Hacker News Reader

I came across a pretty gross corner of this Google/IAC interplay a while ago. I was looking into the sources of our worst-quality paid traffic by various performance metrics, and found lots if of it coming through ads served on Google “search partners”, aka other search engines that can serve keyword-based Google ads on their own results pages and get a cut of the revenue. Many of these search engines are total garbage, like the ones that malware/malicious browser extensions will set as your default homepage. You and I might consider the traffic from such “search engines” as much less valuable, but Google enables the checkbox for advertisers to use these search partners by default, and even adds a message underneath saying, in effect, “most users choose to take advantage of our search partner network”, if you uncheck it.

It gets especially shady with IAC in particular, as they run a bunch of these “search engines” (not actually a search engine anyone has ever intended to use without being tricked into it) purely as a venue for PPC arbitrage: they run ads on Google for generic search terms, which link to their own search results pages, which display “search partner” Google ads. These results pages are highly optimized to trick people into clicking the ads, which they then get a cut of revenue on.

The traffic source that originally lead me to this rabbit hole was an IAC-owned Google search partner property, and our ads were running on their results pages. The ads had their full title linked and colored blue, and the “results” only had a tiny arrow link at the very end of the description, the titles were not clickable. Clearly this was sufficient to meet Google’s standards as a search partner.

This system is terrible for both regular internet users and for unsophisticated advertisers. It’s clearly and intentionally manipulative to both parties. I don’t know why I was surprised to learn that Google was not just enabling but actually encouraging this kind of stuff, but it still gives me heartburn. They are very clearly making tons of money from it, and have every incentive to keep the cash flowing.

Exactly this!!

Seriously, bingo. And the idea that Google "didn't know" this is total garbage. Google's advertising business is not a neglected corner of the business.

Given so many sites run google analytics - google can run the metrics from click to dwell time etc.

What's weird - I don't have a phd in data-analytics, and I'm not google analytics expert, but it's pretty clear when some source of traffic is being tricked or the other one I had issues with (paid) to click through. Because they don't convert, and some bounce within a fraction a second.

And google couldn't determine this stuff was low quality?

Stuff like this is so depressing because I find myself wondering if I should just start being an asshole without any ethics. There doesn't seem to be any significant repercussions for that type of behavior and the people doing it are probably multi-millionaires many times over.

It's very little work, very low risk, and has a huge upside if you're "successful" at it. I also wonder if the people doing it think they're clever.

PPC = pay-per-click

thx for the info

I don’t sympathize with advertisers much but they must have lost so much money for basically nothing over the years with inflated metrics, malware served DAUs, outright clickfrauds etc. Google and scammers were the only ones who benefited out of it.

And still they don’t have any option other than to surrender to Google and Facebook if they have to reach their audience on web.

Advertisers can make accounts on Reddit and other forums and do product placement there or contact people on Instagram or Tiktok to do product placement.

I assume almost all commercial media is chock full of product placement.

I saw a pretty genius idea recently. I logged into a Bank of America cash rewards credit card account, and under a recent transaction at a pizza place, there was a link to a competing pizza place offering 10% cash back, double my usual cash back if I ate there by a certain date.

I've reported malicious Chrome extensions and Google ads on Search that direct to them that hijack the browser, even had Googlers pursue the matter internally, only to find them reinstated within hours. And tons of these have lasted for years.

Malicious actors are almost certainly incredible revenue drivers for Google, and people on the ads team are protecting them because they make their metrics look good.

> Malicious actors are almost certainly incredible revenue drivers for Google, and people on the ads team are protecting them because they make their metrics look good.

This is one of the downsides of a Google monopoly (/single advertiser market): they don't have to care about click fraud besides making sure it doesn't show up in headlines. Even if Google suddenly had a reputation for click fraud, not advertising on YouTube and the rest of the web can be a death sentence to staying competitive in your respective market.

I'm reminded of the whole Facebook "pivot to video" scandal, where they were telling media producers that people were watching video ads at massively inflated rates compared to reality, and there was no way to check Facebook's reported numbers, since they controlled the infrastructure. An entire industry moved from text to video based on lies. I'm sure some sales folks did well for themselves as hundreds of writers lost their jobs.

