Google critiqued the practice of displaying ads above search results
twitter.com
twitter.com
-"We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. "
- "We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
- "A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines."
To be clear: the "we" in these quotes are the founders of Google.
[1] https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
As an aside, I've been reading a bunch of academic papers about early web crawlers and search engines. It's a fun and interesting subject. Mercator [2] (which became Alta Vista) is another early search engine and one of the few that discusses its architecture in detail.
[2] https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-173.pdf
"Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors.
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This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results."
My guess is it's a majority of their revenue.
It's such a slimy practice.
Try "vegas hotels" or "mortgage rates" as queries on google and see how far you have to scroll down to find something that isn't an ad, ad widget, etc.
Then there's tricking (largely) old people into clicking pages they didn't want, thinking it was a search result. Sometimes even scams.
IMO Google's core business model has become scamming advertisers, helping scammers to fool unsophisticated users, and extorting companies, all heavily driven by their inline ads move. I consider them contemptible for continuing it for years when they have to know that's the case, and likely have all along.
I hate seeing the same on DDG—and they seem to be getting worse. It must be super effective, but of course tricking people is effective. It's also very, very wrong.
Google collects more data about users than it does about the topics that users want to search, all for the ultimate purpose of selling advertising services, and often under the guise of a parallel construction with respect to the purpose of such collection, e.g., "to improve user experience".
It's actually worse. Google didn't just say "our competitors put ads on top of results". They're suggesting/hinting that those competitors accept payment for placement when in fact that wasn't happening, their competitors like Bing (MSN then) were doing what Google is doing now - merely placing ads above the results, not selling placement.
The end result is that they're all now selling placement. The visual difference between ads and organic results is almost non-existent.
Well hold on. We can go ahead and talk about how different this Google statement is from their ethos in the present day. But the framing of this being about ad placement was incorrect, and that has nothing to do with anything.
>They're suggesting/hinting that those competitors accept payment for placement when in fact that wasn't happening
It wasn't? This strikes me as yet another completely out of left field reaction. I mean, is there a consensus that that's obviously false? A source? Where is this "in fact that wasn't happening" coming from? Was there a big media cycle where there was a deep dive investigation into this that settled the question, that everyone remembers except me? There's a whole field of actors who at one time were relevant: Jeeves, Lycos, Altavista, Infoseek, Dogpile, Hotbot, Webcrawler, etc. And they went through any number of permutations of design, ownership, were sold and reacquired and it stands to reason that at some point some versions of these did things that Google is suggesting.
At a minimum it seems prima facie plausible that competitors entertained this.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yahoo-adopting-paid-incl...
On a very vague, thematic level, this kind of grandstanding in Google's statement does seem to be in some sort of conflict with Google's approach to ad placement in 2022, because ads do very much seem similar to search results, but it has nothing to do with "ads above search results" or ads in the sidebar.
There was a lot of internal chatter about whether this was compromising the integrity of the results. The decision was made to make the ad unit super obviously distinct from organic content, and to make a high quality threshold for getting promoted to that position - many pages would still be served with ads on the right of results but not above.
Even still we were very worried about the perception that the organic results were for sale. I would definitely believe that at one point in time the company was prepared to draw a line in the sand around “no ads above organic results.”
Edit: at launch the top ads looked like this: http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3892/2343/1600/google_adw...
Then realised I had to turn off my blocker.
Looks like
$('#tads').remove()
will remove the adverts?
It's a good chance someone wanting to find a "car selling" website might use that phrase, no?
Search as it is now is fundamentally at odds with us as our own agents. We're 30 years into the internet. I shouldn't just be presented with a magical search box that tries to figure out what I want and intermingles it with trash that makes them money and fosters a broken internet. Instead, I should get knobs, settings, configuration galore, include/exclude operators, filter lists, curated lists, sub-lists of internet sites, dynamic lists determined automatically by the search engine (only blogs, only forums, only search sites), etc. Who knows where search might be if we didn't have "magic" results from Google.
