Comment by billyhoffman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by billyhoffman | Hacker News Reader

The full version of Brin and Page's classic paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" [1], which describes the early architect of Google and is an interested read in its own right, literally has "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives." Highlights include:

-"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

Another interesting paragraph talks about search engine bias:

"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."

Bait and switch. "Look at our more transparent search engine in the academic realm." Gotcha. Look again. Google is not an unbiased search engine. Its ~100% funded by advertising.

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".

Not in 1998

It'd be interesting to see a breakdown of their add revenue and what portion come from these top level ad results.

My guess is it's a majority of their revenue.

It's such a slimy practice.

Well, and they've gone way beyond 3 or 4 ads on top of the search results if the query terms are particularly valuable.

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.

So much of it's making companies pay to be at the actual-top, when they're already result 1 or 2 in the natural results and are obviously what the searcher wanted. I go out of my way not to click these but most people I observe do click them, even when the non-ad link is also above the fold. That's a "success" for Google, maybe a "success" for the company's marketing department, a loss for the company in fact, and at best neutral for the searcher.

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.

I remember reading the first paper and my impression is that a lot of the engineering limitations back then no longer apply in 2020+.

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