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Comment by jborichevskiy | Hacker News Reader

> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is billions of people use Google?

Key paragraph of the article. You don't have to be good at ads when you have a firehose of most of the world's population coming directly to you, telling you exactly what they want to buy/find/learn/read/do in their native language combined with their geolocation and search history. It would be hard not to serve up relevant ads in that case.

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But that's precisely what makes Google "good at ads." They built the firehose. Own a destination where billions of people go everyday, find a way to measure their intent, serve my information to them. That = fantastic at ads.

I think it's pretty clear what Peretti was talking about--let's make an effort to respond to his intended meaning and not get caught up in semantics.

Peretti is talking about quality versus quantity: maybe Google doesn't serve up quality ads, maybe they just serve up quantity ads.

He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does.

As to the question posed by the article, isn't the answer obvious? I don't know if users even "trust" Google's responses now. But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers. As long as Google is still the best way to search up information on, e.g., obscure aspects of Stardew Valley's economy, users who want to do searches about such things will continue to prefer Google. If Google ceases to surface good results for queries compared to e.g. DDG, users will migrate to DDG.

> He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does.

Yeah, I think the only way that would happen is if someone came up with a novel superior approach to search and managed to legally protect it so Google couldn't just copy it. That's a very unlikely at this point.

> But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers.

I don't think I agree with this. Users don't necessarily behave rationally in self-interest: they can be (and are) manipulated, and unwilling to try new tools.

I can believe that if there were another solution that were marginally better it might not be enough to unseat the top player in the market. But switching costs in search are extremely low so it would be surprising if people did not switch for a substantially better experience. In particular, it would require us to believe that what happened when Google showed up on the scene would not happen again, and to me that just does not seem likely.

Perhaps switching costs are low, but they're certainly higher than people are willing to pay in many cases. Switching costs as high as "changing the default search provider" are demonstrably prohibitive.

Peretti is talking about the quality of the ad service, not the quality of the ads themselves. Peretti is suggesting that maybe Google's service isn't anything special, and their success is due to their insanely large audience.

The comment you replied to goes even further to suggest there's no real talent to serving ads at all, and that everything depends upon the audience size. That's not just semantics.

>quality ads

I've seen this term for years but I still don't understand what it means. I don't want to see ads. There are no 'quality' ads. All ads are designed to sell me things period. I don't need anyone telling me about what I might want. I understand ads exist to make money and if they didn't we wouldn't have the internet etc. But there's no 'quality' to them, they're a necessary evil i've come to accept and adapt to over my life. I dislike them, I have no need for them, there'll never be a time I say 'well gee, sure am glad I seen that ad, it showed me just what I didn't know I needed.' Ads exist to sell crap to people, they're not good or bad, they just are. Some are invasive, some are reasonable, but they're all shit.

You may have never seen a good ad then. There was a period of time I would actively look at ads on penny-arcade, because the owners of the site only ever allowed ads (mostly for games) that they themselves could at least tangentially endorse. This meant I basically got hand curated ads for products I was genuinely interested in, by people who’s taste I understood if not agreed with.

That said this ended up being the exception to proof the rule about ads being mostly noise, and I agree the world would be better with less of them. And almost certainly the current state of algorithmic ad serving is a disaster.

Just like the guitar mags I grew up with. I looked at all the ads, and even bought stuff based on what I saw in competing ads along with gear reviews.

For that matter, the same goes for motorcycle magazines, and just about every other kind of magazine that caters to a niche market.

Those kinds of ads can be great, even.

Okay, but did those ads contribute anything beyond reading Penny Arcade's reviews of games? For you as a user, how does the ad improve your experience?

it's really not hard to define what a "good" ad might be--a product (or service) you don't know about but that solves an immediate problem without an immediately obvious solution. it'd anticipate your need, without invading your privacy.

fwiw, i generally don't want to be subjected to ads either, particularly for the privacy-invading aspect, but also the time- and attention-wasting aspect too. most ads are absolutely horribly conceived and targeted, especially spray-and-pray email spam.

You gave examples of what I assume you consider "bad" ads. What would be examples of "good" ads in your opinion? I mean, examples matching the definition you gave:

Anticipating needs of person X, (and serve person X an ad), without any foreknowledge of person X.

another poster gave a good example--offering related merchandise on a interest-based website/forum.

a made-up example might be a customer at best buy spending time in both the tv and pc departments and then having an ad pop up on a nearby screen for an intel NUC and/or apple tv (making the assumption you want a tv-connected computer). the ad didn't need to know any personal characteristics about you other than limited, directly observable behavior in the store.

i'm sure people who focus on this every day (i.e., not me) can provide better examples.

