Ads team begging for worse search results so that ads team can hit their goals
twitter.com
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Edit: here it is – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467. Thanks to the user who emailed!
It’s not clear what exactly that means, but search ranking seems more likely than a Chrome UI change.
Because I read more than random out of context tweets as my source of information.
> Is there another email that mentions Omnibox?
Yes. It's linked in multiple places in this very HN thread. Page 4 in the original justice.gov PDF specifically mentions the experiment that was done as a result of that originally quoted "complaint" email, and says "start experiments to improve search ranking in the omnibox".
The document actually requests a change in Chrome to make the search box more prominent, it's not about search results at all!
HN prefers titles that come from the article or submission itself. I'd suggest either tweet or email.
"If the email with your strategy gets printed in the front page of a newspaper, how would you feel about it?"
It's a good rule of thumb for professional ethics in general.
So is it to have your strategy guided by general accepted ethics, or to not speak about your real strategy in open words?
This is the generally accepted interpretation of the words. In other words, if you are unsure if something you're doing is ethical or not consider how others would react if they heard about you doing it. It's basically saying to consider group ethics and not just your own.
It’s also pretty common for public companies to try to shift volume to higher revenue or margin products when they’re pacing short of consensus.
That said, you can always override a bonus plan and pay even when they fall short of their sales plan. It seemed like that was the entire catalyst of this conversation, wanting the ads team to hit their bonus.
If y’all think this is unethical, you should hear the conversations I was privy to about how hospitals execs were considering halting patient admissions during the pandemic because nursing labor got expensive and breaking even was deemed unacceptable. The government upped reimbursements and same hospital execs made massive windfall bonuses
A company that continuously invests their efforts on maximum revenue subtraction eventually pushes their users out. Similarly, a company that invests too much into research and present user satisfaction, particularly when users don't pay for the product, is set to have some financial and economical problems in the future.
I think this is borderline ethical. For sure it's over 9000 in the Maquiavellian scale (I mean the gymnastics behind "please don't say that this is us pushing for worse results, that's a very negative message" are genius and I can see that working really well under certain circumstances in a corporate setup), but that doesn't mean that it's unethical _necessarily_.
Also, this sounds like an email from a sales person, although I don't know whether it is or not. Some of the sale people that I've known were more than willing to cross into the greyest of grey areas to make their quota, regardless of the legality. I'm curious what the response to this email was.
What is the rollback they are talking about? Is it in terms of something new in google chrome?
From what I can tell, they are looking for certain amount of ads 'injection' to come from chrome. What does that really mean? Does chrome really control the ads injected into the search results from google? I had assumed that was directly from google. Or maybe something happened in the recent chrome update that reduced the number of direct queries heading to google?
Also what's with the suggestion to increase the search box vertical space to increase in a search tab to make search prominent? That sounds pretty interesting to me.
How is this on the front page of HN? Flagged.
Did the tweeter just say he fucking nailed predicting the sun would rise?
https://web.archive.org/web/20230919185431/https://www.justi...
The Chrome team does seem to be screwing with things to increase the number of searches needed by a user to find what they want though, thereby increasing the number of ads shown and potentially clicked upon.
Best approach would be to not do it at all but I guess that's too much to ask.
The first sentence is basically only a variation of "don't write it in an email if you wouldn't want to read it in the news".
If the article was about a body being discovered in a murderers backyard and I had written "ideally don't bury bodies in your backyard" you would have questioned how sick and twisted I am that I didn't write "don't kill people"? The prior is inherent to the statement.
"The truth is that Google and Facebook and the other large marketing data companies probably have some very sophisticated models of purchase intent. These companies likely know exactly when someone is making the choice, and could show people the relevant ad at the precise moment when they are most susceptible to it. But, the entire business model of these companies is to increase spend on their products. Why would they tell anyone something that would reduce ad spend?"
https://lockwood.dev/advertising/2019/06/07/adtech-sucks.htm...