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Comment by nutanc | Hacker News Reader

Yes, we have also been beating the drum since a long time. But unfortunately our drum is not as big as DHH :)

Curious: why do you feel your competitors shouldn't be able to do this? If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

    why do they not go directly to your site but
    instead search for it on a general search engine?

Do you honestly expect people to remember the domain names of the brands of everything they have or are interested in?

My grandmother still searches Google for "google images".

As I have mentioned, I have no problem with my competitors being able to do this. The problem is how Google buries ozonetel.com below everything else. It should be absolutely fine if Google puts Ozonetel as first search result(because there is a brand and company called Ozonetel), and then puts the ads below that. Its win-win for everyone.

"If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine?"

It's because now mostly people(including me) search for a brand we know and click on the site. Mainly we type in the address bar(without .com) and press enter. The default search engine brings up the list and we click.

>The problem is how Google buries ozonetel.com below everything else. It should be absolutely fine if Google puts Ozonetel as first search result(because there is a brand and company called Ozonetel), and then puts the ads below that.

Sure, and I want to watch a show and then have all of the commercials run at then end after I turn off the TV.

>More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

So what would your answer to this be?

"if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?"

Apple is a common noun in the English language. So I would assume the first result to be Wikipedia or some site which gives the best details about apples. The second result could be Apple.com or whoever has applied for the keyword.

Thank you for answering. But that is inconsistent with what you said about your brand appearing first before any ads. In Apple’s case, are competitors allowed to bid on this keyword, since it is a common noun in English? Why or why not? I assume your brand is not a common word in the English language but what if it is in another language? As you can see, I can continue muddying the waters until it’s not so trivial to make a decision on these things — especially automatically.

Now you’re comparing apples and Ozonetels. Ozonetel is not a common noun.

I'm behind a Pihole and the top result for Ozonetel is ozonetel.com. On mobile, there is a "People also search for" bar that takes me to Google searches for their competitors, but it's mostly the Ozonetel home page, LinkedIn, Twitter, Crunchbase etc.

Normal users don't type domains, they type where they want to go into the address bar. my aunt will type "google" into chromes url bae to bring up the classic google search page she knows, and then will continue to type something like "jcpenney" into that box.

If the site is in her browser history she'll get an autocomplete suggestion for jcpenney.com .

One justification might be that it creates an environment where everyone but the ad provider loses.

If, hypothetically, Google was more pervasive than it already is, and made their ads more intrusive until consumers overwhelmongly clicked the highest priced ad for a given keyword, and Exotel bought the Ozonetel keyword, Ozonetel would have no choice but to buy ads for its own name. They could also buy ads for the Exotel keyword. The two could get stuck in a bidding war, wastefully sending money to Google when the optimal thing would be to just send users to the site they're trying to reach.

We're long past the point where you should expect users to try to guess domain names and to pretend that Google is just another general-purpose search engine. That universe could be nice but we don't live in it.

This is exactly what happened and a bidding war started(long time back).

And then we decided to step back from the bidding war. One reason to do so was because we did not have VC funded money. If we had VC money, maybe we would have continued the bidding war. But glad that we could make the right choice.

As a practical matter, search is how 99% of everyone gets to everything. Even if the browser fills in http:// for me so I can just type a name to get a complete URL why would I risk misspelling or mis-domaining a URL and possibly getting a fake or time wasting similarly named site? It doesn’t really matter whether the apple wiki or apple.com comes first because there is no chance I will confuse the two (unlike, say competing online furniture companies).

If you trust Google more than your browser and your own self, surely they deserve to make money off the hard work they put in to earn your trust.

1) Not if that goes to a place that isn't the best answer for it, as expected by a normal person not paid by Google or purchasing Google advertisements. Might this threaten the ability of Google to screw with smaller companies for money? Darn, that's a shame. They'll have to make only a transcendental amount of money instead of all of the money.

2) Related to the above: Google has decided they want to be a critical cog in the body politic. We as citizens get to have a say in how critical cogs in the body politic function. If Google doesn't like that, Google should not put themselves in that spot. We can help them with that if needed.

> If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine?

Plenty of people use the search engine as their homepage or reflexively open it when making a new tab, and searching for the name of the service (you don’t have to remember the TLD) becomes a habit.

When Google used to show organic results front and center and made advertising conspicuous, this was reasonable. Now that there is a pile of undifferentiated advertising on top of organic results, it's borderline fraud.

> When Google used to show organic results front and center and made advertising conspicuous, this was reasonable. Now that there is a pile of undifferentiated advertising on top of organic results, it's borderline fraud.

One of the things I would like the antitrust investigations to dig into is Google's decision to make ads look more like search results, after a long-held principled stance of clear differentiation between the two.

IIRC, Google never did comment publicly on that particular design change.

I'm sure any internal discussions on the topic will be fascinating reading.

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