To be fair, the example you gave require facial recognition wouldn't it?

You'd have to recognize the face and track it prior to displaying the ad.

well, face recognition is more specific than you'd need in this case.

if you went that route, you could get away with simpler person recognition (height, width, clothing color, accessories, etc.). or you could just track phones and other devices via wifi/bluetooth (and presumably uwb in the near future).

but you could also just have salespeople on the floor doing the recognition & ad placement part of it, for a lower-tech solution.

i'd actually bet trained salespeople would have better hit rates over algorithmic solutions, where access to large amounts of dislocated data is the main advantage (at the cost of our privacy).

The problem with ads isn't "good" or "bad" ads, it's that the nature of building a business of serving ads inevitably leads to an unquenchable thirst for data plus customers whose primary goal in paying you is to sell things, not to provide value (though some may do so as a selling strategy). It's hard to imagine how, or even why, such an ad business could serve the best interests of the end consumer, despite the idea held at one point that perhaps consumers would be so turned off by ads that they'd defect to a different solution. There might be SOME people who don't use Google or Facebook for these reasons, but most people simply deal with poor user experience, security, and frustration because they want to see things listed with reviews on a map, or know what their friends are doing on the weekend.

> "...serving ads inevitably leads to an unquenchable thirst for data..."

well, to continue playing devil's advocate, we've had hundreds of years of advertising (newspapers, pamphlets, and posters/signs before that) without any kind of systematic data collection, so it's not necessarily an intrinsic characteristic of the advertising business to collect data.

in an alternate universe, if banks didn't have such a stodgy and stifling rent-seeking business on the movement of money (transaction fees on everything), microtransactions might be the preferred business model of many online businesses that are now dependent on ads.

Your hard-line position that all ads are bad, always, is laughable. If you search for "cheapest gasoline" it's not unreasonable that an ad for an electric car might be interesting. Or if you search for "Orlando hotels", an ad for generally less expensive hotels in Kissimmee (the next town over) is more valuable than a perfectly literal result. And if you search for "k8s cluster deployment tools" then you probably want as many ads as possible, so your evaluation doesn't fail to include a comprehensive set of options.

Perhaps you're saying I already know about electric cars and Kissimmee and kubernetes, to which I'd respond, yes, probably via ads. Maybe a commercial or sign or web ad, but also maybe through a TV news spot (pr campaign) or magazine review (expenses paid) or web article (with affiliate link).

> Your hard-line position that all ads are bad, always, is laughable.

This doesn't seem especially civil.

> If you search for "cheapest gasoline" it's not unreasonable that an ad for an electric car might be interesting.

Interesting to whom? The parent comment doesn't want to see ads. So no it's not likely to be interesting in this context.

> Or if you search for "Orlando hotels", an ad for generally less expensive hotels in Kissimmee (the next town over) is more valuable than a perfectly literal result.

For me, personally, no I would find that to be an annoyance.

> And if you search for "k8s cluster deployment tools" then you probably want as many ads as possible, so your evaluation doesn't fail to include a comprehensive set of options.

Again no, I would want 0 ads in that case. Have you read about k8s cluster deployment tools? It's hard to find any useful information because even the results that aren't literally ads are fluff blog posts with little content. I don't want the fluff posts, but I can comb through them. I certainly don't want the ads.

> Perhaps you're saying I already know about electric cars and Kissimmee and kubernetes, to which I'd respond, yes, probably via ads.

There are ways to learn about things without someone paying for the right to say them at you when you don't want them to.

OK Mr Literal, you're saying when you search for "Las Vegas hotels" you want the results to exclude the entirety of the Strip, "Dallas football stadium" to exclude where the Cowboys play, and "American airlines reservations" to provide the web site or phone number for Delta (which is, technically, an American airline.)

Could you explain how you got this from the comment you're replying to? Are you assuming a search engine can't find things there are ads for except when serving the ads?

Please check a map. It's an "annoyance" to SquishyPanda23 when he doesn't get a precisely literal result. If Kissimmee != Orlando, then Strip hotels != Las Vegas (they are all in unincorporated Clark County, NV) and AT&T Stadium != Dallas (it's in Arlington, and the old Texas Stadium is in Irving).

