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Comment by gverrilla | Hacker News Reader

amazing quotes:

> Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally pretty negative about search engines that sold ads. Appendix A in their original paper says:

    we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of theconsumers

and that

    we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have acompetitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm

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I guess the prospect of literally a hundred billion dollars each made them reconsider.

It would be interested to know how this process looked like. I'd imagine it was very gradual and consisted of little steps each leading to the next one, and when they finally started to serve ads they were probably thinking it's not that bad. I believe crossing that line made paved the way for considering things like tracking the whole web morally acceptable, maybe even positive.

For one, when they started ads, they were not inline with the search results, and in brightly highlighted boxes. So it was easy to say, you know, we have ads, but they don't affect search results.

Today they say the same thing, but nontechnical users can no longer distinguish ads from their organic search results.

Non-technical users can't read the bolded "Ad" in the top left? Ok, it's more subtle than before but it doesn't prey on the less sophisticated among us.

For one, that Ad logo spent about two years being yellow-on-white, so people without well-tuned contrast monitors couldn't see it at all.

Last year they made a change that made them so indistinguishable to the untrained eye that even Google rolled them back: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/squint-and-youll-click-it/ https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/24/google-will-iterate-the-desi...

But no, generally, they don't notice that. Studies have been done demonstrating how few users can tell the difference between an ad and a search result. In one study, half of respondents "didn't spot" ads in Google search results at all: https://www.123-reg.co.uk/blog/seo-2/how-google-is-profiting...

That study was in 2013, when Ads were much more obvious in search results than they are today. By 2018, the statistic of people who couldn't identify search ads on Google was up closer to two-thirds: https://marketingtechnews.net/news/2018/sep/06/two-thirds-pe...

it normally takes me 1 sentence max to realise i've clicked on an ad by mistake. I think even if there was no ad shin i would still manage to work out what is promoted content. If ads ever stops being generic, irrelevant clickbait, we might have a problem on our hands. But that particular danger doesn't seem to be very likely at all.

> it normally takes me 1 sentence max to realise i've clicked on an ad by mistake.

Good thing that has no cost, then. Especially with how poorly optimized all the javascript on these pages is, slowing loading to a perceptible crawl (unless, perhaps again, if you’re in the bubble where every machine you use is latest flagship android or a workstation, blind to the experience of the less ‘sophisticated’ users).

It sounds crazy, but they really can’t. Seriously, have you ever been over a non tech person’s shoulder while they are googling? They click the first thing they see with zero scrutiny.

I have an incredible number of personal anecdotes to offer about not just watching ordinary users click on ads, but also Google Ads being the primary source for most scams and malware on the Internet, that Google pushes to the top of their results for money. (When you have helped dozens of seniors taken advantage of by scammers that Google profited off of, it's hard to be particularly amicable about the company and their business practices.)

However, I went with showing studies because unfortunately, our personal real world experiences rarely win online arguments. ;)

Watch a non-nerd use Google. They 100% do click on those ads without realizing they're ads. Constantly. I wouldn't be surprised if most ad-clicks for Google are performed by people having no clue they're clicking on an ad.

The DoubleClick acquisition was the inflection point, even obviously at the time. Before that AdWords was reasonably in-line with Google's standards and culture.

We ran a DoubleClick ad engine on the Clear Channel websites right around that time period. The front-end was a Java Web Start application, ugly, slow, but very intuitive to use for ad-targeting. I wrote several extensions for it using their plugin-api and the ad engine worked really, really well. Had several calls with the DART team and they were all smart people delivering a necessary service to keep websites free to use. Hard to believe that something so simple and useful could become the tool for evil that it has.

They hired Eric Schmidt as CEO. That’s how it happened. Larry and Sergei were still in “don’t be evil” mode. But you have to be a little evil when this much money is involved, so they hired Schmidt to be evil for them. They then learned how to be evil under his tutelage. Schmidt is absolutely an ethical nihilist, just listen to any of his speeches on privacy and security.

I think the truth is that they were naive or focused on their consumer existence, but as soon as they were the owners of the hottest and best search engine it was a simple next step to monetize with ads. I don’t this excerpt suggests they had any personal qualms with ads, just that they had problems to be overcome and often detract from the user experience - which almost anyone would agree with including people who are rich from ads.

My hypothesis is that at some point someone was given clearance to try a couple of plainly-evil things, and the results were so wildly lucrative that the "don't be evil" faction either defected or lost all sway.

Notably, ads in-line with results. I suspect that was the first move that sent them irrevocably down the evil-path. Watch a non-tech-geek use Google and you'll see why—I bet ad-clicks went up 10x with that change, or more. Then they began to serve ads beyond those early "non-evil" clearly marked text-only ads. That led to them making tons of money from webspam sites, while also putting tons of effort into fighting webspam, and some time around '09 or so they realized they should lay off the latter, on account of the former.

And here we are. Google search is worse, Google advertise deceptively on purpose, and the whole web is overrun with webspam.

Which would one?

1. One search engine w/ hundreds of thousands of employeers & bajillions in revenue

2. One search engine w/ like 3 people & a chonky Patreon account

That’s a bit of a false dichotomy though. Although the original AdWords also made them an adverting based search engine, it made them massively profitable without violating anyone’s privacy.

It was the need to make even more billions that led them down the slippery slope of mass surveillance that makes everyone uneasy now.

Original AdWords in early 200Xs were quite a breath of fresh air compared to other type of advertising on the net.

The ads seemed relevant. I actually clicked on them with a sense of purpose!

At the time AdWords truly seemed how advertising should be done ethically with an iron wall between search and advertising.

That wall started crumbling pretty quickly by mid 200Xs.

Maybe the wall was never there?

I thought it wouldnt be suprising, especially that we're on news hacker out of all places

Well, they weren’t wrong, but then they saw there was nothing wrong with the first passage you quoted.

I guess growing up is when you give in to profit above all.

Technically they held true to this sentiment. Google Scholar doesn’t seem to have ads.

I sometimes ask myself if they are looking back and questioning all the little decisions they took and think, "where did we go wrong"?

I think that you end up convincing yourself that you did the best, despite the obvious differences between what you were thinking back in the day and now. Also, you would make yourself think it was probably the only possible outcome and your younger self was wrong or at least very, very naïve.

Or at least that's what I would do, sitting on a mountain of dollars.

It has to be emphasised that (IIUC) Page and Brin's misbehaviour is not just a thing of the past, but active and ongoing, since they still have majority voting power over Alphabet https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-g... . Even one of them is a hugely clouty shareholder, especially if he enlisted the support of a few of their chums who hold the remainder of Class B. Yes, by now they probably can't just undo Google's fundamental size and orientation as an AdWords behemoth at will: too many business risks and legitimate concerns about fiduciary duty, too much risk of shareholder lawsuits and so on. But within that they surely have enormous power to restrain Google's actions at their discretion.

Of course when bad things happen the usual tendency is to attribute too much power and assign too much blame to a few individuals. But if anything the reverse seems to be true here. Page and Brin largely don't have the twin "if I don't do it I'll be fired" and "if I don't do it someone else will" excuses that others tend to have. Yet there seems to be an ambient belief that they shouldn't be expected to restrain Google, that their (at best) abdication of responsibility is somehow inevitable or proper. What makes this really disgraceful is that Google probably got where it today is in large part because in the past people bought, and Google actively sold, the idea that Larry and Sergey were nice guys who could be could be trusted to use their controlling stake to do the right thing. However stupid it was to ever trust in that idea, Page and Brin are not justified in abusing that trust now.

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