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Comment by Guest0918231 | Hacker News Reader

I understand why it's happening and I mentioned it in my comment. However, I just find it incredibly inappropriate that...

1. When I search an exact domain Google will take money from a competitor and show their "advertisement" first. I say that in quotations, because it looks like they're showing a search result, not an advertisement. At this point it feels like companies are paying for their search placement. Pay enough money and you can be the first result for any search term.

2. Does Google give Expedia the option to not pay for an advertisement when there is no competition? I don't think so, and in the example I posted, Google has basically scared Expedia into outbidding no one.

The whole thing feels like extortion. Pay us money or we'll send people trying to navigate to your website to one of your competitors.

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I 100% agree with you. It is extortion.

Google = the new Yelp

That's what happens when MBAs and not engineers run your tech company

There are enough unethical engineers in the world (in fact, many of them work at Google!) that you don’t need to make this accusatory statement.

Your statement has unquantified "enough, "many" and unqualified "in fact". It also completely misses the point - it is the proportion of unethical decision makers that matters. Not the absolute numbers.

To be fair this exact behaviour has been happening since pretty much day 1, Google no longer being run by engineers is a very recent development.

The difference now is gate keeping. Prior behavior did leave one to make choices.

Google made their favored ones easy.

Now that fails to deliver expected results. Too many people not making the choices Google would have them make.

I aggree with your point #1, if you search for an specific term / domain it should always appear first if there's a direct match.

but for #2 there's a pro-competition argument here. If you search for Expedia and all you ever get is Expedia and expedia pages underneath that, in theory that's good. But what if you don't know about other online travel sites? You'll never see them, so it kind of makes sense that you are shown other sites in there.

Google should recognise that a search for Expedia is either: a) For Expedia b) For a travel holiday

and let other competitors rank for b), showing Expedia as the biggest and main CTA on the page.

so it kind of makes sense that you are shown other sites in there

Why? If I search for a specific thing (Expedia), why would Google assume I want to see other options that I did not ask for other than "it's more profitable for Google"? More specifically, in the event I want other options, why is the correct answer "you want to see the other options that are paying Google the most"? That's not "pro-competition", that's "pro-Google".

Google should recognise that a search for Expedia is either: a) For Expedia b) For a travel holiday

Why, short of mind reading (I assume they're working on it, but it's not in the 10Q), should Google ever assume B?

What about generic or almost generic trademarks? If I search for something like bandaid I am certainly _not_ expecting Google to rank Johnson and Johnson (the owner of the trademark for bandaid) above other potentially more relevant results.

And the same applies to other terms like Kleenex, Ziploc, aspirin, etc.

> But what if you don't know about other online travel sites? You'll never see them, so it kind of makes sense that you are shown other sites in there.

I don't think that makes sense. Or, at least, such results should be below all the actually relevant results.

If I'm searching for Expedia, then what I want is results about Expedia. Nothing else. If I want to know about other travel sites, I'd be searching for "travel sites" instead.

And if you don't know the name for the generic product to search for?

Jacuzzi, styrofoam, and Super Glue are all brand specific trademarked items[0], but I doubt most users care about that when they're searching for those terms.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

To play devil's advocate, these kind of brand ads are usually very cheap and frequently generate some incrementality - you're basically paying to have your links take over a larger part of page 1. Even if competitors weren't going to advertise, it might be worth it.

I pay five figures a month for my "$domain" ad. It's not cheap by any means, but we're forced to buy, otherwise our competitors steal our traffic.

Similarly with GTLDs. Many companies have to register their own .sucks so someone else doesn't stand a website up there. What a pointless waste of money.

And .sucks is expensive for a TLD. I also hate .co. They're basically a top-level typo-squatter IMO.

"Steal"?

If customers searching for your brand are happy to buy from your competitor with a different name, maybe your brand isn't so strong?

And if you are profiting from advertising your brand to people who don't choose your product over alternatives, isn't your marketing just "stealing" purchases from competitors?

Yeah, that's not how it is working right now. It's more like:

User: "Google, how do I get to Costco?"

Google: "Here are directions to Target."

User:"But I asked for directions to Costco."

Google: "Target gave us a lot of money. So, firstly here are directions to Target. If you still want Costco, keep scrolling, but Target is great. You should shop here."

When you literally search for one brand and the first result is a competitor, just because they bought out the ad space for your brand name's keywords, that is theft, imo. Or extortion if you'd prefer. It's at the very least, extremely disingenuous and sleazy. Customer loyalty is looking up the preferred brand to begin with.

I imagine it kind of like this...

Two stores, A and B are competitors. I visit company A and say that I'll stand at the entrance of their competitor, store B. I'll tell each customer trying to enter store B about store A and attempt to refer them, as long as store A pays me $0.50 for each person I try to send their way.

This works, some people that drove to visit store B now go to store A instead. Now, store B is getting annoyed at me "stealing" their customers, but I have a solution. I tell store B the more money they pay me, the less likely it is that I'll refer their next customer to store A. So, store B starts paying me $1.00 each time someone tries to enter their own store, and in return, I do nothing but stand there.

A year goes by and I'm standing at the entrance of every store in the country. I collect a dollar when someone tries to enter every store, and I do nothing but let them pass.

That's naive way of looking at things. Do you know how many brands and trademarks exist in the world? It's over 40 million! Do you know how many brands easily gets mixed up with normal English? When someone searches for best buy, do they always want to go to best buy store? When I type subway, do I want a sandwich shop or subway station? Doing things at scale is very different. And you can't be unfair to small brands while only taking care of big brands. While I understand your issue, there is no clear cut solution here.