But, hey, he's absolutely entitled to live his life ignorant about viable options.

You can be in favor of the search engine making the best guess to what you wanted, but still consider ads worse than search results. The reason is that ads aren't optimized only for relevancy, but for relevancy multiplied by commission. When an advertiser pays more per click, their ads will show on less relevant searches. If that effect didn't exist, I think people would be more ok with ads.

I've never claimed that ads are better than search results. I'm only stating that some ads, in certain contexts or situations, do provide positive value. 'Grawprog' summed up his comment by stating "they're all shit," and I disagreed and gave examples of when they might offer positive value.

I'm not sure I understand your response.

Discerning the intent of a search is completely orthogonal to whether to serve advertisements.

Search engines are generally not great at discerning the intent of a search. For example they frequently return irrelevant results that don't match key words even when you ask for a literal search. This has been discussed a lot.

But that's an unrelated issue to whether the search should return advertisements in addition to search results.

Signs like those famous Golden Arches can be useful.

However, when browsing the web in 20+ years I have never seen a useful paid for online add. That’s an inherent product of the medium where the only point of an add is to be less useful than the content I am looking at.

Supose your GPS added advertising. so it’s priority is not the best for you but what’s best for 3rd parties. That’s what online adds are, they take something useful and inherently degrade the experience.

> Signs like those famous Golden Arches can be useful.

I know this is picking on your example rather than your general concept, but this is a great example of how advertising is harmful. McDonald's has done incalculable damage to the health of Americans, and even if you don't go there, seeing the arches sometimes will get your kids yelling in the back seat, "I want to go to McDonald's!" This isn't helpful to us: it's helpful to McDonald's.

There are many factors that might determine which search results I will want to see. Under no circumstances will those factors include "how much money did they pay the search engine". By definition, that can only change my search results to something less aligned with what I want.

It's rather naive to believe they only arbiter of what's an ad or not an ad is payment to Google.

Not at all! The positive sum game here goes

* Company creates thing people like you want to buy.

* Company knows if you know about the thing, you will want to buy it.

* Company knows you don't know whether a thing like their thing even exists, so you have no reason to search hard for it.

* Company upfronts the money to defray your search costs, knowing it will be paid back when you buy the thing. This is called advertising.

I am constantly learning about things I would have enjoyed if I had known about them. It is damn hard to make people aware even that you are giving away free lunch. Advertising breaks down that needless ignorance.

I used to buy hand tools at Lowe's, Home Depot, or occasionally Autozone if it was car-related. One day I saw a search result ad for Harbor Freight. Had heard the name, never knew they were a tools shop. I've joked to friends that discovery was life-changing. (for reasons, compare prices on just about anything, a good example would be a 1.5 ton floor jack)

Mostly tangential to the original point on this thread, but Harbor Freight tends to sell the cheapest, and far from the best, tools.

Might be fine for your use case, I donno.

I'm not a contractor beating up on these things every day. I need an impact wrench a couple times a year, my HF stuff is fine for my use case. I love the Bosch impact driver I got at Lowe's 10 years ago, but they've changed the battery pack so I can't take advantage of compatibility with other Bosch tools. HF also has random stuff for close to free... packs of zip ties for $2, decent work gloves for $4, actually free LED light perfect for under a car, etc.

Advertising creates needless ignorance, by giving the impression that well-advertised products are quality products.

GoDaddy and NordVPN, for examples, are garbage products with highly effective advertising. Seeing ads for these products actively harms people, because it prevents them from finding better products like Gandi or PIA.

> If you search for "cheapest gasoline" it's not unreasonable that an ad for an electric car might be interesting.

No, I still don't want to see an ad. It's not unreasonable that a search result for electric cars might be interesting, but I want results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the advertiser that serves themselves.

> Or if you search for "Orlando hotels", an ad for generally less expensive hotels in Kissimmee (the next town over) is more valuable than a perfectly literal result.

No, I still don't want to see an ad. A search result for a cheaper hotel in Kissimmee might be valuable, but I want results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the hotel that serves themselves.

> And if you search for "k8s cluster deployment tools" then you probably want as many ads as possible, so your evaluation doesn't fail to include a comprehensive set of options.

No, I still don't want to see an ad. I want to see search results of a comprehensive set of options, but I want those results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the hotel that serves themselves.

> Perhaps you're saying I already know about electric cars and Kissimmee and kubernetes, to which I'd respond, yes, probably via ads. Maybe a commercial or sign or web ad, but also maybe through a TV news spot (pr campaign) or magazine review (expenses paid) or web article (with affiliate link).

