Google critiqued the practice of displaying ads above search results

https://twitter.com/krebs_adrian/status/1488173888068542466

by hubraumhugo • 4 years ago

333 159 4 years ago

chmod775• 4 years ago

In the same vein: https://i.imgur.com/y0xl11R.jpg

sp332• 4 years ago

I can't quite make out the text there. Does the first one say "don't put your name on the internet" and then the second one demands your name?

hadrien01• 4 years ago

The first one is the YouTube help saying "Never post things like your name" and the second one is the YouTube website saying "Start using your full name on YouTube", prefilled with your Google+ info.

openknot• 4 years ago

Yes, that's the essence of it. A high-resolution version appears upon clicking the image.

Transcript for accessibility (2011):

First red box: Safety Center, Protecting Your Privacy

Second red box: Never post things like your name

Third red box: Prevent privacy trouble before it starts. Once your privacy has been compromised, you might not be able to undo the damage.

Fourth red box: Protecting your privacy means that you are taking care not to post personal information that could result in you being harmed over the [internet].

2013 (no red boxes, but relevant elements are):

Start using your full name on YouTube.

How you appear now: 1337_megahacker [no profile picture]

How you'll appear after: Lewis C. Skolnick From your Google+ profile [profile picture of person].

Two buttons appear at the bottom-right. "I don't want to use my full name" [colored similarly to background, de-emphasized] and "Next [blue background, emphasized].

advisedwang• 4 years ago

And thankfully after much community and employee noise, they reversed that: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/16/youtube-t...

Cthulhu_2• 4 years ago

I do believe their motivation for people using their real name / identity came from a push to prevent abuse - theory being that you'd be more careful of what you post online if it's under your own name.

But in practice, it made people indifferent about what they say online.

snowwrestler• 4 years ago

I think it was actually tied to the integration of YouTube with Google Plus, which was intended to be a “real name” social network like Facebook.

Cthulhu_2• 4 years ago

But in practice, it made people indifferent about what they say online. And of course, bots and malicious users will just use a fake name. The backlash that Facebook got when trying to force people to use their real identity, and to have their friends tell on them, must have been enormous - and likely lead to lawsuits, not to mention things like violence and death (think people trying to evade stalkers, trans people, etc.)

(And before replying to that last statement, think about whether you're about to commit victim blaming)

syrrim• 4 years ago

https://i.imgur.com/y0xl11R_d.webp?maxwidth=2360&shape=thumb...

tester7562• 4 years ago

I disagree, its way more complex matter.

Internet evolved from "that computer thing where you should avoid stranger and putting your real info"

to something that's as important as infrastructure,

we spend so much time in it that it is basically part of the world

Facebook and similar pushed it

SubiculumCode• 4 years ago

I mean that was back when 'don't be evil' was credibly the company philosophy. Going public didn't help.

z3c02• 4 years ago

I'm beginning to use "going public" as my indicator to stop using a product. My decade-old reddit account was recently deleted for this reason, as they were showing all the signs before they announced their intention to go public.

I'm really hoping DigitalOcean and Gitlab prove my theory wrong. You would think that private companies would be more prone to unethical practices.

6gvONxR4sf7o• 4 years ago

You might be able to use it as an indicator when to stop working there too. Which sucks because public companies tend to pay nearly twice as much.

rebelde• 4 years ago

Right. They need to show growth every year in search advertising. One way to grow is to put more ads in more places. Of course, even before going public, they still had to grow (so that they could go public), but they had natural growth then.

thefourthchime• 4 years ago

Does anyone else fondly remember the early 2010s. When companies at least pretended to "Make the world a better place". Now it seems they're just racing to see who can be worth the next N trillion dollar company.

folkrav• 4 years ago

The Silicon Valley TV show quite vividly portrayed that era of tech, especially in the earlier seasons.

hdesh• 4 years ago

"What are you looking at? Never seen a hypocrite before?"

caaqil• 4 years ago

The earliest version [1] of this page is from Dec, 2015, which is (relatively) recent. Not sure if the Archive missed it but I imagined it'd be much older page.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20151213182805/https://www.googl...

ec109685• 4 years ago

And they had been showing ads above search results on Mobile for a while: https://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-three-mobile-te...