A good "taste" of what search might have been is if you look at Google's product or shopping search tab.
- How to Make a Car Smell New Again - Auto Adviser
- How to Get That 'New Car Smell' in an Old Car - Car Cologne
- The Science of the New-Car Smell - caranddriver.com
Edit: Used to look like this: http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3892/2343/1600/google_adw...
And I'd take it as a given that if that assumption was true, a large majority of Googlers would not have the faintest idea that this is happening and refute any speculations that it might exist without even a trace of insincerity.
I'm not even saying this intending a "look how evil Google has become!" implication, I actually think that it would likely be a quality decrease, from the users perspective, if they deliberately left that out. From the user's perspective, "Is a business known to us" is likely a valuable relevance improvement, not a quality decrease. But it shows how scarily dominant Google's position can be.
I just typed "new car" in Google. Literally the only results I can see are ads. Ads where the presentation and content is identical to the organic search results, save for the tiny word "Ad" in the title. Ads where the link reliably navigates to the page that has the content summarized by Google in their search result ad. Moreover, the UI for me clicking a foo.com link from a Google ad is identical to me clicking an organic foo.com link. Finally, the UX is improved if I click an ad because I don't have to scroll.
So it's not even a "above" vs. "sidebar" situation. The ads are the only results that show up without scrolling. Arguing that this isn't "buying a better position in the search results" is the extreme-skiing of pedantry.
Google certainly does sell ads above search today. And it certainly is irritating and it definitely is reflective of Google's following their financial interests at the cost of user experience. Google's expressed ethos in the statement certainly does seem at variance with their design choices and ad placement in the present day.
We can talk all day about their pivot away from don't be evil.
But tweet, the title, the framing, and the thing everybody are talking about, ads placed above search, has nothing to do with anything. The statement doesn't mention that, and these gotcha charges premised on something that was never said.
Google is in many important respects a bad actor that needs to be criticized, but that truth shouldn't be a blank check to misinterpret them and dismiss corrections as pedantry.
I'm just not grokking what you mean.
Let's construct an example of an evil Google who decided to start "selling better positions in search results." Let's say they decided to do it using the following method:
1. Sell the first three positions in the organic search results in an automated auction
2. So as to avoid accusations of trickery, they put a little "Ad" indicator by the top three positions in the three top search results.
3. They put a little "news" display below the first three results to separate them from the rest of the search results. This means the user typically has to scroll to see the rest of the results, adding value to those first three positions.
Would what I just described count as a relevant example of hypocritical behavior for the company quoted in that Tweet? If so, then the search results I got were the same as what I just described-- only the history of how Google got there is different.
If it's not a relevant example, then I still don't understand the point of OP or your comment.
Edit: clarification. Also, could you perhaps give me an example of how you think a company could hypothetically act in a way that contradicts the quote from the tweet? If it's not what I laid out here, what would it be?
And as I've said in numerous comments, there's a thematic level at which the statement is clearly at odds with Google's ethos in 2022, but that point can be made without equivocating between unlike things for the purpose of misrepresenting the statement.
Edit: in response to your question: Google's statement critiques the placement of ads into search results. So one example of them acting in a hypocritical manner would be to place ads directly into search results.
Perhaps "broadened" would be better. I have in fact broadened the definition of "search results" to capture the common usage and expectation of a user that punches a query string into google, taps "search", and is brought to a page of results.
[EDIT] All I have to go on is the current link with a tweet with an image with highlighted text about how Google doesn't sell result positioning (they 100% do) and a small bit of text from the person who posted it. That person does not appear to post any more in the ensuing thread. Others do, one pathetically defending Google as not selling result placement (they obviously do) and others pointing out how that's BS, and some people posting screenshots of current and old Google results demonstrating this. What am I supposed to take away from that?