No, I'm saying that I want to discover products that are the best for my needs, not products with the best ad placement. I want tools that serve me, instead of serving the best-funded advertisers.

Literally none of the cases you describe are what I want. Ads inherently give inaccurate information.

Excuse me, but who are these benevolent 3rd parties who freely exist to "serve" you? Do you mean sites like Expedia or Booking.com, who are, of course, getting paid behind the scenes to highlight specific hotels? Or "review" sites who select their winner based on top paying affiliate links (see Sleepopolis)? Or car review sites who glowingly praise some new model, right after the writer was flown to California and given an all-expense paid weekend to tour wine country?

I'm assuming kerkeslager is talking about publications like Consumer Reports. Basically any publication that sells you access to curated aggregated content. It would be up to the readers to decide whether they trust the impartiality of the authors.

Perhaps kerkeslager could actually answer himself. Consumer Reports is behind a hard paywall, you certainly aren't getting their researched info via a search result. As far as ad-free publications "like" Consumer Reports, I'm not aware of any. Maybe it's because they don't advertise effectively...

"Quality" in this Peretti's context would be "effective in selling a product": i.e. it's what advertisers consider to be quality.

I agree with your point though: from a user's perspective there's no such thing as a quality ad: ads are inherently bad.

After all this time watchin me, everything I ever asked it, all the ads I never clicked on, all the videos it watched me watch, all my emails it read, heck even after I worked for the dang company for nearly ten years, Google does not understand a very basic, essential thing about me. I hate advertising, damn it! I am sick of looking at it, I am sick of it looking at me. I am sick of hearing about how advertising is necessary to support a $130 billion in revenue and a trillion dollar valuation and some of the world's richest people. It's a lie. I'm sick of hearing about how I don't really hate advertising, I just want to see better ads. It's horseshit. I want to stop being bothered. I wanna stop being followed around. I wanna stop being monetized. We could have a smaller, more useful web that better benefited humanity, we could make education free or nearly free, we could actually have a chance to realize the dream of the original pioneers of the internet, if we weren't so obsessed with making it into the world's largest commercial marketplace, the world's biggest casino and TV show, and Google wasn't intent on extracting its ludicrous "fair share". If access to the internet is a human right, then its gateways can't be commercial entities, let alone ones hell-bent on growth. It is fundamentally incompatible.

You don't need Google. The Internet is fairly decentralized. You can build your small web even today and just block Google via robots.txt, never use it yourself, and link via webrings.

The Internet is very good at overlay networks. Search engines aren't even required. If you want Google's features then they ask that you pay their price. But if you don't want to play with the rest of us, you can host on your own, you can choose to browse via a free web directory you and others like you maintain, and all that.

It's all there for the taking. It's just that the rest of us derive utility from being part of the network that's growing.

Unfortunately their price is excessive and their income mostly comes from rent-seeking the contribution they make to the value of the internet is negligible and they leverage their position to take an outsized chunk out of income streams.

Google is a literal barrier to entry when it comes to running a web based business - if you can't secure traffic you die and traffic breeds more traffic so it's price is highly inelastic. It's (essentially) the same issue as market driven healthcare if you are dying then prolonging your life (generally) has infinite value and the market price for treatment becomes as much cash as you can get your hands on.

That's only if you want access to all the people who find Google useful. The guy I'm responding to wants a smaller web that doesn't grow. You can do that without drinking from the Google firehouse.

No one is taking the ability to make a smaller web away from anyone. But that's the nature of the small web, it's small. And maybe your business can't sustain itself on small. That's just incompatibility of what you want and physical reality.

You know what people say on this website about blocking ads, right? "Your business model is not my problem". It's true.

I get what you're saying and I sympathize. It just isn't compatible with the other guy's view. In a "smaller web" your business wouldn't even exist.

YaCy certainly comes to mind when considering decentralized web search. Google has a strong control of the pipe of people sending it queries. Though, there are certainly other methods.

https://yacy.net/index.html

>Google does not understand a very basic, essential thing about me. I hate advertising, damn it!

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

I just want to point out it's not necessarily that we want those things, it's that those who are in control push for it, and they do it because the way our society is structured rewards them for it

They understand that you are part of the cohort that doesn't want to be monetized. Which is the reason they don't change it for you, because the efforts required to remove this cohort from tracking and still serve useful search results are a lot higher than what they think people would pay for.

