Many people would not have found this cleaner without Googling, reading reviews, etc. While that may not be an ad directly, it's part of the marketing budget. So what needs to change?
Before that, there were classified ads in papers. Those were lightly vetted by the local newspaper. Also, with a warrant, the police could generally track down the person that placed the ad, which broke a lot of bullshit scams. (Like house sitters that don’t exist, but are instead getting lists of people that will be out of town.)
People just don't want to do that
In some sparser places there might also only be a couple contractors working anyway. Might be able to get suggestions just by asking around wherever you get permits.
They've already lost the case with this, and are currently trying to prevent what needs to change: Google must be forced to divest large portions of its ad business to reintroduce competition in the marketing space.
Is there any evidence of them abusing that knowledge? Or was the lawsuit over them having a monopoly and/or anticompetitive practices?
Also, note that Google was caught intentionally deleting evidence they were ordered by the court to retain.
Which case is this?
(Note the separate case which determined Google is running an illegally anticompetitive operation in Search was a separate case which can be referred to as "United States v. Google LLC (2020)" and there is a third case they lost recently, Epic Games Inc. v. Google LLC, which determined Google operates an illegal monopoly with Android as well.)
Yes, and anecdotally I've heard of better experiences using services that do not appear on the top search results. The reason being that the top results have already captured the local market and so are less incentivized to respond quickly, accept the job or task, or offer a better rate. They already have their business and may not need yours.
You're right, they'll find whatever incumbent cleaner instead. A marketing ban is something that all incumbents would love, because they don't need to attract more customers whereas marketing is basically the only way that upstarts can get a foothold.
Reputation based platforms are pretty much the only way to go around here. (Yelp barely counts at this point.)
The modern web was designed by predatory middlemen who want a cut of transactions they otherwise have no business being involved in. It's a textbook case of rentier capitalism.
So what needs to change is that we need to identify the design decisions made by those middlemen, rip them out root and branch, and fix the gaps with something that takes as an input the trust graph of the users so that the only way the middlemen can stay relevant is to personally gain the trust of each user whose transaction they've gotten in the middle of, and we need to publish the result as a protocol, not a platform, so it can be used without us (the authors of the protocol) being at risk of becoming the problem we're trying to solve.
I don't get it, is google blocking people from making or requesting word of mouth referrals? Or are people switching to google ads because it's more convenient? It just sounds like you're using "rentier capitalism" to describe companies you don't like.
It would be nice to block them from doing so, but the real fix is to give those users something better to use. Not much has gone into using technology to amplify the innate peer-to-peer trust/distrust mechanisms that we've spent millenia evolving such that they scale to the demands of our times, and quite a lot (thanks to google and friends) has gone into suppressing them.
What does google's control over web standards have to do with the death of word of mouth referrals? You might not like FLoC or webusb but those aren't the reasons why everyone doesn't bother with word of mouth referrals to hire cleaners.
Now I don't know if there are any home cleaners that attempt to reach a wider audience on YouTube. Maybe there's a different medium that might suit their business better. But whatever it is, if it tries to be faster than meatspace gossip, there's some advertising platform selling the ability to interfere with it.
That Google isn't blocking a better model doesn't mean they aren't at fault. Ads are like pollution for our minds, we need a better web
Are you sure you don't have it reversed? Companies would be quite happy if they could enter into some sort of no advertising pact so they don't have to spend any money on ads at all.
>The trouble is, for Google, the customers are the companies buying ads, not the people browsing the web. It's a classic example of not paying for your externalities
No, it's fully internalized, because consumers are getting free content (ie. sites where the ads are placed) and services (eg. gmail) in exchange. I'd be far more sympathetic to your claims of "externalities" if google stuffed its ads into your computer like junk mail makes its way into your mailbox.
That's why it's a local optimum. Any company that try to unilaterally leave advertising will be punished. The global optimum would be no advertising at all, of course.
Anyway the people are already fighting back. I block ads everywhere, at least.