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Comment by Puts | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I click on Google ads just because I don't like a brand and feel a little bit of joy knowing I just cost them a dollar.

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Way more than a dollar. If you really want to cost a company a pretty penny, click on the ad after searching for an "intent" to do something rather than the exact brand. Some of those Adwords cost many tens of dollars.

I haven't seen anyone mention the fact that a big factor that contributes to how the Google Ads "black box" determines how to rank ads is via an Ad Quality measurement.

Each ad is given a quality score, and since your own website will be guaranteed to be the most authoritative source for a keyword search with your own branded keyword(s) in it, by default the quality of your own ads will be much higher than your competition.

This means in practice that the cost for a brand to be shown first on their own branded keywords is much lower than their average CPC, let alone the cost for their competitors to be there.

The very fact that you have to bid on clicks for your own damn website by paying Google, because Google has prioritized ads to the point of displaying them higher and making them almost indistinguishable from the "organic" search result proves they have intentionally created a tax on the internet.

It will get worse, to the point where to get auto-completed in the omnibox you'll have to pay. TBH I am not even sure if that isn't already the case!

I'd rather ignore some ads which are less intrusive than places like Amazon than pay a subscription fee to use search, gmail and docs which are funded by ads.

There are other options. For example, funding a publicly-owned search engine with $1 billion a year in infrastructure and development costs would be 50x cheaper than what the US spends on foodstamps. It'd be 1/10th the NSF's annual budget.

Not that that's the best option, but we could consider some new ideas.

A publicly owned search engine, that will absolutely not be used for propaganda purposes by, say, the Department of State, or by a megalomaniac elected representative.

Need to build consent for a war with <Country>? Give me access to the search index, and a few weeks, and it'll be done.

I didn't say it was the best option. But wow, you just trust a billion lines of closed source written to satisfy ad optimization criteria with zero transparency? I mean, we can subject things to public oversight.

Google is pretty big with open sourcing. Open sourcing search would ruin it though. Spammers would game the system.

> But wow, you just trust a billion lines of closed source written to satisfy ad optimization criteria with zero transparency?

I trust that a multi-national serving multiple markets is going to give me less nationally biased information than the government of a superpower (with political ambitions that span the globe.)

It's why I generally don't turn to the Voice of America for news.

> a multi-national serving multiple markets

You think Google search doesn't adjust its search results based on your geography? It absolutely does, and that's just one of hundreds of inputs into its completely inscrutable machine-learning driven tangle of a ranking algorithm. Your trust is very badly misplaced if you think that Google can't be/isn't already corrupted by the corrupt governments it must deal with to do daily business.

Lol if you think that isn't happening right now. Google made a change to its algorithms sometime in the past 5 years to surface "authoritative" sources, meaning sources that toe the state department line. For example, the World Socialist Web Site, which has a consistent anti-war line reported being demoted.

"Google blocked every one of the WSWS’s 45 top search terms" (8/2017)

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/04/goog-a04.html

"Google admits to censoring the World Socialist Web Site" (11/2020)

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/04/goog-n04.html

"In a statement before a Senate hearing on October 28, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, admitted that the dominant online search company has censored the World Socialist Web Site.

At the Senate Commerce Committee hearing, when asked by Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah to provide the name of one left-wing “high profile person or entity” that has been censored by Google, Pichai named the WSWS."

"Google refines its search results to curb fake news" (4/2017)

https://www.engadget.com/2017-04-25-google-tweaks-search-to-...

(the comments below this article are funny because it's full of liberal-aligned comments on the disproven Trump-Russia conspiracy theory that is still given life in mainstream outlets)

There may be an air gap between Google and the government, but there's certainly zero air gap between Google and the Democratic Party.

Google is a revolving door. It might be biased dem, but I really doubt they don't try to hire people like former generals or intelligence people.

Sure, but there are no shortage of top level generals and intelligence people that identify with Democrat agenda, now that democrats finally gave up on things like freedom of speech, privacy, individual liberty and such.

A government owned search engine is 100% bad idea, it will cost a ton, it will cost more than equivalent business developed one, it will be abused by governments and law enforcement, your traffic will be combined with government data to make a last century dictatorship police state weep for joy be a money maker for people you very much don’t admire

most of all there is no public value for it when the government can legislate operators

>Ad Quality measurement

It's called Quality score (soon to be discontinued) and has 3 components. Only one of which is landing page related. And nothing prevents competitors from building "more relevant" landing pages than the original brand.