But let's surprise them. I personally would be willing to pay up to 10k per decade of my remaining life expectancy to opt out completely. Upfront payment, right now. A package deal including Amazon would be even better, maybe for 50% more?

I think at one point people need to put a price point to their privacy, otherwise nothing changes. The market has no incentive for this change right now. And yes, that would mean that privacy is a luxury for people who can afford it, which is not what I would like to see, especially since I remember the times when you had privacy by default when going online. But I can't imagine how it can become a fundamental right under the current market conditions.

That's nowhere near enough. Sorry. You do want to see ads, you just don't realise it.

Google did actually run this experiment. They aren't stupid and lots of people say they'd rather pay money directly rather than see ads. Because of Google's place in the ecosystem they can actually implement that.

So they did. It eventually became Google Contributor and never really launched properly. The early version of Contributor was a lot more pure than what eventually launched. It let you set a budget and compete against yourself in the ad auction, so publishers were getting the same amount of money for their content as before. I tried it out when I worked there. You could set a fake budget and Google would pay for you to see empty boxes or pictures from your own photo albums instead of ads. A few things became apparent.

One is Google doesn't serve all or even most of the ads on the internet. So I still saw a lot of ads. This made the experience feel pretty pointless.

Another is that this model is completely infeasible. The internet economy is huge. Just a week or so of browsing rapidly blew my test budget of a few hundred dollars. To see no ads on the internet served by Google I would have needed to pay a large multiple of what I paid monthly for TV, mobile and Internet connectivity.

You say you'd be willing to pay $10k per decade? Forget it. If you're a heavy internet user that'd buy you less than a month, not a decade.

Finally, this didn't opt you out of search ads. That's because Google has strong experimental evidence that ads on search are good for users. One of the longest running A/B tests the firm ever did was selecting 1% of users and disabling search ads for them. What they found was a long term trend where those users simply used Google less than normal. Without ads the results were less useful so they did the obvious and searched less. Why would Google let you pay to make their product less useful for you?

Good points, actually very interesting, especially the budget part.

But I wasn't talking about just the ads, I was talking about the tracking to optimize those ads. I don't care about the ads. Show me ads, I ignore them anyway. I just don't want to be tracked to build out my personality profile for the rest of my life, because I don't know who will get access to that data and what it might be used for. Show ads based on my search term, not based on my browser, email and location history. They will have the same effect as the optimized ones: none.

Just keep in mind, the cohort I was talking about, was the one that will not be monetized. It is the cohort that still sees ads, but will never convert. So I'm not sure why I would buy my own ad space for an amount of money that is based on the usual conversion rate, when my conversion or click rate for my sample of n=1 is zero all the time. My profile correlates to zero spending, it is not worth the average ad price.

Google Contributor kind of proves my point about the efforts required being too costly. It was easier to inject a person as a buyer for their own profile into the merchandising system, than to rework all the tracking tools and the analytics that runs on it to stop tracking that specific person. So yes, my $10k is still not enough.

> Why would Google let you pay to make their product less useful for you?

Because I value privacy as a principle more than a slightly less useful product, and I would pay for it. But apparently I can't afford it.

Many ads are brand ads. You don't have to click for the advertiser to get what they want, just see their ad at all. Even for click-based ads, well, most people claim they never click on ads. But, they're wrong. Again, Google has lots of data on this. You will never be allowed to opt out of ads if you aren't paying your way, because lots of people would do it and that would render the internet economically unviable (of course no such ad network would survive for more than 5 minutes).

It was easier to inject a person as a buyer for their own profile into the merchandising system, than to rework all the tracking tools and the analytics that runs on it to stop tracking that specific person.

No, they did it that way because otherwise it'd have reduced publisher earnings who would then have gone to other ad networks with no Contributor programme. How do you set the price of not seeing an ad otherwise? The price of seeing it is set by auction. It had nothing to do with tracking which can be disabled by anyone here:

https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662922?hl=en-GB

and here

https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

Tracking isn't actually the big hammer people imagine it is. That's a fiction invented by journalists. It helps a bit but only really basic stuff like "show German people ads in German" or remarketing (show people ads for products they were looking at buying very recently). That's why it's OK to opt out. You become worth a bit less and you'll see more irritating ads as a result, but very few use this option.

Because I value privacy as a principle more than a slightly less useful product, and I would pay for it. But apparently I can't afford it.

Go disable ad tracking then. The options have been there for many years.