And enabled this on desktop in 2016: https://searchengineland.com/google-no-ads-right-side-of-des...

smitop• 4 years ago

It's from March 2002: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22109078

dvngnt_• 4 years ago

This practice has enabled scams. Many crypto sites now have a fraudulent version showing as a top result in ads which will allow the user to enter their seed phrase and empty their accounts.

at this point an adblocker is more useful than an antivirus software

mountainb• 4 years ago

Every time I get a new iPhone and forget to install an ad blocker, Safari crashes due to an ad problem and then I remember to install the ad blocker.

3np• 4 years ago

Which ad-blocker(s) would you recommend for iOS?

elboru• 4 years ago

Here in Mexico we had a similar scam that ran for months, if not years. There was this site (or sites) pretending to be an official government’s passports website. It was the first link in the search result for “pasaporte mexicano”. I personally know people who fell for it, the page would ask for bank deposits to get your Mexican passport.

The page looked legit, it even had https and the url name looked fine, the only thing giving it away was that it missed the official .gob.mx domain at the end, but regular people don’t Pay attention to that. It was the first result link! And they didn’t remove it for months, amazing.

Edit: I thought that scam was removed already, but no! It’s still there, the first three links (the only visible ones on mobile) are scam websites.

https://ibb.co/PMHCQ31

ocdtrekkie4• 4 years ago

My favorite search engine ad scam test query is "mapquest". It almost always returns sites that force you to install a malicious browser extension via the Chrome Web Store.

Reason why: Senior citizens go to MapQuest for directions because it's the term they associate with getting directions on the Internet.

Scaless• 4 years ago

It is not just crypto, it has been happening in gaming communities for a long time. Sometimes it's just fishing for more of their own page views, other times it it more malicious such as offering a trojaned game client that will steal your login details [0]. It is very cheap and easy to do because the communities are relatively small.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/95zk30/psa_first...

dekhn4• 4 years ago

When sundar took over he changed some policies within google to reduce previous commitments to a high quality internet, with the goal of increased growth. This includes a mixing of ads and search results in a way that maximizes revenue as well as many other dark patterns. I believe that Google concluded that it was going to lose relevance and market share if they didn't do this. Note also that the vast majority of google revenue in ads comes from mobile video ads, not search results these days.

colordrops• 4 years ago

They will lose relevance and eventually market share for doing these things. It almost seems inevitable that companies eventually degrade in quality and die or become shadows of their former selves due to compromises brought about by the endless growth expected by investors.

cm2012• 4 years ago

The bit about mobile video revenue is not true.

"Today, Google parent Alphabet Inc. reported a record $65.1 billion in revenue during the third quarter of 2021, with the company’s advertising business increasing 43.2% to $53.1 billion. Quarterly search advertising made up the bulk of revenue with $37.9 billion in the third quarter, rising from $26.3 billion during the same period in 2020. YouTube ads accounted for another $7.2 billion—up from $5 billion in Q3 2020—and Google’s ad network revenue brought in $7.9 billion."

dekhn4• 4 years ago

I used to work there and I think my statement is technically correct, regardless of what the breakdown in the earnings say.

Oh, sorry- I should have said "profit", not "revenue".

bryanrasmussen• 4 years ago

Note also that the vast majority of google revenue in ads comes from mobile video ads, not search results these days.

So theoretically in a few years Google might decide to kill their search product and nobody will really come in and make another one because after all the years of bad search results from Google everyone will naturally conclude that search on the internet just doesn't work.

That's right, I'm so paranoid I think that song is about me.

cutenewt• 4 years ago

When sundar took over he changed some policies within google to reduce previous commitments to a high quality internet, with the goal of increased growth.

Do you have more details for this?

ocdtrekkie4• 4 years ago

Sundar never "took over" in anything but a job title sense. Larry and Sergey continue to hold supermajority voting power over the company's board. The business operates the way Larry and Sergey want it to.