Adrian Krebs, who wrote the tweet, is not claiming ads and search results are the same thing, contrary to the insistence of many here who think they are speaking for him. Instead, he is treating ads and search as truly distinguishable things but makes a point about the placement of ads relative to search. But he misattributes a claim to Google, claiming their statement is, amont other things a critique ads placed above search results.
Some people just don't want to hear this criticism, they just want to hear "Google bad." So they want to argue the point, misinterpreting the nuance as apologetics on behalf of Google.
This is creating a lot of cognitive dissonance, so there's a lot of effort to equivocate, insisting that the wrong thing (ads above search) is the same as the right thing (ads are separate from search).
So every next comment attempting to square this circle by introducing a new term of art to put the two different things under a common umbrella, totally inconsistent with the original statements, in an attempt to achieve the desired equivocation. For you the new term of art is "result positioning", a term which shows up nowhere in either Krebs or Google, and which helpfully throws away the nuance.
At this point this has transformed from a convo about google into a study of the predictable steps of congitive dissonance that people go through. Personal attacks have come in right on schedule.
Edit: since I can't reply anymore (and probably should just move on with my day): I'm just going to note I'm failing to detect anything in the reply below that substantively engages with anything I've said, although I am seeing a lot of performative incredulity.
I'm quite frankly astonished that you're being serious. Google sells top result placement. Calling it another thing is just lying. Taking their lies seriously is... incredible. I literally can't believe anyone would do that. [EDIT] Without a financial stake in it, anyway. Obviously people peddle blatant lies in exchange for money all the time. (I am not accusing you of that, that's just the one circumstance in which I find that entirely unsurprising, and I assume it's what's going on with the guy in the Twitter thread).
[EDIT EDIT] Actually, looking back over this... your posts read more bizarre to me with each re-read. WTF is happening in this thread.
[EDIT ONE MORE TIME, I JUST REALLY HAVE TO FIGURE OUT WHAT IS GOING ON]
To reiterate my understanding here:
1) The post is pointing out that Google says allowing people to pay to go to the top of search results is bad, so they don't do it. That's... just what it says, straight up. I have to assume (from the rest of the context of the post and following thread) this is being pointed out because it's funny and/or hypocritical, since (see below).
2) Google in fact places ads that are very obviously designed to trick people into thinking they're search results, above "natural" search results. To rephrase: you can buy ads that put your hard-to-distinguish-from-a-search-result link at the top of search results. The evidence that this is on purpose include that Google used to make it far more obvious explicitly because they didn't want to trick people, and stopped doing that, and just watching any non-geek use Google then asking them what they think just happened.
3) Some company saying something does not affect reality, whatsoever.
4) "I'm not touching you" (while waving hands as close as possible without touching) isn't even valid or convincing when kids use it as a defense, let alone adults. Everyone involved knows exactly what's going on, and that it's wrong.
5) Any equivocation happening here is in trying to draw a fine line between selling ads designed to trick people into thinking they're the top search results, and simply selling top search result placement. Same damn thing, to the point that I find it hard to take anyone serious who's trying to treat the distinction as in any way important.
Where are we diverging, here?
Now the latest version of the equivocation is "top of search results" which throws away the distinction between ads and search, a distinction that exists in Google's original statement, in order to falsely attribute to Google a statement professing they would not place ads on top of search results.
This is a repeat in the exercise of equivocation that I described above. The next step in the cycle is to engaging personal attacks, and then it's to reboot back to the beginning with a new equivocation, and on and on. At this point I feel that this thread has exhausted itself and all further comments are just continuing in this predictable pattern.
>>> Title: Why we sell advertising, not search results.
(1)[In a world where everything seems to be for sale, why can't advertisers buy better position in our search results?]
(2)The answer is simple. We believe you should be able to trust what you find using Google. [From the beginning, our approach to search has been to provide the most relevant answers and results to our users.]
(3)(I think I can omit the paragraph that's just google describing how they arrive at search results and their claim that they're not tainted by money changing hands, right?)