I think there is more to privacy than just disabling personalized ads, which is the reason I'm not bothered by them. I'm more concerned about personalized search results and filter bubbles. But I also think it is totally fine that the system works for you and you get value out of it.

Best thing I've read this year. Couldn't agree more.

Which ads? The ads on the google search engine, or the ads that random website is getting from google. Are the google ads at me.com any good?

I'm surprised more companies don't take this in house. 20 years ago little small town newspapers and radio stations had their own in house ad sales. Seems like a no-brainier for web news to sell targeted ads to their customers.

Because a newspaper does not have enough user targeting data; their ads would not be as valuable since they would not be as well targeted.

The ads I see on my paper newspaper are often better “targeted” than the ones I see (or block ;) ) on their website.

Of course this is not data, but the parent post has an interesting stance.

I'm tired of saying this but either I've been caught in a fluke of some kind or Google really isn't so good at advertising.

Or they are optimizing to fleece dumb advertisers or I am extreme outlier.

Instagram however, a service that I hardly use, manages to present ads that look interesting again and again.

Newspapers used to be relatively well targeted. You know people reading the Podunk Times are probably in the Podunk region. But now the competition has surged ahead, and you can target on Facebook "people who run as a hobby and are African American and live in a metro with great than >500K population" or whatever.

But from a consumer point of view, is it better to be targeted in a loose way by people guessing about your demographics or an exact way by people who know your demos? And as a publisher, how the hell are you supposed to make content if all the money is gobbled up by the platforms?

I think we should return to status quo ante by just banning the collection of targeting data. We know that the old ad ecosystem worked because we observed it working, and we know that the new one sucks because we observe publishers going bankrupt and privacy being violated.

They still do that. Large content sites still sell ads and can do so in any way they want, exclusivity deals, results oriented, click based, you name it. The inventory they can't sell directly they sell to Google or whoever is paying best at that time. They can even throw an ad view into ad networks to be bid on and show the winning bid ad to the user. The whole bidding war happens in real time for each user for each ad sometimes across multiple ad networks.

I suppose a lot of people here know how real time bidding networks work but I was mind blown the first time I saw that.

Sometimes I type the name of a site into the URL bar, but I don't include the top-level domain. Most of the time, the top link is an ad for the site I wanted, and the second link is a non-ad link to the site I wanted.

I always try to click the non-ad link, as I like the sites that I remember the names of and I don't want them to have to pay the troll toll, but sometimes I accidentally click the top link and I feel bad (only very very little, though) about it. Yesterday, I accidentally made Hackaday pay the toll.

I refuse to say that that is being good at ads. It's kind of slimy, forcing sites to do SEO to put themselves at the top of the list when someone is searching their name. I've actually switched over from chrome to firefox (on the machines where I have the option) because of this (and the fact that the top ~7 search results for many queries are SEO'd garbage).

I have a feeling that we'll arrive soon at StatGate... The point where we find that many companies have been providing erroneous and/or outright false web stats, recommendations, reviews and other metrics to users in order to steer and increase profit.

Social media sites offer the ability for everyone on platforms to pay for primary placement now. This is a big conflict of interest in how posts are shown to users, and why very protected/secret algorithms are now applied to creatively show posts to some users and not others on all of these sites and services.

Once a company like Google has cornered the search market,and they also have tentacles everywhere through their collected data form other sources (e.g. google maps, gmail, google trends, Android, etc) there are few ways of backing out. They are now deeply ingrained in our society, and they'll know about anyone who is inventing an alternate path before it even happens and possibly operate in an anti-competitive manner. This is the modern realization of Skynet in a way I guess. :/

At the end of the day, how can we trust companies that manipulate us to boost profits? We simply can't, and we shouldn't really allow monopolies to get this big and embedded into critical services.

I suspect the same. And it wouldn't be unprecedented:

WSJ: Facebook Overestimated Key Video Metric for Two Years (2016)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-overestimated-key-vide...

Well even a company of exemplary moral character like Facebook might make a simple mistake every now and then.

Such upstanding member of the community!

Same as any other monopolistic company. Comcast isn't necessarily good at providing internet, in fact most of their customers would say they're shit at it. But most people don't have a choice.

I am forced to use Comcast, and I really wish I had another option. I have numerous complaints about them. But I have to say -- the quality of their internet service is not one of them. It's been consistently solid and well-performing for me for years.

Their upload speed doesn't bother you?

