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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Well, this is about misalignment of incentives. If you are a search user, you are not Google's customer. You are their product. They sell you to people who buy adwords - whoever they may be.

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OK, this line of reasoning is all over the place. All it does is expose that you know close to nothing about how Google works. There are in fact, many hundreds of engineers whose sole incentive (e.g. promotions and salary adjustments) and purpose in their job is to make sure that your search results are good.

These engineers are /not/ the engineers that are in charge of designing or running the systems that sell ads. In fact, those are two completely different divisions of the company. (If you would like to learn more about how Google works from the inside, I suggest reading Steven Levy's book "In the Plex")

Just because you do not pay for something does not mean it is not a product. If search was not good, people would go to a competitor. This is how Google got to where it is today, and bing.com is just a click away. This thread is about the quality of Google search results, and your argument is that Google does not care about the quality of your search results because they allow you to use it free of charge by inserting labeled advertisements.

To me, this is not a logical argument -- your emotions and sense of being wronged have taken over.

Oh, I feel no sense of being wronged at all, this is not emotion speaking, it's cool-headed business analysis. There's no such thing as free, someone always pays, and if you think you are getting something for free, that only means that someone else is paying for it for you, and perhaps they want something in return. You can understand this and adjust your expectations accordingly, or you can get upset without really knowing why.

Downvotes are incontrovertibly free.

I have noticed over the past few days a lot of drive-by downvoting of anything critical of the Holy Google.

Replying to self since we are at the max depth.

So, from the perspective of a business analyst, you are saying that Google has no incentive to ensure the quality of their search results because they don't receive any additional money from the people who use it?

That sounds like very short-term thinking to me, and Google is a famously long-term thinking company.

OT your line of reasoning reminds me of Excite when they were considering using Google's results. "[Google] was too good. If Excite were to host a search engine that instantly gave people information they sought, [Excite's CEO] explained, the users would leave the site instantly." [1]

[1] http://cdixon.org/2011/05/16/accurate-contrarian-theories/

No, of course they do, but only so you'll come back and can be shown more ads. And "incentive" is quite literal: ads are Google's main (only?) revenue stream. If they don't get eyeballs, they have no inventory of product to sell to their real customers.

Look, I'm not saying this is good or bad. But it is what it is.

Well, you're saying "it is what it is," but you're only providing arguments, not evidence. I think rryan has presented actual evidence in the form of how Google is structured.

But don't you see that if Google sells no ads, those people working to make your search better don't get paid either?

I can see that, but you're making the fundamental mistake that just because something is plausible that it is actually happening. There's enough moving parts here that arguments are not sufficient.

No, it is a valid point. To lose sight of that is to forget they're a business.

You don't pay them directly. Yes, they get paid based on your repeat usage, but they get paid by advertisers.

Keeping things just good enough that search users return is not the same set of incentives as delivering search that meets the comprehensive set of user wants.

Your instinctual reaction to frame this in the context of a market is faulty. ALL of the major search players operate under the conceptual mode of users as product, advertisers as customers. The same is true with other media companies (TV, newspaper, etc). That seems to be the only model the market will currently bear, as the existence of media giants is predicated on their ability to accelerate consumption

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