Google Is Not a Search Engine – It's an Advertising Platform (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Google Is Not a Search Engine – It's an Advertising Platform (2019)

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84 pointskoyanisqatsi79 comments

Just because a product makes money a certain way doesn’t make that product equal to the way it makes money. I don't say, "time to turn on the local ad network" when I watch the evening news. They provide some crappy news segments, the weather, I'm slightly more informed, they in turn make money from showing ads to me. I say I "watched the news" which accurately describes what I consumed. I think we can still call Google a search engine? I mean, people still use it to search for things no?

The conclusion of the article was a little bit different than it started so I can't say there was strong argument being made for anything really here. I'll just say, I'll never get the 15 minutes back from reading this article that I learned nothing from.

> I don't say, "time to turn on the local ad network" when I watch the evening news.

I do and I really hope more people realize what's going on there. I really can't stand more than a few moments of modern TV. Heck with cable you pay for the chance to get advertised to and the ads are just getting louder and more garish with time.

Increasingly at least my peers and I are just refusing add supported services. QoL is horrible and manipulating you is the only purpose they have. Boomers will take "modern" news networks with them when they die off.

My parents don't understand why I have never owned a TV, let alone cable. A few times a year I'll watch TV at their house. They proudly proclaim how they're not paying for cable, they only pay for Youtube TV or some such. It has ads; far more ads than content. I ask why they are paying to be served ads. They don't even understand the question. It's really messed up.

Likewise, everytime I buy something I don't call it the "money taker item".

> If something is free, you are the product.

We really need to stop repeating this, it's a clever soundbite that we repeat to each other to be dismissive. It is not true, by which I mean it's not even false in some cases, it's just generally not true. Free products exist, in abundance, for which you are not a product. Paid users are often still products.

Especially ironic given that it's often proponents of free software (free as in both) that repeat this soundbite.

If you show up at a social event often enough, someone is going to ask you to bring something.

It's largely true though, how is it not? Free is either a loss leader for something else that's paid, like a demo, or you're the product. However I agree that paid users are still often a product.

Paying apple doesn't stop them from selling ads on your phone, same with samsung smart tvs etc.

Free software where the user is not the product is not an exception. The number of free dev libraries, Linux software, specialized software like audio plugins (Eg VCVRack, Max4Live, Reaktor, etc) is huge. Maybe in easily commercialized areas like iOS apps the vast majority of free apps monetize users, but outside of that this phrase has far less relevancy.

Well I guess I meant free software by capitalist profit seeking entities like corporations.

That isn't accurate. Let's look at Linux. Yes you can download it and compile it yourself but typically you would download from a website that tracks you. You would get a distro that typically has a business model. Yes, there's debian (and others) but even they have sponsors that pay the salaries of people working on the software.

The free portion are things that are already written. Services are the thing that costs money and they include features, hosting, adapting, etc. Those aren't free.

Maybe I'm cynical but I see things that are technically free all residing within environments that aren't. I don't have a problem with that, I'm OK with commercial interests. They pay my salary. But we need to be realistic about the scope of free and how financially viable would it be to be "free".

I am not sure I follow you. If I download a Linux distro from a website that is using Google Analytics, I am still the product? That is not even remotely correct. We are not discussing tracking or sponsorships here, or even whether people who write free software have financial incentives. In very many cases free software _is_ the product, not the people who download and use it.

Yes. Tracking data has value so you are the product to the company providing the hosting.

Yes. The code you're downloading is free. Just like the words of Shakespeare are now free. But you need to read those words off of something. That "something" sometimes includes tracking. Why would a commercial company offer this for free?

Sometimes it's indeed charity. But we have no way of knowing it. Sometimes the value is analytics which they can use to fingerprint and follow you across other properties they have.

You are saying that if someone takes free software and sells it (or distributes with the intention to monetize that service through ads) then that makes software not free? I disagree.

In the context of this discussion, there is a clear distinction between developers/companies that build truly free products vs free products that are intended to be monetized through selling user data or showing ads.

A service that tracks and sells user data in exchange for free downloads is a different product, has nothing to do with the original code/product that it might be distributing.

That was very specifically NOT what I said. What I said was that this person *might* be using tracking and monetization methods that would flip the value proposition by leveraging your details and privacy.

The thing is that you have relatively limited ability to know the level of tracking that companies use.

I'm *not* saying that paying for software solves this problem. I'm saying that "free" isn't as simple an answer as yes or no. It's more nuanced.

In that case I misunderstood you. Sure, we can’t always know all tracking details of closed source software, or even open source software with telemetry or some other tracking enabled.