(4)[And while we believe relevant ads can be as useful as actual search results, we don't want anyone to be confused about which is which.]
(5)Every ad on Google is clearly marked and set apart from the actual search results. While advertisers can pay more to be displayed higher in the advertising area, [no one can buy better placement in the search results themselves]. Moreover, ads are only displayed if they're relevant to the search terms you entered. That means you only see ads that are actually useful.
(6)Some online services don't believe the distinction between search results and advertising is all that important.
(7)We do.
>>>
1. Google says you cannot buy better search result positioning from them. (well, you can, but more on that later)
2. Because users trusting results is important. (OK)
3. (sure, OK)
4. They absofuckinglutely do want you to be confused. This is not true. They behaved differently in the past when, maybe, it was true, including in the early days of inline ads with results. It is not true now. This is probably highlighted because it's hilariously false, right?
5. They are not clearly marked (now). The distinction between buying a top-placed ad that a huge percentage of users will think is a search result, and buying better search result placement, is grade A bullshit. This is the equivocation.
6. Yeah, like Google.
7. They do not.
[EDIT] I was wrong that Krebs doesn't post in the responses. He does, writing this: "And this is how it looked like in the past (taken from HN). Ads were markedly distinct, both visually and in placement." The screenshot highlights both sidebar ads and visually-distinct inline ads above the results. I see nothing to support your assertion that "Adrian Krebs, who wrote the tweet, is not claiming ads and search results are the same thing, contrary to the insistence of many here who think they are speaking for him. Instead, he is treating ads and search as truly distinguishable things but makes a point about the placement of ads relative to search." The reading of this overall thing as his making the point that Google have so blurred the lines between their above-the-results ads and the results themselves that they're effectively doing exactly the thing they say they don't seems entirely unambiguous to me.
[EDIT EDIT] I worked out a way to obtain your reading—or, at least what I think your reading is. If you assume that Krebs mis-read the very short and clear document that he took time to highlight, embed, and tweet (as quoted above—I'm assuming the highlighting was his) then this: "The post critiques the practice of displaying ads above search results, a method used by some of Google's competitors back then." isn't just an accurate-enough but (perhaps) imperfectly precise phrasing, but simply wrong, and everything else related to it including how ~everyone here and on Twitter read it is wrong (=correct for a funny and the-most-obvious critique of the document vs. reality, but wrong for what Krebs intention was under your reading), and you assume that Krebs either didn't notice that everyone was getting it wrong or decided to pretend that's what he meant, and you assume he only intended to showcase part of the image he re-posted from here, then your reading prevails.
I do not judge this a strong reading, at all.
>>>
Adrian Krebs @krebs_adrian Replying to @dannysullivan Thanks for clarifying this. I think the post leaves some room for interpretation. The intention was that ads should be more clearly differentiated from organic results, which is not the case today.
>>>
There is no room for doubt. You took a plausible but unsupported-anywhere-else reading of single phrase in the OG post, contrary to seemingly almost everyone else who read it, then did... all of this, over it, including accusing people of all kinds of bad faith or poor reading ability, based on no merit. On top of the overwhelming contextual evidence that you were incorrect, here it is in black and white.
>>>
Adrian Krebs @krebs_adrian Replying to @dannysullivan Thanks for clarifying this. I think the post leaves some room for interpretation. The intention was that ads should be more clearly differentiated from organic results, which is not the case today.
>>>
To repeat: "The intention was that ads should be more clearly differentiated from organic results"
The concern of the entire thing aligns with the reading that most people (apparently?) took away to begin with, which is that their above-the-results ads are so similar to organic results that all of the same things are wrong with it as with directly selling placement within results.
The confusion appears to stem entirely from Krebs having in his head that a top-of-organic-results-placement of a link is still, also, an ad, when he wrote the original post. Which is not unreasonable, but could, lacking other context (but there's a ton...) be read a different way. He corrects that in the above follow-up and confirms your interpretation.
