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.