If you advertise on facebook you don't care too much about reported numbers. It's add spend in, conversions out.

The facebook targeting back 2 years ago at least, amazing. There is a niche for hyperspecific advertising and facebook just crushed it (I'm not posting on facebook / no facebook app, so I think they suck for human health).

The parent is correct.

What a lot of HNers don't understand is that:

1) if you're a digital marketer with a budget, you have to spend the budget. Even if you know the metrics don't add up, you just keep spending until somebody finds a platform with a better ROI.

2) ad platforms don't like to talk about their secret sauce, because that would attract scrutiny.

IIRC CollegeHumor was nearly sunk by this debacle.

And as bad as click fraud on Google and Facebook is, I don't see how more advertisers would help. The only way they could really improve fraud detection is if Google Analytics were instead some sort of public utility. And even then I don't really see how you could get a competitive marketplace for fighting fraud. You would just have to trust that the analytics utility was legit.

And anyway GDPR/CCPA type legislation is probably a better route, which if anything makes fraud detection even more difficult.

> For all the highly paid data scientists google paid, they somehow thought IAC's business in this space was consumer positive when every metric must have been screaming that it was user unfriendly.

How do you get to that idea from the article? To me it seems to be saying the opposite: the Chrome Trust & Safety has been saying the extensions were malicious, not that these are positive to the consumers. It also states that the reason the extensions haven't been removed are anti-trust fears.

Are those fears justified? Given the quote from IAC in that article, that's clearly how they're going to spin it. And various competition authorities seem to very sympathetic the idea that Google should continue serving search results for garbage sites that real users aren't interested in as long as there's any appearance of conflict of interest. This seems analogous to that.

Does Google have people looking at Chrome extension data? It seems almost like a zombie project for them. It carries on, but next to no resources seem to be allocated to it.

The issue is not the extensions per se, but the partner revenue.

"I'm extremely pleased to announce the extension of our 14-year relationship with Google," said Joey Levin, CEO of IAC. "We've generated nearly $10 billion in revenue to date through the life of our partnership, and this extension makes clear that we have plenty more to deliver. Google's search and search advertising products remain the strongest in the world, and we believe that this renewal puts us in a solid position for the years ahead."

Does google have data scientists looking at ad revenue? For sure. How that revenue is generated is a core business, and there is no question they had metrics on quality of that traffic which would be the first hop before landing on the ad. The idea they thought this was all quality organic traffic - no chance.

I get regulators are cracking down, but the fake reviews, fake shopping sites and now these fake ad revenue generators don't deserve regulatory protection.

Fair point on the extensions side though.

I'd be surprised if data science was ran on the chrome web store/extensions in any medium/large capacity. The report abuse feature doesn't seem to work, maybe unless X% downloads report it triggering some internal alarm for an intern to go try out the extension (maybe on an airgapped chromebook).

> removing subdomains from URL bar

I'm ok with that because you can turn it off; right-click the bar and check "Always show full URLs."

Come on. We all know the playbook:

1. Hide useful feature behind a hidden menu.

2. Remove feature for lack of use.

3. Claim to be responsive to users.

A default setting plus an option behind a right-click menu is basically a mark of death. Just a matter of time.

The next step will be a per-page option that resets every time you navigate. I.e., you can see the full address for the current page but have to do it manually every time.

It's not the first time Google sides with scammers. What comes to mind is blocking of the phone call recording API in Android. I can imagine insurance companies and various other organisations involved in from phone sales to outright scams had a "talk" with Google to have this removed from the phones as consumers had too much power. I myself got scammed by insurance company - they claimed I will get a certain option, but after I paid and got all the paperwork, there was no mention of the option I was supposed to get. Thankfully I recorded all calls with that company and only when I said I had them lying on record they changed their tune and refunded me. I am now struggling to find a new phone that can record calls as if there was a conspiracy to never talk about this feature as well. I couldn't find any review that would test if call recording is possible.