The original complaint is about exactly the thing that (again, apparently) most people took it to be.
To make an untruth into a truth, it's necessary to zoom out and get fuzzy in words so the one thing kinda-sorta means the other.
So you can make things fuzzy by saying "ads on top" kinda sorta means "making ads look like search results" which kinda means it's okay to attribute a thing to Google that wasn't said.
I think the breakdown is this: people feel like this clarification is a challenge. When I say "google didn't say that about ad placement" people hear "Google has never done anything wrong with their search ads." And so it's a proxy for that argument.
Others view these things as sponsored search listings because.... they have 99% in common with search listings and only 50% in common with ads as presented at the time that Google made this statement.
What they are selling, despite being called ads, are for all intents and purposes search results. So I don't think it's unfair to call them out for how it conflicts with earlier positions against the selling of search results.
Krebs paraphrased that statement as Google "critiques the practice of displaying ads above search results" and noted that they were instead placed on a sidebar.
He's not flagging the statement out of a belief that ads and search basically amount to the same thing.
The organic results even include an optional transparency pop up (click the ...) that explains in more detail the factors that went into showing the result.
EDIT: Oh wait, never mind. On desktop, the ads are loaded in from a separate domain that my router blocks. On mobile, I see several at the top of the page. Fail.
The former is a firey way to say "an ad is shown at the top" and the latter a dismissive way to distract from how many ads there are, neither actually talks to the state of the number of ads despite what their wording implies.
If the author's point is that the "Ad" text is not distinct enough and conflicts with the doc's view that ads need to be clearly marked, why not actually say that? Because what is distinct enough is just a matter of opinion. So instead the author has taken something that's not a matter of opinion but a clear fact ("there are ads above the search results") and just made up the part about the doc critiquing this. It's genius, because everyone loves a good story of corporate hypocrisy. But it's also not true. Why exactly are we looking to reward dishonest clickbait?
There is a corresponding meme where people complain about the quality of the results for "best pants" where they have to amend it to "best pants reddit". Well, I have news for you: "best pants" is not a search that can be usefully answered. There is no such thing as "best pants".
I've got three wayback machine links below and the nostradomous one eschewed inline ads in 2002 so I think the experience was somewhat dependent on what keywords you were searching.
But going back to 2000 (when scraping DMOZ was still how everyone seeded quality), you can see that "inline ads" above organic results were a relatively early thing.
https://web.archive.org/web/20021002224152/http://www.google...
https://web.archive.org/web/20001205201000/http://www.google...
https://web.archive.org/web/20021105030346/http://www.google...
Looked through old posts from the google dance days on webmasterworld, I couldn't see any discussion of ads repositioned from the sidebar to inline, so yeah, I think inline placement was around a long time, certainly by the time this google blog post was first published.
It's quite clear to anyone who has used Google over the past decade that:
1. When you search for anything remotely commercial, your first page is essentially all ads, especially on mobile. It used to be possible that, if you were a site but had the top spot in Google for a commercial term, you had a great opportunity. That is no longer the case now, in that you are forced to pay "the Google tax", because there will be 4-5 ads above your primary search position if you don't pay for an ad.
2. Over time Google has made the distinction between organic results and ads much less clear. All you get now is teeny bolded "Ad" text in the upper left corner, everything else looks the same.
These are valid criticisms. Saying "Google critiqued the practice of displaying ads above search results" is simply not true based on the poster's own linked screenshot.
at this point an adblocker is more useful than an antivirus software
For Safari on my Mac I use the Ka-boom extension
It works pretty well for me, but then, I don't generally surf on my phone and only use Safari when I have clicked a link from messages or something.
I'm interested in other possible options on iOS as well, though. Hoping to see more replies.
Configure your home router to use it to filter for every device on your home WiFi network.
They have one set of DNS servers that just blocks ads and another set that additionally attempts to filter out adult content.