The developer could be using harvested data for monetization. Or not. That’s a bit too speculative and borderline conspiratorial to be discussing.

I released free software myself, my friends have done the same - without any user tracking or ads. So anecdotally I can tell with confidence that free software does exist. Is all free software really free (as in not monetized by the developer in some hidden way)? No, not all.

I did too. But I put it on github which makes collaboration easy.

What does github track?

I don't know. I don't pay for it and I get a lot for free. I'm not switching to doing everything on my own private servers, etc. I live in the modern world. But I think we need to be conscious of who is footing the bill and their motivations to do so.

I think I responded to this concern in my previous comment.

Basically you are conflating free software as written and released by a developer with a completely separate service (eg Github) that is used to distribute this free software. Both the software and GitHub are free to the end user, but GitHub is likely harvesting user data for monetization.

As I said before, this does not make the original software not free. In this specific case distribution/download is not free. That has nothing to do with whether the user is the product or the code is the product for the developer.

> Paying apple doesn't stop them from selling ads

Nobody called Google evil back when they just sold ads based on the keywords you typed into search.

It's not the ad part that is evil, it's the relentlessly spying on everyone's life part.

I don't think ads are evil nor is being a product inherently awful. It can be a great worthwhile trade to be the product if you're getting enough recompense. Like Lebron James is a product for the NBA but I doubt he's complaining much about that.

You don't have to relentlessly spy on everyone's life to sell ads, however that is the business model Google has chosen.

Their mission is to organize all the world's information, so i think they have a different set of values than you.

Their mission is now to spy on everyone as much as possible and leverage that data to make a profit.

How does organizing all the world’s information generate profits?

>We really need to stop repeating this

We really don't, since it's been beautifully illustrated through Google's actions over the years.

My favorite example is Google bragging to it's advertising customers that they were buying a copy of everyone's credit card transaction data, which could be used for ad targeting.

>Google has been able to track your location using Google Maps for a long time. Since 2014, it has used that information to provide advertisers with information on how often people visit their stores. But store visits aren’t purchases, so, as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-no...

> We really don't, since it's been beautifully illustrated through Google's actions over the years.

You've proven that it should be changed to "If something free is Google's, you are the product".

Free things I'm benefiting from right now (right as I write this): Hacker News, Firefox, Linux, a keyboard a friend gifted me, a video of a guy talking about the color brown, the electricity paid by my landlord. I also just took out the trash which will be picked up, for free, by the city.

I'm the "product" of none of these things. They are paid for, indirectly, just as pretty much everything is. Just as for example, your volunteering time is paid for by your other actions in life allowing you to give this time away.

So what we should maybe change it to is closer to: "If something is free, it's just fucking free and there can be a host of reasons as to why so stop thinking in soundbites and employ critical thinking instead of being cynical about everything."

From your perspective, a more charitable rewriting of the phrase should be "If a product or service that sounds like it should cost money is free, and it's obvious the product or service is not something being made available through gift/barter/mutual aid, then you might be a part of the product's revenue generation strategy."

The electricity and trash are bad examples to bring up. You're paying for those with increased rent and municipal taxes.

Open source projects like Firefox and Linux are sort of counter-examples, except they're backed by nonprofits. If a nonprofit is giving something away, there's actually a decent chance that they don't have surreptitious motives. Same for a friend giving you something, that's not really a "product" in the sense of the saying.

I'd say that HN actually falls into the category of productizing its users. The reason HN exists is to attract talent to Y Combinator, and to get an audience for the companies they fund. It's a productive relationship that has created a great forum, but HN doesn't just exist for goodness' sake.

The phrase makes people think that if they are paying then they're not the product. The price the user pays is not always monetary.

A better phrase might be, "If you are the product then who is the customer?"

These things do not need to be mutually exclusive. Google has an advertising platform on top of a search engine.

When the majority of the results you get on the first page are paid for, then it's an advertising platform masquerading as a search engine.

Which is something Google used to make fun of it's competitors for doing, back when they were the underdog.

Then they introduced one ad per search, which was a big deal people talked about. Now we don't talk about it enough.

That's an arbitrary rule that we've made up. The search engine still exists. The advertising platform would not exist without it.

The % of ads on the first page of the search results is a detail of how the two co-exist, not evidence that there is only one and not the other.

> The advertising platform would not exist without it.

Considering how many people even get past those ads... tough to make that argument.

How? Literally millions of people get past the ads every day. Maybe even hundreds of millions.

Google claims that majority of search queries do not return ads but the most common and the most popular search queries return a lot of ads as we can witness.

