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Comment by buran77 | Hacker News Reader

> relevant material provided to us

Sure would be nice if the material was provided to us too. Or write an article explaining clearly how the original info was misconstrued. Simply deleting it (edit: instead of replacing it with a clarification so anyone who goes to read the wrong info gets the corrected one) really sends a wrong message, both about Wired and Google.

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The relevant material was almost certainly the slide that the article was mischaracterizing: https://twitter.com/adamkovac/status/1710041764910846061

I wish WIRED had included this context in their retraction statement…

Maybe they meant a longer version of this tweet:

https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1709726778170786297 (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37802302)

"The organic (IE: non-sponsored) results you see in Search are not affected by our ads systems."

Uh, other than being pushed off the visible page, I guess?

That's a very fair point, and I've complained about that degradation on Google many, many times over the years on HN, but I also don't think that's what Google was responding to. The Wired article has been taken down, but I'm assuming it was arguing that Google would change organic results to get more ad clicks. Google is saying here that ad results and organic results are 2 independent, orthogonal systems.

Again, your point is one I strongly agree with, but it's also taken out-of-context with respect to the article Google was responding to.

I think there's also a case for neglecting the quality of organics, while investing highly in the quality of ad targeting. So it's not quite as twirling-mustachio villain feeling, it has roughly the same effect.

Yep. It's obvious that they design for you to click ads, but it was fairly rocky suggesting that the backend reaches out to the ad system. This wouldn't just destroy results, but also run afoul of FCC Ad disclosure requirements.

So is no one questioning that maybe the search subsystem talks to the "website score" (or whatever it's called in Google-speak), to determine if it's relevant? And perhaps that score is influenced by how many valid ads there are.

Maybe the score is simply highly-correlated with a site that shows many google ads? Think about it, someone that shows Google ads happens to also be very very keen on optimizing everything that affects their rankings in Google searches.

Hey Google, perhaps "displaying many Google ads" should be a negative on page-rank?

Regardless, the Wired piece had no evidence and didn't make a claim on the same basis as what you're suggesting. The opinion author mistook this feature by thinking it applied to organic results: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10286719?hl=en

The 'visible page' isn't a finite length.

I'm not sure what point you're making. Is it just that I didn't say "currently visible portion of the page, the part you see without deliberate scrolling"?

Or, I guess "below the fold"

It's not fixed, but it is finite. No infinite sized screen exists

If they mean it's forced off the screen, not the page, that makes sense.

People don't click on or look at anything past the top 5 results anymore. They just refine the query.

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