The page looked legit, it even had https and the url name looked fine, the only thing giving it away was that it missed the official .gob.mx domain at the end, but regular people don’t Pay attention to that. It was the first result link! And they didn’t remove it for months, amazing.
Edit: I thought that scam was removed already, but no! It’s still there, the first three links (the only visible ones on mobile) are scam websites.
Reason why: Senior citizens go to MapQuest for directions because it's the term they associate with getting directions on the Internet.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/95zk30/psa_first...
"Today, Google parent Alphabet Inc. reported a record $65.1 billion in revenue during the third quarter of 2021, with the company’s advertising business increasing 43.2% to $53.1 billion. Quarterly search advertising made up the bulk of revenue with $37.9 billion in the third quarter, rising from $26.3 billion during the same period in 2020. YouTube ads accounted for another $7.2 billion—up from $5 billion in Q3 2020—and Google’s ad network revenue brought in $7.9 billion."
Oh, sorry- I should have said "profit", not "revenue".
So theoretically in a few years Google might decide to kill their search product and nobody will really come in and make another one because after all the years of bad search results from Google everyone will naturally conclude that search on the internet just doesn't work.
That's right, I'm so paranoid I think that song is about me.
Do you have more details for this?
I think people want an excuse to justify their previous positive outlooks on Larry and Sergey by claiming something has changed. But Larry and Sergey still sit in charge of an extremely harmful company under investigation for numerous types of illegal and inappropriate conduct. Both had inappropriate relationships with subordinates that should've gotten them both fired, and both of them have yachts and/or islands that are worth more than some small countries.
Larry handed sundar effective control over Google when he promoted himself to Alphabet. Even 10 years ago, Larry lost interest in search (it was really sad for the search folks when they realized that). Larry picked sundar because sundar is a robot that makes money, and larry needs that money for his longterm mission.
They may not be day to day involved, but they vote down any shareholder proposals to fix what Google is doing, they're aware of what's going on. And the sleezy practices started long before Alphabet did, ads and search results have been becoming less distinguishable for a decade.
And Sundar's claim to fame, lest we forget, is hijacking everyone's browser settings by injecting the Google Toolbar into every Adobe Flash Player installer.
Unless you work directly with one of these three people I don't know how you could make such a claim. Press releases don't count as reliable sources
The ethics of ad is murky. How do you think a search company should make money? Subscription?
> everyone is promoted to their level of incompetence
Where the business sees some success and grows until they lose the thing that everyone liked about them to begin with
Business outgrows their market or something.
Blizzard stops producing highly polished experiences for money.
Googles search results are degraded and littered with ads for money.
Microsoft shifts from software to consumer data collection and now my servers all have Xbox services and a touch UI for some stupid reason (sorry, for money).
It applies to politicians and businesses alike.
Making it grotesquely blatant, how very much the Google computers were reading all your email.
At least now they conceal it a little better, by storing your keyword/interests in a giant permanent database, then bringing the advertisements up on other, non-Google pages!
They did say they aren’t scanning email for advertising purposes anymore though.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/26/534451513...
“Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change”
https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
When they started with the permanent database, the ads immediately got useless.
I couldn't even *believe* at the time why anyone would sign up for that. Still can't believe it.
Transcript for accessibility (2011):
First red box: Safety Center, Protecting Your Privacy
Second red box: Never post things like your name
Third red box: Prevent privacy trouble before it starts. Once your privacy has been compromised, you might not be able to undo the damage.
Fourth red box: Protecting your privacy means that you are taking care not to post personal information that could result in you being harmed over the [internet].
2013 (no red boxes, but relevant elements are):
Start using your full name on YouTube.
How you appear now: 1337_megahacker [no profile picture]
How you'll appear after: Lewis C. Skolnick From your Google+ profile [profile picture of person].
Two buttons appear at the bottom-right. "I don't want to use my full name" [colored similarly to background, de-emphasized] and "Next [blue background, emphasized].
Not for me. Maybe imgur does something different in mobile than desktop.
Thanks for the transcription.