It would be interesting to see how much of their revenue is advertising and how much is everything else because I'm almost certain the bulk of it is mostly advertising [0].

0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...

Yes, Google's revenue has always been driven by advertising. This has not changed in decades.

Do you think the advertising model is sustainable? I personally don't think it is because as an advertising network that gives a cut of its proceeds to various sites that host ads from their network they're incentivized to look the other way when it comes to SEO spam. So as Google has gotten larger so has the problem of SEO spam (which is mostly content designed to hack the Google ranking algorithm to earn a cut of revenue from the clickstream controlled and managed by Google).

SEO spammers are incentivized by Google to create incoherent content that Google itself ranks highly because it increases their main source of revenue. This is why I think their model is not sustainable. Eventually the web will be saturated with adversarial SEO spam instead of information curated by people.

If that happens people will abandon "Open Web" and will only use "Walled Gardens" like FB, IG, Twitter, LinkedIn, YT, TikTok, Reddit, Discord etc. That would be tragic.

I think people do this now already. How many people do you know that host their content on open platforms?

For example there are thousands of blogs out there but the question is how much are they consumed by people. Overall I would say majority of people(casual users) still use Open Web to find general information and some smaller percentage of Web users use it to find more specific and specialized information, those are power users. The reason for all this is that they(casual users) think Google is the Internet and that the information is out there sort of hosted on Google for them to find it. I think the Web users need to develop more personal connections(following) to websites and not just rely on Google to spit out information for them. For example some ways of doing that are: Website's comments section which is out there for users to engage with each other and with the website operator, another way is RSS/Atom feeds, newsletters etc.

Curation is the main problem. Google's promise was automatic curation based on the link metadata created by people but that's starting to fail as they try to infer intent from other signals fed into large ML models.

I'm not sure if this is solvable problem in the current ecosystem. The commercial web is now pretty much set in stone and I don't think there is a way around the juggernauts and their data centers.

It's just that the search engine is getting worse, to the benefit of the advertising platform.

"The Large Hadron Collider is not a physics experiment, it's a Government lobbying entity"

Hate it or love it, the advertising supported business model of the Internet has transformed the lives of a large chunk of humanity beyond any belief. I come from a very poor background in a country many would consider backward and yet, i had access to the wonders of human knowledge at the tips of my fingers while growing up. The generation before me were not so lucky and its incredibly sad to contrast these fortunes.

Except it is more of an international entity to be considered a governmental. Also you probably mean CERN (the organization).

I don't understand the analogy, I'm sure that CERN carries some lobbying activities but that is probably for funding purposes to carry out the scientific activities. That is different from what we are talking about here

The analogy is that one is a monetization model and the other is the composition of the core business.

In the former, the business is solving software engineering problems that very few dare to take on and the monetization model is online advertising.

Also, CERN in this analogy would be Alphabet.

> The analogy is that one is a monetization model and the other is the composition of the core business.

I still cannot get the analogy.

> Also, CERN in this analogy would be Alphabet.

LHC is an experiment (Almost dozen to be accurate) [1] and could be an analogy for the Google search engine as a product (or Gmail or other google products). CERN is still the organization which organize and have several other divisions like computing and engineering that serve LHC and a couple of smaller experiments. I don't think there is Alphabet analogy for LHC (maybe EU in this case but also US and a couple of other countries)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Large_Hadron_Collider_...

Look at all the "tech business model" defenders. Google is their hero. No one is willing to pay for Google. The website user is the product. All the analogies to actual products in the real world that have actual monetary value are wrong. None of us pay anything to Google and we never will. We pay ISPs for internet connections.

https://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

What the "tech" supporters and their hopeless arguments conveniently ignore is that it's possible to have a search engine that does not locate and present ads along with the search results. In fact, that was the original Google. The plan was to avoid the influence of advertising. Why. Because it sucks. An entire Appendix was devoted to this issue. No amount of "tech" hype can change that fact. Computers and computer networks did not and still do not not require advertising to work.

For me, Google Search was always nothing more than a 'hook' device that feeds into their AD business. Is it useful? Yes. Has it gained enormous traction and even sneaked into the Oxford dictionary?[0] Yes. But it's clear the main ulterior motive was to feed into their ADs business.

And the main search engine is not the only data-point. Google is so entangled with the web that they have countless other data-points to gather data. They're even in your web-font libraries and monitoring you with Google Analytics, not to mention YouTube, and all the other endpoints they can use to feed their ADs business.

They're a parasite of the web.

[0] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...

