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Comment by lima | Hacker News Reader

> But they purposefully use CLS in Search to increase clicks on Ads

You present this as a fact, but it would be absurd that Google would use such a cheap and easily detected trick to increase CTR. It would be bordering on ad fraud and I'm sure that Google, of all companies, knows better than that.

Occam's Razor says that this is a stupid async content loading bug, which they subsequently fixed. I've never seen this happen and when I just tried it without adblocker with that exact search term, it didn't - the page loaded with the ad.

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> You present this as a fact, but it would be absurd that Google would use such a cheap and easily detected trick to increase CTR.

3 years ago and I wouldn't believed it at all but around 2 years ago I saw it happen consistently with a colleague at the desk next to me.

I cannot say for sure that it wasn't an extension in his browser but I can say for sure that I think Google has been really busy tearing down the mountains of trust they had before 2007 - 2009.

Similarly, thanks to async ad loading, gmail replaces first two items in my email list with ads with such a convinient delay that I accidentaly click on the ads more often than I would like to. Occam's razor would say that if it can bring more money, it is not accident.

Accidental clicks are invalid clicks according to Google's own documentation[1][2].

For this to not be an accident, one would have to assume that Google actually makes more money from those invalid clicks, and that someone decided that yep, rendering ads asynchronously was a decent and legal approach at increasing advertising revenue, and requested the GMail team to implement it.

This kind of corporate misbehavior is not unheard of, but I just can't imagine it happening at Google.

It's much more likely that this is just unfortunate UX design to "improve" rendering performance without considering users on slow connections.

(I can reproduce this one just fine in desktop GMail - on the first render of the "Promotions" tab, the ads render asynchronously)

[1]: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/42995?hl=en

[2]: https://www.blog.google/products/ads/preventing-accidental-c...

"No you don't understand: invalid clicks are things that happen on other peoples properties. You definitely meant to click that ad in gmail. We know, we're google, you can definitely trust us about this"

'Unfortunate UX design to 'improve' rendering' is the plausible-deniability they can use to justify this.

> This kind of corporate misbehavior is not unheard of, but I just can't imagine it happening at Google.

I definitely can, I don't think anywhere is immune to this once you reach a certain scale. They have a profit-motive to make money, they will absolutely try and get away with as much as they possibly can.

For example, the scourge of "people also ask" at the top of search results, that appears synchronously where the top result was a second ago, and has a randomly-generated container ID to prevent easy blocking. Not an ad, but, equivalently, content that I didn't ask for but that Google, for some reason, clearly really wants me to click on.

Happens to me all the time, it's either complete UX heresy or ad fraud.

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