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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

When I was in Google Ads, someone explained to me that Search ads were 10x more profitable than banner ads. The reason is the search tells you something about what the user wants. Our canonical example was "flowers." It's perfectly reasonable to show you ads for 1-800-FLOWERS.

Of course, over time that's been corrupted so you see only ads. Don't bother beating that dead horse.

All the "targeted advertisement" efforts are to figure out what you want when you didn't say anything, and reduce that 10x to 5x or less. I don't see a good reason not to prohibit those, if people object to them. There's no right to make infinite money off the Internet.

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> Our canonical example was "flowers." It's perfectly reasonable to show you ads for 1-800-FLOWERS.

It still results in strong perverse incentives. If I search for $company I don't want to have the top hit be $rival_company

I've gotten good deals searching for one company and getting an ad from another VC-funded company in the same market offering a large discount.

As long as it's the top ad spot, why not? That's basically the only relevant ad when you search $company -- "Hey, we also do that."

Why would you want to see results ranked by advertiser's ability to pay rather than a neutral metric of relevance?

One argument would be - my WILLINGNESS to pay for an ad is driven by my assumption of its relevance to you.

It can also be driven by level of my wealth, so a business A might be willing to pay more for an ad for its product than business B despite less assumed relevance, then ranking would not reflect assumed relevance.

if the probability of a click is zero, you won't be shown no matter how much you bid.

p(click) is an estimate, of course, but you'd reasonably expect that Google has gotten pretty good at that.

This shouldn't surprise you: Google ranks them by the money IT stands to make, which includes the probability you'll click on it.

Relevance presumably increases p(click).

"advertiser's ability to pay" has no bearing on things. If the advertiser does not pass credit checks, it doesn't even enter the auction.

It could work only if advertiser pays per click instead of per show. Is pay-per-click the only option in Google?

There also is clickbait.

(With the caveat that I've been out for a while, so things could have changed)

Search Ads are pay-per-click (or conversion now? Not sure)

All others are pay-per-impression.

conversions are what the advertiser really cares about, but they're hard for Google to be sure about. And what if you see the ad today but buy it next week in the store?

> neutral metric of relevance

Organic search? Corrupted by SEO, so not neutral. The advertiser's ability or willingness to pay, is at least something of relevance? It reveals at least someone has the product you want, and possibly a deal.

Why do you think that organic search is so more corrupted by SEO than ability to pay is relevant, that neutral ranking is noticeably more relevant than ad ranking?

there's a ML model that ranks ads relative to a query. Contractors get paid to provide the "ground truth."

You can read about how it was in 2008-10 here:

https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads

Undoubtedly it's different now.

Google puts ads above real search results, so the top ad spot is above everything else too. And this is how you get lovely workflows like "google for VLC, click top result, get malware"

When I was at Google I almost got in trouble a couple of times by asking if Google might have a monopoly. I was told to delete messages and to never say "The M Word".

disclosure: work at Google

This makes sense if your genuine perspective is that you don't have a monopoly.

Like if I sent a bunch of emails saying "Hey guys, we are making great progress on committing genocide" - people would say "wtf man, we don't commit genocide, we just make software, why are you talking like that?"

Then you're all like "shhh don't say the G word..."

I'm not sure what you did in the company, but unless you had a VP+ level position, how are you qualified to know whether Google has a monopoly or not? Like, how do you have omniscient data on what competitors sales look like? You're just speculating in an unhealthy way. And that's why people told you to be quiet.

Actually, I reject the argument from qualifications. (That doesn't mean he was right to say what he said.) Having climbed the greasy pole of management doesn't make you on expert on anything except pole-climbing.

You can read in the trade press what market share everyone has. Judging whether a company is or isn't a monopoly is something anyone can do, although if you're not the judge you have no impact.

VPs are not qualified because they climbed a corporate ladder - they are qualified because they are in charge a wider section of the business and are authorized to see data from that wide area.

If you're an L4 code, you're not going to getting a bunch of confidential data piped to you.

>You can read in the trade press what market share everyone has

This is exactly the point - some jr associate sipping morning coffee and reading whatever news declaring Monopoly internally is not helpful in any way to the enterprise.

as I said: saying it inside G is not cool.

This "confidential" data, though: I call BS. Maybe 40 years ago that was true. Not anymore. The "wider section of the business" : we're talking about a business that transcends G's internals.

Your snobbery is showing: "some jr associate sipping morning coffee and reading whatever news declaring Monopoly internally is not helpful in any way to the enterprise."

"some jr associate" -- how dare those peasants have an opinion?

"sipping morning coffee" -- what does that have to do with anything?

Yeah I am being snobby. Look at the root comment we are replying under.

Insinuating that they could not say the word “monopoly” could not be said because it was a giant conspiracy to keep it hush. It’s cringe.

Same energy as “that’s exactly what a guilty person would say”. Turns out, “I didn’t do it” is also exactly what an innocent person would say.

Maybe I'm "cringe" sure.

I don't think what I experienced was an admission of guilt. There's a lot of different ways a company can exploit its market position inappropriately. And bringing up a sensitive topic like monopolies can make people uncomfortable because it's related to other ideas - like anti-competitive behavior. I literally had a manager describe a tactic to me that would be illegal anti-competitive behavior. Granted, it was something well outside of his control so he's no risk to the free market.

My hope was that by asking about the topic people could confidently describe why Google had no monopolies and wasn't exploiting anything. I didn't get that at all so I stopped.

The real reason is that in Discovery your email would come out. It's not that it makes anyone uncomfortable.

> I literally had a manager describe a tactic to me that would be illegal anti-competitive behavior

But presumably that was in a face-to-face conversation, which would not be discovered. And "I don't recall" would be his answer if ever asked about it.

> There's no right to make infinite money off the Internet.

I like this a lot. Google is massively profitable. The only argument in favor of continue to extract every cent they can off the market, is that we have a fiction of perpetual, constant growth. It should be 100% okay for a company to say “we’re super profitable, we’re going to tone it down now and focus on making our services better”.

It's corporate religion: "Where is the growth coming from?"

At a certain size, the answer should be "It's not."

And then they get valued by their dividend yield. That IS boring, to some people.

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