But in practice, it made people indifferent about what they say online.
But in practice, it made people indifferent about what they say online. And of course, bots and malicious users will just use a fake name. The backlash that Facebook got when trying to force people to use their real identity, and to have their friends tell on them, must have been enormous - and likely lead to lawsuits, not to mention things like violence and death (think people trying to evade stalkers, trans people, etc.)
(And before replying to that last statement, think about whether you're about to commit victim blaming)
Internet evolved from "that computer thing where you should avoid stranger and putting your real info"
to something that's as important as infrastructure,
we spend so much time in it that it is basically part of the world
Facebook and similar pushed it
Google artificially pushes down those company results to keep forcing them to pay big bucks for the top result only via advertising. Pretty slimy business Google is in these days. Like paying the local thugs to protect your grocery store.
A new upstart criticises the way it is being done, comes in and changes things, then takes over and then slowly becomes the big guy they were fighting against in the first place.
There is are reason to criticise what is being done because it's not the best for the consumer, but there is a reason it's done that way because it's good for business. So the upstart takes over by building a better product but soon corporate needs become a bigger priority once the company reaches scale, so it's prioties change.
Like many newspapers separate ads and editorial, Google has a strict separation between our Ads departments and our Search departments -- and our results. Buying ads will not gain you any better ability to rank in the non-paid Search results. Nor will it get you any special support.
That's what the page explains. It never says we don't have ads that show at the top of the page and, in fact, acknowledges that we do: "While advertisers can pay more to be displayed higher in the advertising area." Nor is it true that at the time, we only had ads that appeared on the right-side of the page. Google's first ads appeared at the top of the page way back in 1999.
In addition, we continue to keep ads separated from Search and labeled so they can be identified.
I totally get that some people would like to see fewer ads. I don't work on the Ad side of Google, but I know that feedback has been heard.
The ads used to be a clearly yellow block. Then it became more and more faded yellow-to-white. Today, the ads have literally the exact same CSS, except that they do say "Ad" at the start, the legally mandated minimum disclosure.
How do you reconcile this?
To me, "honest" is already dishonest, in that Google deliberately tries to make ads vs search results visually ambiguous and thus the ads at the top are barely different from paid search placement.
As for ad labeling, I don't work on the ad side. I work on the Search side. My understanding from those on the ad side is that the labels are visible and do work. And ads are always labeled.
> And ads are always labeled.
Poorly these days, and you know it. Many, many people here are making the point that if you eventually shrink the word "Ad" down to a 2-point font we would still have a PR person here arguing "but we Label it as an ad." You have a lot of users now telling you that you're already reaching the point where ads are not considered distinguishable from results.
> As for ad labeling, I don't work on the ad side. I work on the Search side.
For customers, Ads are part of the Search product. On mobile, ads and ad-driven widgets often take up the first 1-3 screen scrolls before I scroll down to a "not-ad". For me, if this isn't part of your work, you're not working "my" Google Search. Your work may be to represent some subset of what Google Search is, but it's NOT the part of the "Google Search" product that is being discussed here.
We are not discussing DWIM search or paywalled results or even stack-overflow scrape spam that infests my actual Search results. We are discussing how ads that look a hell of a lot like search results infest the top 1-3 mobile screen-scrolls before I get to the results that are comprised of the same Stack Overflow page copied by 4 different scraper engines and reposted on multiple domains.
If the ads, which is the topic here, isn't part of the product you work on, then your professional experience carries no weight in this discussion -- though your personal experience is as welcome as anyone else's. 'jsnell pointed out what you did, but 5 hours earlier; his clarification was well received and there was already a discussion about the clarification.
I do understand the point you're making. Many here had harsh words for the linked twitter post. My favorite was [0], also several hours before your response. In fact in this discussion on HN there's actually so little confusion over the point you clarified that it almost seems that responding to the linked twitter post on HN, without responding to any of the HN discussion ... is very much a case of responding to a straw man.