Not really, no. Their price tag and their billing shenanigans sure do, though.

I guess, but the price tag seems intertwined with the quality of service? Hard to separate them (at least for me).

The pricing is much higher than equally good service that can be had from other companies in other parts of my city, so I consider it overpriced.

But the bigger problem is that you have to scrutinize every billing statement from them, and then when they start charging you for things they shouldn't be (every 2 or 3 months), you have to spend a couple of hours on the phone with them to get it straightened out. Until the next time.

I feel like we need some precedent here - billing errors in the volume Comcast hands them out are essentially contract violations that go entirely unpunished - you don't get a discount if you have to wrestle with them to correct your bill, you can't charge them for your time, you just come out the other end with what they had originally offered you.

I'm hoping the recent CenturyLink/Minnesota situation gets more scrutiny over telecom bills. You may find this to be relevant [0]. I work in telecom and CTL is one of our vendor partners, I feel like I'm on the phone with them at least twice a week raising flags about billing statements.

[0] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/01/08/centurylink-to-pay-...

The upload speed does suck, but it truly does affect only the 1% of the 1%, and is an infrastructure problem. They could and should update the infrastructure, but truly the number of people who demand a serious upload speed and are residential customers is incredibly small.

Most people can choose only phone company or cable company for internet (some people only get 1 or the other).

There are LOTS of search engines to choose from that are freely available. DuckDuckGo is pretty great these days.

Microsoft is even is making a search engine now, I've heard! /s

Google has a near monopoly on search which is unrelated to their competence serving adds.

So, Google could theoretically be terrible at advertising and yet still make insane profits from it. Just as Comcast’s internal IT systems might be a mess. This is why monopolies tend to be less efficient over time, nothing is forcing efficient operations.

In this analogy the "cable customer" would be the ad purchaser. I don't know enough about that industry to know if the analogy works, but just saying.

i shake my head every time i think of the sheer marketing power of the bing brand...

Hey man, i googled that chick in marketing last night and found her facebook account. Really??? well i binged her and found her pornhub account. Bing... Find what you really are looking for.

I don't like Comcast, but at least in my experience, others I know and companies worked at, it's been surprisingly reliable. Used them at multiple locations over the past 15+ years and could count the number of outages or other issues on one hand. Is that unusual?

Do we know what the data says about it? Statistics on uptime, ping, speed, customer response turnaround...

I used them in college in Chicago ~ 4 years ago and we have 12+ outages in a single year, several of which took multiple days to resolve, and we never got close to the speed we were paying for.

There’s a certain irony that you ask for data instead of anecdotes to chastise /u/blackearl’s claim, then provide a personal anecdote to support your claim.

This seems like a reasonable start to build a case against Comcast:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Comcast

Just questioning, not chastising. Nor making a claim based on anecdata. I thought that would be obvious by asking for actual data.

I included my anecdote simply to question the narrative.

What I'm looking for is proof.

When I used comcast (which was several years ago) the actual service was fine - it was the terrible customer relations that really got my goat, and it's harder to quantify customer satisfaction but the fact they aren't the absolute worst company isn't a mark of honor, showing up on customer surveys as one of the worst companies is enough of a black mark - the ranking is less important than being on the top ten at all.

This is just anecdote:I have two houses with Comcast: one in Palo Alto and one in the sierras. The one in the sierras is pretty fast though had lots of multi-hour outages that stopped a couple of years ago.

The one in Palo Alto goes out a couple of times a week and is quite slow.

Luckily they haven't implemented the mooted usage caps: last year I was traveling for a few months but somehow managed to transfer tens of GB over the network in the sierras, according to Comcast's site.

They have a lot of good network engineers but the work at the edge is inferior.

Google is more of a monopsony than a monopoly

Comcast has a physical monopoly or duopoly in most markets. Customers don't have much choice even though Comcast does a shitty job for a premium price.

Google's competitors are literally a click away. Google couldn't get away with Comcasting the web.

"Good" is hard to define, when we're talking about monopolistish scenarios, at least in this era.

Google's ads make good money because:

(1) The overture model for running a search ad market works well (Google acquired and adopted a mature system). (2) targeted ad markets get better with scale. The larger the market share, the smaller a& more targeted a segment is. (3) Ads are also search results. Over time, Google has nudged users to select ads... on high value searches.

On that last point: The value of a click varies in orders of magnitude 18c for this one $12 for that one. In the early days, this meant you could buy clicks for pennies. These days, Google limits the supply of low value ads and increases the supply of low value ad clickers.