Or maybe ads could go back to where they were: on some yellow background and on the side. Not looking like the first search results.

You’re kidding! A single click costs more than a dollar?

Sometimes. The "intent" scenarios can be pretty valuable.

"I need a lawyer in ___ right now". That lead can be worth a lot.

"Looking to buy a new car today", etc.

Google keyword planner tool shows cpc (cost per click) for keywords. For an online gambling keyword it shows me 14.97€ (for one click). There are other industries with cpc's of 80€ and more.

Is it enough just to click on the link?

There surely are browser extensions that click on every link, just to make the companies pay, and make advertisers look even shitter.

No, it's got to be a real person intentionally clicking the link, and very large teams of skilled people work exclusively on figuring out which clicks fall in this category. Cursor movement patterns, delay time, whether the link was actually rendering on the display when it was clicked, IP address, cookies, signed-in identities, previous click patterns, location, all of these things and more factor in. When people talk about Google hoovering up data, it is in large part for this purpose.

Sounds like a good use of AI, if not one of the best! Let’s train an AI using real humans and have it click these links. Run the client in an P2P network so multiple can contribute to this.

If ads are no longer profitable, then this should sink both the online advertising market as well as Google.

Clickfraud has been around forever and teams detecting clickfraud have also been around forever. Automation that impersonates human users is not a new idea.

Yes I’m well aware, yet AI hasn’t existed for as long as clickfraud and we both know at some point a program with enough sophistication will look like a human.

Lemme guess, you’re in ads?

Back in the early 00s clicks on Mesothelioma were something like $24 a click because anyone who could spell it probably has it and is looking to sue.

“Mesothelioma Lawyer” was still one of the highest cost clicks when I was working in ad tech about 2 years ago. IIRC the cost was north of $50

As a script kiddie I made a pretty penny keyword stuffing that on my network of ad-infected web proxies.

Before Google banned much of the advertising on the category, some addiction treatment keywords cost north of $300 per click. “Drug rehab Las Vegas” was my favorite, because if they didn’t use a tight keyword match, they would get charged for people trying to find the Rehab pool party.

Yes. As an experiment, I tried running a Google Ads campaign for my https://chezmoi.io open source project bidding on "dotfile manager". Twenty clicks cost me $20. I terminated the experiment quickly.

That could be the boycott of the 21st century. Don't like how a company is behaving? Get a social media campaign to have people make intentful searched in different search engines, click through, go to a signup form/add stuff to a cart, and then just leave.

If I can do 10 of these, which would take a few minutes, I could cost a company $100. Which means, with the right tools for spoofing my identity, I could cost them $1000 an hour. If I spend a good work day on this, I could probably cost them $10,000.

If I convince 10 people to do this with me for a day, we could cost them $100,000. We might be able to cost them $1M in a week.

> Which means, with the right tools for spoofing my identity, I could cost them $1000 an hour.

Very, very sophisticated systems exist to prevent spoofed identities from counting as ad clicks.

Said systems can probably cope with most of the regular stuff, but what about an army of Twitter followers? Most are going to be signed in, they are going to be spread out geographically, they are going to be real people with real browsers with cookies, etc.

Yes, but those aren’t spoofed identities, they’re actual humans intentionally clicking the link. This is harder for the defender to defend against, but it’s also vastly harder for the attacker to scale. Defenses against this sort of “organic” traffic do exist, because this is something that people committing ad fraud attempt to do using compromised browsers of real people.

Edit: I mostly want to stress that there’s a huge body of (largely proprietary) work on this topic. Thousands of skilled people have been full-time employed for decades thinking about exclusively this topic, on both the offensive and defensive side, in a continuously escalating arms race. Anyone just getting started on this topic has a couple of decades of literature review to catch up on before they should imagine that their proposals are novel. I don’t mean to discourage you if it’s a topic you find interesting, but you should bear in mind that the answer to “But has anyone thought of XYZ?” is “Yes” for basically all values of XYZ. There’s a lot of money at stake if the answer is no.

It sounds like a really fascinating topic! If someone is interested, where he/she would need to start? any papers that review most/all methods that are up to date?

I've done that once in a blue moon, but it doesn't really accomplish anything except transferring that money to Google. Since I used to work for Google, thanks, I guess :-)

Marvelous! I'll do the same. Watch out, Exxon!

I mostly click on ads as chaff (mostly I block them but sometimes unblock them just do do some random clicking in the hope of confounding some profiles being compiled on me)

I used to do that with mesothelioma law firm ads.

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