you scroll with your keyboard, how do you get back to the search field more quickly than with the mouse?
If you scroll with the mouse, how is a one-click solution with the device you already have in your hand not more efficient?
BL: DDG makes bang switches unwieldy. They should fix that.
EDIT: The / key is DDG's shortcut for going back to the search box. That helps a little. Doesn't mean that a clickable button wouldn't help usability a ton. Additionally, since editing a search is probably the most common use case (rather than replacing the search terms entirely), going to the search box should start with the cursor at the beginning or end of the box, rather than with the whole field highlighted.
In any case, certainly you can recognize that a huge proportion of people scroll with a mouse, n'est-ce pas?
Look at Mac sales after Intel/BootCamp/Parallels. VirtualPC existed before but it wasn't easy or fast. When it became almost seamless to fall back to Windows when necessary, more people were willing to take the leap.
You probably still are if you use chrome. By default DDG searches keep the query in the URL which means your chrome history contains history of all your searches.
You can also turn it off to save this data on you.
But yes, you can turn that off in your Google preferences as well.
Yes, I could cmd-click on the title instead but people (me) are lazy. Bigger targets make for a better/quicker experience.
They have a few other javascript enhancements like this that seem to break simple HTML functionality. Enough of them that I go back to using Google any time I venture into the DDG world.
In short, no, DDG is definitely not inferior in my experience, it's all just a matter of getting used to it.
Naive algorithm: if (search term exactly matches the domain of one of the ads) { disable_all_search_ads(); }
(Extend to handle partial matches, alternate spellings, etc)
The reality is if we didn’t have to do defensive ads on our organic results my company could probably offer 30% lower pricing. But because there’s no easy way to discriminate against google ad clickers we have to charge the Google tax to everyone, as most businesses do.
The end result is that nobody cries foul to the search monopoly and its cost to society. Google gets to charge monopolistic pricing without anyone noticing.
If I search for medicine, maybe they'll show me an ad for homeopathy. Maybe I'm gullible.
If I search Reliable Product X and I get an ad for Garbage Product Y...
Eventually, doesn't this de-value Google's own brand as being the place where you go to find... what you typed into the search bar?
Google doesn't have an awesome ads platform at this time. They just have no competition
You might ask whether state bar ethics rules have a different take? And the answer is yes, with results all over the place. This DDG search may be of interest: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22bar%22+buying+competitors+keywo...
I'd also argue that Basecamp (the service) is more known than Garmin Basecamp, _especially_ in these circles, DHH is definitely not some 'no-name' :)
My brain did a pre-google.
This is the most entitled blog post I have ever seen. As much as I personally dislike Google et al. I don't believe the ownership of a trademark or even just a brand entitles you to be the top of page for that word.
Also... if someone is searching for Basecamp specifically (i.e. using the search team "basecamp") they likely aren't going to click an ad for something they aren't looking for.
I have a very hard time feeling bad for Basecamp in this situation.
Basecamp made a value judgement that the value google provides through its search results is worth the price of paying for ads. This is revealed preference in action, Google has done nothing wrong here other than be the best at what they do.
Much in the same way that you don't have to work but are very much forced to.
Because Google has a quasi-monopoly on Internet search, something that ideally should be a neutral infrastructure service.
If your counterclaim is that no one forces me to survive then I suppose I don't have an answer beyond that.
For an amusing experience, look up "programming questions answered" on Google and Bing and see where Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange show up. If they do. Google serves up a "hongkiat" site that mentions them, but you would need to step deeper that I did to actually find either.
Does this mean that SO and SE are refusing to be coerced?