Google could have built a search engine where paid results were indistinguishable from organic results, but the negative externalities of that were too great.
Google could have remained in China, but the negative externalities of developing and managing a censorship engine were too great.
Google could have productized AI before the risks were controlled, but they sacrificed revenue and first-mover advantage to be more responsible, and to protect their reputation.
This behavior is so rare, it's hard to think of another megacorp that would do that.
Google's far from perfect, they've made ethical lapses, which their competitors love to yell and scream about, but their competitors wouldn't hold up well under the same scrutiny.
Have you not used Google search in the past 5 years?
Before Google, search engines didn't do this. Paid results were indistinguishable from organic results.
Here's an example --> https://imgur.com/a/bSJTBeD
If you have a counter-example, please share!
Prominently? Bold text?
Here's how they repeatedly made ads indistinguishable from search results: https://atechnocratblog.wordpress.com/2016/07/26/color-fade-...
Or this: https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/1648496387640938496
To quote from the above, here's what they said in the beginning: "we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers"
I do agree however that the labeling has gotten less prominent over time. I don't however agree that it has become subtle enough to considered indistinguishable from search results.
This is what it looks like on mobile. A tiny "sponsored" text is the only thing that distinguishes ads from search results: https://imgur.com/a/WOk4NdR
It's deliberately designed this way compared to what it once was https://atechnocratblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/history-...
To deny this is quite bizarre
Now, when I search any even slightly remotely commercial search term on mobile, about the entire first page and a half of results are ads. Yes, they're identified with a "Sponsored" message, but as you can see from the "evolution" link the other commenter replied, this was obviously done to make the visual treatment between ads and organic results less clear.
The reason I'm thrilled about Google finally getting competition in their bread-and-butter is not because I want them to fail, but I want them to stop sucking so bad. For about the past 10 or so years Google has gotten so comfy with their monopoly position that the vast majority of their main search updates have been extremely hostile to both end users and their advertisers as Google continually demands more and more of "the Google tax" by pushing organic results down the page.
In the meantime I've switched to Bing, not because I think Microsoft is so much better, because I desperately want multiple search alternatives.
Edit: Great article from a couple years ago about how Google tried to make ads even more indistinguishable from organic results: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/1/23/21078343/google-ad-d...
> ...
> In the meantime I've switched to Bing
Hilarious!
Here's Bing --> https://imgur.com/a/N3HCTtw
Here's Google --> https://imgur.com/a/bSJTBeD
Identical search terms.
Which ads look more like organic results?