It's an interesting case study in how much power financial incentives have.

Google didn't start as an ad platform, at least not that I ever heard. It started as a legimate attempt at building better search. Do you remember how bad web search was before Google?

However once it had some success and advertising revenue started coming in, that changed the entire focus and culture of the company. Now everything is about ads. Search is just a means to serve ads. Google phones and Android? Ads. Chrome browser? Ads. Gmail? Ads.

To me, when it arrived Google was attractive because it had a simple, clean home page. Big search field, the work "Google" and not much else. At the time the other search engines plastered the home page with ads. Also at the time, I didn't perceive Google's search as vastly superior, though it may have been.

The clean interface and lack of home page clutter was good enough to win me over. It's interesting that for all of these years they have kept the home page relatively clear (Or so I imagine, been DDG exclusively for about 8 years now).

Back in 1998, Google was indeed the upstart: a limited index compared to the giant of the time, AltaVista.

But they ran Linux. That was Slashdot-worthy!

Others were Web Portals that had search, Google was only search engine but ironically enough as they grew larger and more ambitious they became Web Portal(the concept that they once feared). But I admit Google's UI is still nice and clean.

> It's an interesting case study in how much power financial incentives have.

Publicly traded companies gonna behave like a publicly traded company -- badly. Gotta keep that share price up up up, and woe be to the executive that does not.

I think “always” is a bit extreme. google was created to be a useful search engine. adwords came later

Even after ads appeared, there was a period in which the ads you saw were based on the search keywords you typed in and not on relentless spying on every facet of your life.

yeah I remember watching a fairly congratulatory documentary on British TV about how they did it. they put a lot of thought into making sure it wasn’t intrusive or inappropriate. that was obviously back in the Don’t be Evil days. it’s all gone to shit now

I think it can be both. Mainly it is just getting attention now because the advertisement part has started to become more obvious given that the search engine part is less useful.

Google also captures a ton of credit card swipe transactions which is crazy to me - that does not involve the web at all!

Are there any browser addons that can remove all paid for ad results and re-sort them to their non-paid for location?

ublock origin can do this.

> to their non-paid for location

AKA not shown at all. I agree!

> there are numerous other search engines available to any user with web access — Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex being the most popular, outside of more country-specific platforms like China’s Baidu.

Yandex is a country-specific platform. For ten years it's been referred to as "the Russian google."

The results seem so clinical or academic now. I want to read what freaks write. I often add the word reddit to my search or other platforms tags to get more opinionated and personal content.

Is it 2010 again? Already?

porque no los dos = it can be both, why not both?

  Google Is a Search Engine, and an Advertising Platform.

In other news the sun is yellow.

THAT would be news indeed.

Are all the visible wavelengths present in equal magnitude? It looks yellow to me.

According to [1] actually

> it emits most of its energy around 500 nm, which is close to blue-green light

then further down

> Here on Earth, the atmosphere plays a role in the color of the sun. Since shorter wavelength blue light is scattered more efficiently than longer wavelength red light, we lose some of the blue tint of the sun as sunlight passes through the atmosphere. In addition, all wavelengths of visible light passing through our atmosphere are attenuated so that the light that reaches our eyes does not immediately saturate the cone receptors. This allows the brain to perceive color from the image with a little less blue – yellow

[1] https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/what-color-sun

semantics

Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1361/

Wow. Almost like listening to sophomore physics students arguing over whether electrons are waves or particles.

Lawyers from a "famous" german yellow press publication once, like years ago, said:

"Journalism is only a vehicle to deliver ads to the reader."

(free translation)

I really think there’s a case to be made for banning advertising as a whole, besides a few designated places like shop windows and classified sections

That would be a dream, though I'm sure that this will never happen. The web is cursed, advertising is an immanent feature of the web.

there would of course be unintended consequences. you would probably be making advertising “cool”, which would probably make the adverts that do succeed in filtering through all the more successful. you can imagine it being a treat for people to go to a country that still has advertising. a bit like visiting the US from Europe is now

and if you don’t ensure robust public funding for journalism and the arts while doing it, you’d be locking away certain forms of content from poorer people. the BBC shows that it can be done and done well, it would just have to be secured in a way that takes it out of the political arena, as you can be damn sure the first thing a free-market party would do would be to kill that funding so that further down the line they can point and say “look at the failing arts, we need corporate funding back to support this industry”

but yeah, the web, with its tendency towards “free” content, has an innate problem that I don’t see going anywhere. there are occasional pushbacks against advertising. the TV industry went that way for a while, but now even Netflix is introducing an ad-supported tier

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