Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

Well "lead generation" is about matching "needers" with "suppliers".

Eg., suppose a pipe breaks, you search for plumber, you find a plumber. That search is a lead generator for that plumber.

That search is "free", by intuition, kinda destroys our sense of value in lead generation, right? Google should NOT be free for that plumber; the plumber should be paying quite a lot for the service.

Suppliers of services need a system which allocates demand, right? Indeed, customers need a system of finding suppliers.

View on HN

I much prefer organic plumber results than ad. So google should be free for the plumber.

The best result is almost never the ad. And in the rare situation where there ad is the best result, it’s an inefficiency because the poor plumber is paying for an unnecessary ad.

We’re hitting a point where we always get shitty plumbers because they have good ads and don’t need to be good plumbers. Or even worse, most plumber ads are just lead generation where I get some random plumber driving 90 minutes because they bought the lead and responded first.

I’d rather be in a world where the search surfaced the best plumber. Not some arbitrating middleman sucking value away from the plumber and the person with a backed up toilet.

You've missed my point.

The search itself has to be paid for; the search itself is lead generation. The search is the "middle man".

Who is paying for google search?

Is there a service out there I can pay to let me look through a list of curated plumbers that do not pay the service to be listed? See the comments of other users of the service, star ratings etc. Plumbers that get complaints get dropped. I'd definitely pay for that if I didn't already know someone.

In my US state, plumbers are contractors governed by a contractor's board that keeps records about complaints. Always look up a contractor with the regulatory board. It's even free.

I hate to break it to you but the SEO industry is as big as advertising generally and organic results are heavily gamed. As it relies a ton on link building and many of those links are paid for it's hardly the meritocratic process many think it is.

> Google should NOT be free for that plumber; the plumber should be paying quite a lot for the service.

But that makes the service into an ad. The last thing I'm going to do is take any recommendations from someone who is being paid to give recommendations.

Google's value prop is that high quality results are free, and low quality results for dumb people go on the ad ghetto.

Without that, they lose the users thst drive revenue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com