I'd like to be very clear: On the google Search property, it's less about the number of ads, and more about "ads look very, very, very similar to the actual search results". Therefore, selling ads above the results is becoming very, very close to "selling search results". In fact for many of your customers, that is already a distinction without a difference. If you want to be taken seriously on this it's best to respond to a steel-man of the public's argument, even if the actual line of argument from the public is somewhat weakly presented. After all, you are the professional in public communication, we are the amateurs.
Most readers on HN are already well aware of the narrow distinction between "selling search results" and "selling ads above search results that (to many users) look exactly like search results". Some people are here trying to bring this issue to the forefront of discourse in order to help Google take action to strengthen their Search property.
It's hard to take your word as an official "PR Liaison for Search" word at face value on this when it lacks sufficiently rigorous introspection. The primary revenue-generating division for a $2 trillion company should be able to afford real introspection!
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20151213182805/https://www.googl...
And enabled this on desktop in 2016: https://searchengineland.com/google-no-ads-right-side-of-des...
everything you think you know about "history" is misinformation. In 2032 Google AI-generates colorful VR videos of the Real Past and boy, I am telling you, we are much better off now!
Keep Googling, dpark, 2032
Over the past six years, they've made $755 billion and not a cent paid to people for the use and sell of their data. And all because they provide services like ads above searches and link to shopping websites and Wikipedia, meanwhile selling people's data to whoever? Honestly, it's so hard to use Google as an actual search engine it feels like Google is more like a directory these days. Like, when I have to input a search as:
"yes" "i" "really" "want" "to" "search" "these" "terms"
This really undercuts your message. Google is a leech on society and their products aren’t even good, but you keep using Gmail because it’s kind of a hassle to switch.
You could switch to a different email provider and use DuckDuckGo for search. But you don’t. So your principled stance against Google doesn’t even extend to them most obvious examples of not giving them your business.
But sure, it’s very believable that the days of their products being good are “long and gone”.
They single handedly lead the assault on our online privacy. Not that no others were trying, but they succeeded.
I remember altavista giving me interesting results from actual personal websites and I could tweak it by being more precise. On google today the top results are pretty much always garbage SEO optimized aggregate nonsense.
Although lately Google does seem to be losing the battle with the scammers/spammers, at least for certain classes of queries. The number of garbage results I have to wade through if the answer isn’t in Wikipedia seems to be growing.
I'm really hoping DigitalOcean and Gitlab prove my theory wrong. You would think that private companies would be more prone to unethical practices.
From a response tweet:
> To be fair, the approach taken by Google (and most search engines) abides by the rules as set down by folks like the Advertising Standards Authority which let "Ad" work as a get out of jail free card regardless of context or visuals.
At the very least I think there should be a requirement of a different color background, along what Google used to have in their "Sponsored Links" section at the top of results.
This was back when Google still placed text only ads off to the side of the results page in a blue box to make them even more distinctly separated from the search results.
>Google may be big with the cyber-cognescenti, but AltaVista is still reaching a lot more users. While AltaVista reaches 17.7% of Web users, Google gets just 7%, according to the latest Media Metrix numbers.
https://www.forbes.com/2000/10/20/1020alta.html?sh=68521b3e7...
They weren't bought by Overture until 2003.
Yeah, there are SEO tactics, but they don't grant you fixed position. And Google Ad, well Search Ad is always different (from day one) than the organic search result.
And even so, Google Ad can't be misleading, because it directly affects the search result for the user, so you have some parameters like Quality score of the ad and the keyword, and yeah, if you try to mislead, they will disapprove your ad.
- Ads results
- Sites that display Google Ads
- Google's original algorithmic results
"Every ad on Google is clearly marked and set apart"
I opened Chromium based browser without AdBlock and they actually put "Ad" next to those first result(s).
It is marked as an Ad, but the thing is whether it is "clearly". I'd say not really.
Welcome to capitalism. The pursuit of profit ruins everything.