I think people want an excuse to justify their previous positive outlooks on Larry and Sergey by claiming something has changed. But Larry and Sergey still sit in charge of an extremely harmful company under investigation for numerous types of illegal and inappropriate conduct. Both had inappropriate relationships with subordinates that should've gotten them both fired, and both of them have yachts and/or islands that are worth more than some small countries.

dekhn4• 4 years ago

Larry and Sergey have absolutely zero involvement in Google's daily activities (I don't think Sergey even comes around X any more, but might still hang around research once in a while).

Larry handed sundar effective control over Google when he promoted himself to Alphabet. Even 10 years ago, Larry lost interest in search (it was really sad for the search folks when they realized that). Larry picked sundar because sundar is a robot that makes money, and larry needs that money for his longterm mission.

jsnell2• 4 years ago

The screenshot text does not say at all what the author of the tweet claims it does (and what's in the HN title). Nowhere in the text does it actually talk about "above" and "sidebar", that is just an interpretation that the author made up about what "buying a better position in the search results" would mean. Given the context of the times, it was clearly not a statement about layout but about actually reordering the "organic" search results based on payments and without marking those boosted results as ads.

josefresco2• 4 years ago

Given the context of the times, it was clearly not a statement about layout but about actually reordering the "organic" search results based on payments and without marking those boosted results as ads.

It's actually worse. Google didn't just say "our competitors put ads on top of results". They're suggesting/hinting that those competitors accept payment for placement when in fact that wasn't happening, their competitors like Bing (MSN then) were doing what Google is doing now - merely placing ads above the results, not selling placement.

The end result is that they're all now selling placement. The visual difference between ads and organic results is almost non-existent.

glenstein13• 4 years ago

It's actually worse.

Well hold on. We can go ahead and talk about how different this Google statement is from their ethos in the present day. But the framing of this being about ad placement was incorrect, and that has nothing to do with anything.

They're suggesting/hinting that those competitors accept payment for placement when in fact that wasn't happening

It wasn't? This strikes me as yet another completely out of left field reaction. I mean, is there a consensus that that's obviously false? A source? Where is this "in fact that wasn't happening" coming from? Was there a big media cycle where there was a deep dive investigation into this that settled the question, that everyone remembers except me? There's a whole field of actors who at one time were relevant: Jeeves, Lycos, Altavista, Infoseek, Dogpile, Hotbot, Webcrawler, etc. And they went through any number of permutations of design, ownership, were sold and reacquired and it stands to reason that at some point some versions of these did things that Google is suggesting.

At a minimum it seems prima facie plausible that competitors entertained this.

ddalex• 4 years ago

suggesting/hinting that those competitors accept payment for placement when in fact that wasn't happening

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yahoo-adopting-paid-incl...

glenstein13• 4 years ago

Exactly. And, remarkably, so far this is not registering for anybody else in this thread. It is about not placing ads within search results, and making clear that ads, wherever they are, are different from search.

On a very vague, thematic level, this kind of grandstanding in Google's statement does seem to be in some sort of conflict with Google's approach to ad placement in 2022, because ads do very much seem similar to search results, but it has nothing to do with "ads above search results" or ads in the sidebar.

yojo2• 4 years ago

Not sure I agree. I worked in AdWords support when the decision was made to move the top 1-3 ads above the search results.

There was a lot of internal chatter about whether this was compromising the integrity of the results. The decision was made to make the ad unit super obviously distinct from organic content, and to make a high quality threshold for getting promoted to that position - many pages would still be served with ads on the right of results but not above.

Even still we were very worried about the perception that the organic results were for sale. I would definitely believe that at one point in time the company was prepared to draw a line in the sand around “no ads above organic results.”

