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 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).
Peretti is talking about quality versus quantity: maybe Google doesn't serve up quality ads, maybe they just serve up quantity ads.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anticipating needs of person X, (and serve person X an ad), without any foreknowledge of person X.
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.
You'd have to recognize the face and track it prior to displaying the ad.
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).
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.
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).
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.
But, hey, he's absolutely entitled to live his life ignorant about viable options.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
Might be fine for your use case, I donno.
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.
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.
I agree with your point though: from a user's perspective there's no such thing as a quality ad: ads are inherently bad.
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.
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.
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.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
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.
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?
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.
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'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.
Of course this is not data, but the parent post has an interesting stance.
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.
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.
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.