On average, users might even see or click on fewer ads than 10 years ago. On high value search terms, advertising prominence & click-throughs are through the roof.

If Google is "playing dirty," this is where the incentive is highest... and achieves the goals which Google has strategically used to grow revenue for years now.

Playing dirty is even a weird term here. A newspaper may have a journalistic ethos whereby ad-selling squares don't get to editorialise journalism... whether they stick to it or not. By what ethos is Google not supposed to let ad selling concerns influence organic search?

> By what ethos is Google not supposed to let ad selling concerns influence organic search?

So ad-selling squares don't get to editorialise journalism.

Search is (automated) journalist. Why would you think otherwise? If a search treats users as mere eyeballs to trick and hijack instead if inform well engine, then users learn not to trust the search engine, same as any other kind of journalist

> What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway?

This is about incrementality. Google/advertisers are well aware of this fact and have been doing lots of ablation studies to understand advertisement's effectiveness. Don't underestimate the industry; you may spend millions of dollars but not billions of dollars without good justifications.

I don't know the exact numbers (and I wouldn't be able to tell it even if I know it) and it heavily depends on the type of particular ads (e.g. brand ads will show much less incrementality), but the general consensus is that more than half of those ads can take the credit for conversions. Given that conversion tracking and attribution is not perfect, it's fair to take the money.

I frequently see people click through a Google Ad just because they didn't type in the whole domain name. Example: type "NYtimes" into address bar, click on top-most link (an ad). In these cases, the ads are entirely extractive compared to organic results.

The question really is then if those billions went to Bing or DDG and searched for their stuff there, would approximately the same percentage click through to the ads.

Or the organic links for the same sites.

And searching for any company name almost always returns an ad for the company in the first position.

This generates revenue for Google with virtually no added value.

Recently there's been cases where searching for a company name will actually return an ad for a competitor. Companies are being forced into a bidding war to win back the top position for exact searches on their own name.

See: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 and the SS in the reply: https://twitter.com/webiyo/status/1205534848192045056?s=20

"Forced how"? Because otherwise a web user might buy something "better than Basecamp" and that's unfair? If Basecamp can't sell to a prospect who knows their name unless basecamp is top search result, why does Basecamp deserve the sale?

Basecamp seems to generate more free advertising from playing the victim in the media than they lose from whatever they complain about.

> what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective

Did anyone besides Google sales and marketing people actually believe that?

Indeed, who are all those people giving Google $100B a year, with 20% growth YoY, to run their ads? They must all be fools to believe that Google is giving them anything of value.

Possibly? Or they think that their payments are required to be ranked fairly on Google's service and view it more as blackmail than anything else. Searching for "amazon" brings up an Ad paid for by Amazon, searching for "books for sale" brings up paid Ads for four different book sellers - if any of them stopped paying google they'd be, at best, the fourth result - and the first Ad result is for the first organic result, the next organic result is the fourth ad, the one after it a sub-page in the last result and the fourth organic result is craigslist which didn't pay for an Ad. In fact, Amazon isn't even on the first page of results except for their Ad.

Related tweet by Jason Fried about Basecamp result placement:

"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. But at least we can have fun with it. Search for Basecamp and you may see this attached ad."

https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016?la...

A significant portion of the modern digital advertisement is heavily data-driven, and those numbers are available to advertisers as well. Based on the numbers, many advertisers actually believe that Google is one of the best options available on the market. It's possible that this is not necessarily due to their modeling technology but infrastructure though.

Possibly a related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873 (Original title: The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising)

One way to read this is “Google is serving up ads for what would have been the top search result anyway.” This makes you then wonder, why pay for ads?

Because if you don’t, a competitor will and that is where the article takes the turn into talking about the new layout, occlusion, etc. It’s an interesting discussion about trust and how far Google can push before that trust is broken. However, I’m almost certain I’ve had this conversation a decade ago.

> What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway?

At least for my company, we run blackout experiments and measure/estimate the incrementality of the ads.

I've both read trials of 3rd parties and run campaigns where ads are a significant boost to the site already ranking #1 in organic results.

The price of AdWords has certainly gone up, but the value hasn't declined.

Unless you compare to an ad free version of search, you can't prove that the value of placing an ad is more than the negative value of an ad being sold to a competitor.

Haven't ever wanted to prove that!

I can tell you that Instgram serves up ads for things I didn't know that I wanted that I end up buying.

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