Can't you just put your phone on speaker and use a second device to record?

> can imagine insurance companies and various other organisations involved in from phone sales to outright scams had a "talk" with Google to have this removed from the phones as consumers had too much power.

Seems like a conspiracy theory to me. The call recording functionality isn't exactly known by most people, not to mention it's trivially bypassed (see above).

> Can't you just put your phone on speaker and use a second device to record?

Only if: 1. You are somewhere where using a speaker phone won't annoy other people (or leak secrets to them) 2. You have another device to hand, and you have audio recording software set up on that device 3. The amount of background noise is low enough that the call is intelligible.

>Only if: 1. You are somewhere where using a speaker phone won't annoy other people (or leak secrets to them)

Isn't that an issue even if you're not using speakerphone? Companies regularly ask you for your name/address/birthday/secret question/credit card number, so you'll be leaking that info regardless of whether you're using speakerphone or not.

>2. You have another device to hand, and you have audio recording software set up on that device

that doesn't seem too hard. most people have a old phone or a laptop/tablet, failing that they can borrow one from their SO.

>3. The amount of background noise is low enough that the call is intelligible.

I'm struggling to think of situations where this would be an issue, that isn't already covered by the first point. Are you canceling services on the side of a road or something?

He has valid points, and you're really bending over backwards and lacking imagination in trying to dismiss them. Most people can speak into a phone more quietly than they'd have to turn the speaker up enough to record it with another device. Not everyone has an SO, not everyone with an SO is with them 24/7, and not everyone's SO has a spare phone/laptop/tablet immediately available for them to use. And not everyone wants to ask the caller to wait while they ask their SO to borrow their extra device, and set it up to record. And not everyone wants to go through the process of transferring audio recordings from one device and account to another every time they record a conversation. And many people do actually find themselves in situations with lots of background noise, or enough free hands or convenient surfaces to keep all the devices together, even if you can't imagine yourself ever being in such a situation. And not everyone wants shitty noisy low quality analog recordings of their conversations played on a speaker phone, instead of high fidelity digital recordings of the original audio.

That's why I keep my old Android phone and I kept postponing system update for two years now (you cannot disable update notification so this is quite annoying), as I know that update disables call recording API. I would love to upgrade, but I have no idea what's the best way to figure out if call recording works on a particular phone without having to buy it. My plan B is to replace the battery and the screen in my current phone and maybe squeeze another year or two out of it and it will be fun to learn how to do it. It's old, but is still better than e.g. Librem 5.

Samsung phones now have a "Screen Recorder" option built-in, and I see that "Media sounds and mic" are included, so I'm assuming if you turned that on, it would capture both your end and the other end. I haven't tried it, though:

https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00084187/

You'd also presumably be getting a video dump, but you could always just extract the audio layer from it.

These recorders usually will only capture your microphone and will not record the sound on the other side. People used to put their phone on a loudspeaker so that internal microphone would catch some audio, but that's far from ideal.

This issue is absolutely infuriating. I have to run certain calls through an external VoIP system in order to record them, because intentionally or not Google has gotten call recording in Android into an utterly broken state. Most of the time proper call recording is not possible. Some of the time it might be, if you have rooted the device, for some devices. It is next to impossible to figure out what the case is for a given device unless you buy one, root it, and try. I have resorted to using an old-fashioned stick-on microphone made for a desk phone and an external voice recorder in some cases, but this obviously isn't a very portable solution and given the obvious potential of smartphones it's ridiculous that external hardware is required for such a basic feature.

A feature that Google themselves once made a big point of offering with Google Voice, but one wonders if that's just because it was a feature of Grand Central they didn't feel they could cut without losing too many users---not that Google Voice has ever felt like a very active product on Google's end, with the decade plus UI stagnation and Google Hangouts integration.

There is some technical complexity involved here because, at least on older phones, during phone calls the baseband seizes direct control of some audio hardware, so the speaker audio may not "pass through" the operating system at all. But it used to be that call-recording was straightforwardly possible on older devices as a baseband feature and for the large part it seems to have been intentionally removed after the first generation or two of Android devices.