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Comment by echen | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, when I was at Google, the SERP (and caring about users) was a shrine at all levels. Here's an example of one of the weekly Search meetings AlbertCory is talking about: https://search.googleblog.com/2012/03/video-search-quality-m...

For example, my first week at Google/YouTube, I was in a New Hire meeting with our VP. Someone asked about profitability, and he responded that Larry said we didn't have to worry about revenue yet, since the main goal was user growth/happiness, and revenue could come later. Which I thought was fascinating, considering how big YouTube already was at the time (in 2013)!

Though I think this changed a year later, and I find YouTube ads a poor experience compared to Instagram and TikTok -- which aren't merely "better than the rest", but stuff I actually enjoy watching.

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in 10+ years of targeted advertising, i still have yet to see a single ad for something that is actually relevant to what i want to buy. i'm actually baffled that these companies that have my entire purchasing history and metadata still cannot do a better job at making me spend money than absolute randos on the internet.

Indeed - it really surprised me that we didn't see big ad companies saying:. "we've crunched all the data about you, and here is a list of the products you'll be wanting to buy this week. Buy them all? [Yes] [No]".

The company should be smart enough to know I only buy certain brands of dog food. It should know I need a gift for my mum (and what she likes). It knows I need new trainers but will only buy the cheapest. Etc.

The opportunity for this has pretty much closed with the era of data privacy coming in, but I think it is both surprising and a shame that this didn't happen in the last decade.

I was in Ads (the first time) from 2008 - 2010. At that time, there was a "user-specific" (I forget the name) group that specialized in modifying ads based on the user themself. They were VERY very restricted by the lawyers in what personal data they could use. I imagine it's been considerably loosened by now, but I don't know that.

To someone else's point: yes, they are restricted by who bid for the keywords, but honestly, that's the whole magic of Google Ads. You have a "motivated buyer", someone who actually wants to send flowers or stay in Duluth. How do you know that? They searched for "flowers" or "duluth hotels", duh.

Is an advertiser willing to throw money at people who probably want to send flowers, based on their past behavior? Well, maybe, but not on the Search Results page. There are lots of other web venues where they can place creepy ads like that.

This is a fundamental issue with the ad business - the ads are selected from those who bid, not from those that are relevant. For example - if I'm listening to a podcast with a captivating guest, the relevant links would point to their books or blogs. But since they didn't bid for ads, I'm shown some crypto drivel or date-Thai girls scams

Exactly. What they want is to sell ads, what they have is crap ads we don't like, so ... what are they to do?

I believe that would have been during the time that google broke the ability to + words (without initially providing another verbatim alternative) in order to use + for google plus somehow.

I can't square that change with the claimed commitment to search engine quality.

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