But I understand Google here. It's probably their single biggest income stream. Our company is using a very big chunk of our ad words budget targeting our own brand name to make sure it's on top. More than for any other keyword by far. And I imagine many others do the same.
Google are enabling fraud on a massive scale by permitting the hijacking of established names and brands. Often brands or names that some small family company has worked for years to build a reputation for.
We do indeed live in a world where tech and capitalism have birthed some sort of horrific offspring that’s choking us all.
Google are not only making it worse because of advertising, they're making it worse by facilitating scammers and fraudsters and various other criminals.
All because their systems are so automated as to eschew any review that might actually make advertising on the Internet slightly less distasteful (and maybe the FBI wouldn't be recommending the choking off of Google's primary income stream)
Stealing and impersonation good, sex bad.
People in the US have this puritanical view on sex -> it is inherited by Silicon Valley -> it gets forced onto the rest of us.
Since the rest of us are forced to rely on US-based products in some capacity (app stores, payment processors, CDNs...), you can't make anything sex-related even in places where sex work is viewed far more openly than in the US.
The US doesn't have a smalltime corruption problem, you don't bribe your local cop, it has a bigmoney corruption problem as seen (again) here.
We are going to end up with 10 'scammer' ad in the top 10 result, each and everyone fighting each other with more ad budget and lower profit margins.
In the end, the website owner won't even need a website.
It gives newer, or less well-known, companies a chance to gain exposure. And consumers like me might learn about a superior option they didn’t know previously.
Edit: Thought experiment. Over in the Figma thread there’s a lot of talk about trying to ween themselves and others off Adobe products. So is it really a negative for the industry and consumers if Figma shows ads on searches for Photoshop?
Fair enough, but a lot of them are trying to confuse the customer, as Cory Doctorow found
If the ad at all appears to originate from the company that is the target of the ad keyword it should be rejected or require verification that it’s from the company.
Google could even charge a $10 “review fee” for ads placed directly on competitors keywords (per ad treatment, not per ad treatment per keyword) to discourage this behavior from scammers
Yes, because Google's intended and actual outcome is companies are blackmailed into paying to compete on advertising for their own names. Which is highly likely a navigation query.
It would be different if someone googled "photoshop alternatives" or sth
Like "Figma: an Alternative to Photoshop" (you can tell I'm not an advertising copywriter).
You shouldn't need to do this. Googles ad auction on search multiplies your bid by a quality score when deciding which ad to show. A site that satisfies what the user is looking for will have a high quality score, whereas the 'wrong' site (ie. one for a competitor) will have a low quality score - partly determined by the user clicking the back button when they find they have been misled.
That means that if your competitors are pumping $100 into becoming the top search result, you perhaps only need to put $1 into getting the same ad spot.
If you are finding that not to be true, then it might be because your site is low quality for some reason (for example, maybe it doesn't load for some users in some browsers), or maybe your site doesn't have the info people are looking for when they search your company name.
[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse...
For a while I'd bid on the names of competitors (Not being scammy - just trying to win the #1 result placement); however, I found I was spending a bunch with basically zero conversions because - I assume, if someone is searching for something, they're expecting that something, so when they click it and realize it's not - they just exit.
On the other hand, bidding my own name: pennies.
From the end user's point of view, how is "win the #1 result placement" for a competitor's name not a blatant scam?
It's the difference between bidding on the keyword BrandX when my company is ABCBrand with an ad that says:
"Come shop at BrandX" .. when it's going to my ABCBrand, and possibly even having a landing page pretending to be BrandX
vs.
"Come shop at ABCBrand" ... and going to my ABCBrand, as it should.
I can plug OEM 1 + Model1 and get two to three ads for OEM2/3/4 before I get the result I was looking for.
There should be a solution to the problem of the scammers. Banning advertising being allowed to show up on someone else's organic search results ain't it.