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Comment by ma2rten | Hacker News Reader

How would that even work? Search and search ads are one product.

The company that makes the search engine and the company that sells the ads to the advertiser can be different companies, in the same way that you can put Ad Words on your website and they'll show ads based on the content of the site even though you aren't Google.

So assuming the company is splits into Google and AdWords, would Google be forced to work with AdWords or are they allowed to use different providers? Are they allowed to create their own competitor to AdWords? Which problem is this solving?

Yes, they'd be allowed to use other ad providers, and hopefully it would be illegal to penalize them for constantly running some multi-armed-bandit trials across multiple ad providers.

Then AdWords would draw the short end of the stick because their product would become commoditized. Google would still hold the same market power as before. Ad quality might go down because there are multiple providers. Overall I don't see the upside.

Maybe something that would make more sense is if Google was split into two or more search engines, each of them would get a copy of the current source code and data.

Exactly. That's like saying Tesla should be divided into a part making cars, and another part taking payments from buyers.

That is how most of the (American) retail auto market works, though, so it's not a strange idea.

More like car manufacturer and car purchase loan provider (if that were something it were offering in-house).

We could create our own search engine, funded by showing Google Ads, today; the suggestion is that that Ads business be separate to Google's own Search business which happens to use it, but which might easily (except obviously it doesn't) use Facebook Ads or whatever instead.

You can already create your own search engine, and have Google serve the same ads on it as they would for their own search. I don't know what the product is called, or what the requirements for signing up for it are, but it is how a lot (most?) of the smaller search engines monetize.

(I just checked Ask Jeeves and Startpage, and they were both serving ads from Google.)

Yes, that's what I said.

Sorry, your use of "could" instead of "can" made it look like a hypothetical.

The existence of google adwords on other webpages suggests otherwise.

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