To be fair, they don’t do that on Google Maps. However they will push their own Google Flights service when searching for United. Eg “Book United” redirection to Google Flight.

Why does Google owe you traffic?

If I promise to give you a truthful answer to a question you ask, "What's 2+2?", and then I say, "5" (because math teachers pay me to give that answer), the same argument could be made.

Why do I owe you a fulfilled promise? Because I said I'd be honest? Why do I owe you honesty about my honesty?

Reductio ad absurdum

If I build a search engine and promise that it will give accurate and honest results to your search queries, and then it doesn't do that... why do I owe you? "I didn't force you to trust me" is the most childish way to try and weasel out of broken promises there is.

To answer your question though - they don't, but it makes them a shitty company to lie to/manipulate their users.

It's lying insofar as grocery stores having two brands of chips on an endcap that you see first before you get to the actual aisle with the other 30 brands is lying.

More like specifically asking a clerk where the Lays Salt & Vinegar chips, and they walk you to the chip aisle and respond with "Here are the Doritos", but sure...

Except this store only makes money on showing you where the chips are and not on the sales so if they can't show you the Doritos first, there's no store and no chips of any kind. If that's what you'd prefer, then pretend the store doesn't exist and go to a different one.

That's not the only way they make money though. Even if it was the only way they make money, giving accurate results in those cases is the cost of keeping your users for cases you can serve them ads that are relevant. The only reason they got big was their accurate results so it is a shitty thing to do.

Google owes mostly-unbiased accuracy to the internet at large. They built their brand and reputation on that. It should not be possible to purchase a shortcut on the accuracy, especially someone else's.

It doesn't owe anyone anything. It trades this unbiased accuracy for eyeballs on its advertising, the same advertising that many folks in this comment section are condemning. Without the advertising, Google doesn't owe anyone anything. It's not a charity.

Its a sad world you live in where businesses don't owe you to behave ethically.

You'll probably figure out at some point that they do, and that this whole law thing is a proxy for ethics we put in place so that we can punish people that don't.

Until then, live in your world.

I live in the same world you do, minus that smug sense of entitlement to products and services others provide.

Google shouldn’t be a purveyor of brand quality in the case where the user has made an explicit request. If a user types in “shoes” should they 100% get shoes.com as the first result? Of course not. But Expedia? It feels wrong not to make that the first result.

Expedia is indeed the first result for "Expedia", after the 0-2 slots of advertising that may or may not be Expedia. If Google can't monetize the search results page, why are they obligated to provide the search results in the first place? Until Google recoups the costs by showing ads, the relationship between Expedia and Google is one sided: Google provides a lot of traffic to Expedia with nothing in return. How is that fair?

It doesn't. And I totally understand from a business point of view why they do what they do. This is an unfortunate side effect of the monopoly they have on web search, which due to network effects and aggregation is unlikely to go away.

The only real solution is to regulate this to make competition fairer again.

I can't speak for the OP, but in our situation, the customer doesn't realize they are buying from a competitor. We regularly get support requests from customers we can't find an order history for. It's almost always the case that they ordered from someone else thinking they were ordering from us. They searched our name, clicked the first result, and placed the order.

We've even seen this happen with repeat customers of ours. It's tough since Google allows the ads to be very confusing, but then we also have competitors who have blatantly copied our style, content, and have even named themselves in a similar manner.

We also spend just under five figures a month on branded keywords to combat this. We rank #1 organically for all of them, but there are always 3-4 competitors bidding on them so we only get a small portion of that traffic if we don't pay for those keywords and get the #1 paid spot as well.

Even with that in place people will still get duped and click ad #2, #3, or #4 that go to competitor sites.

If I were a competitor, and it’s that cheap and effective for Expedia, then I’d never allow Expedia to have that real estate.

It's absolutely extortion, but it's cheaper for Expedia to buy than a competitor due to Google's auction rules.

Essentially, the bid to be #1 is discounted by the click-through rate. If 90% of people who search "expedia.com" will click an ad for Expedia, and only 10% of people who search "expedia.com" will click an ad for travelsite.com, travelsite.com has to pay 10x what Expedia does to make up for the lost revenue.

Devil's advocate - isn't this a neat way of automatically being anti-incumbent and pro-competition?

It is a tax on customers. Incumbents can generally afford to pay more than upstarts, and of course will just pass that cost on.

? I don't follow the mechanism you're thinking of here.

No. It's a currently non-illegal way to extort businesses.

It might be if it were more transparent. So many people are mislead by these "ads" on branded search keywords though, it really is extortionate.

Wait, I'm confused. Are you saying that Expedia pays Google less when people click on the ad vs when they click on something else?

No, I'm saying Expedia pays less for ads for expedia.com than ExpediaCompetitor pays for ads for expediacompetitor.com.

This gives Expedia an advantage when purchasing ads on the search term "expedia.com".

Of course, Expedia would probably prefer not to purchase ads on "expedia.com" at all.

https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016?s=...

| 2. Does Google give Expedia the option to not pay for an advertisement when there is no competition?

If nobody bids against Expedia, they'll end up paying a penny to win the auction. Source: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2996564?hl=en&r...

Why are users entering brand names into google instead of going directly to the site? How can we change this behavior?

It's one way to avoid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typosquatting

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