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Comment by Jerry2 | Hacker News Reader

With each AdWords display change, Google's been adding billions of dollars to their revenue by confusing and fooling their users and blurring the line between the content and ads.

A visual guide: "A (mostly comprehensive history of Google's ad shading and labeling" https://i.imgur.com/0RxdzBE.png

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For branded keywords, it's not just shady, it's racketeering. You wouldn't want your competitor to show up first when someone searches for your brand, would you? Then pay up.

E.g. https://i.imgur.com/SfomkdQ.png; the second result is a competitor's ad, the third result is the organic result.

This is what Basecamp has been complaining about for a while now too [1]. They even testified in front of Congress about it [2].

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/04/google-paid-search-ads-shake...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/technology/antitrust-hear...

If my Michelin alternative Yalp became influential and I allowed restaurants to bubble up to the top based on money, am I engaging in racketeering?

The difference being that you pay magnitudes less for your branded keywords than the competition, through the quality score. Allowing companies to advertise against their peers is actually creating more competition on the marketplace (which is a good thing).

Edit: Disclosure - I work at Google but this is my own opinion on multi-sided markets

more competition is not synonymous with good, it is a thing that can have good effects or bad.

If for example changes to the marketplace makes it harder to determine who is a fraud and who is not or simply making it difficult to determine the quality of products, competition between the companies with the quality products and fraudsters may increase and that would be a bad thing.

Advocating strongly for your employer and their business practices without disclosing the conflict of interest is essentially astroturfing.

You're right, edited my comment to be more clear that this is my opinion only. I don't use an anonymous username on HN because, as you saw in my profile before searching me, everything I say reflects my opinion only.

Put that way, google is a market maker and hence should be regulated. Right now it’s an unsupervised private regulator, which doesn’t make sense.

It's Never Racketeering

https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...

Thanks for the link. That's useful and entertaining at the same time.

This is a tricky proposition. Google has free speech rights to display whatever they want on their own server pages. These aren't statements of fact so it's not falling under libel & co.

It's like saying that you want to regulate what can advertising companies display on billboards, ex. they cannot display competitor's ads nearby your company's offices. Since the billboard space is private and owned by the ad company (similarly to the ad space on Google servers served pages), they get too decide to put there whatever they want (barring free speech limiting regulations).

Never seen this image before. Fascinating. A damning visualisation of Google's slow but steady descent into a soulless money-making machine.

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