Edit: at launch the top ads looked like this: http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3892/2343/1600/google_adw...

edge17• 4 years ago

I don't find it super obvious at all. I have to actively spend brain energy scrolling to find the first real result

usrusr• 4 years ago

These days I assume that Google does two things at once: place clearly identifiable and directly billable ads, and include "is a known business" in the relevance algorithm blackbox as one of the inputs. One of the many factors and criteria would just happen to be ad spend. There wouldn't be an item "make us more relevant" on the bill, but relevance for a company stopping spending would drop unless some other organic factor happened to compensate.

And I'd take it as a given that if that assumption was true, a large majority of Googlers would not have the faintest idea that this is happening and refute any speculations that it might exist without even a trace of insincerity.

I'm not even saying this intending a "look how evil Google has become!" implication, I actually think that it would likely be a quality decrease, from the users perspective, if they deliberately left that out. From the user's perspective, "Is a business known to us" is likely a valuable relevance improvement, not a quality decrease. But it shows how scarily dominant Google's position can be.

gleb• 4 years ago

Exactly. This was called “paid inclusion“ and was offered by Yahoo, for example.

fellowniusmonk2• 4 years ago

Yeah, if memory serves the overture ad network (which powered yahoo ad results before yahoo bought them) had better roi for a short time period for that very reason.

jancsika2• 4 years ago

What an apologia!

I just typed "new car" in Google. Literally the only results I can see are ads. Ads where the presentation and content is identical to the organic search results, save for the tiny word "Ad" in the title. Ads where the link reliably navigates to the page that has the content summarized by Google in their search result ad. Moreover, the UI for me clicking a foo.com link from a Google ad is identical to me clicking an organic foo.com link. Finally, the UX is improved if I click an ad because I don't have to scroll.

So it's not even a "above" vs. "sidebar" situation. The ads are the only results that show up without scrolling. Arguing that this isn't "buying a better position in the search results" is the extreme-skiing of pedantry.

glenstein13• 4 years ago

Like many other comments here, I think this is continuing to miss the point.

Google certainly does sell ads above search today. And it certainly is irritating and it definitely is reflective of Google's following their financial interests at the cost of user experience. Google's expressed ethos in the statement certainly does seem at variance with their design choices and ad placement in the present day.

We can talk all day about their pivot away from don't be evil.

But tweet, the title, the framing, and the thing everybody are talking about, ads placed above search, has nothing to do with anything. The statement doesn't mention that, and these gotcha charges premised on something that was never said.

Google is in many important respects a bad actor that needs to be criticized, but that truth shouldn't be a blank check to misinterpret them and dismiss corrections as pedantry.

mikepurvis• 4 years ago

Might me a locale thing? For me (southwestern Ontario), a "new car" SERP shows a Google Maps block at the top with non-ad links to dealerships, but after that are some pretty reasonable organic results for pages like Edmunds, caranddriver.com, etc.

The organic results even include an optional transparency pop up (click the ...) that explains in more detail the factors that went into showing the result.

EDIT: Oh wait, never mind. On desktop, the ads are loaded in from a separate domain that my router blocks. On mobile, I see several at the top of the page. Fail.

zamadatix• 4 years ago

"Not scrolling" isn't a useful metric, you can make it say whatever you want it to say. On my small screen phone I see 1 result entry without scrolling, on my large screen desktop I see all 10 result entries. If I feel one way about the issue I can grab my phone and claim "I see nothing but ads without scrolling!" even if it's a single ad while if I feel another way I can go to my desktop and claim "the vast majority of results shown on screen after searching aren't ads" even if there are 3.

The former is a firey way to say "an ad is shown at the top" and the latter a dismissive way to distract from how many ads there are, neither actually talks to the state of the number of ads despite what their wording implies.

jsnell2• 4 years ago

This isn't nitpicking about a minor detail, the fabricated claim is the entire core of the submission and the only reason it is getting this HN engagement. Imagine that they'd written a tweet saying "I think Google should not show ads above the search results" or "there should be fewer ads", and not added the screenshot. Do you think that would be near the top of the frontpage? I don't.

If the author's point is that the "Ad" text is not distinct enough and conflicts with the doc's view that ads need to be clearly marked, why not actually say that? Because what is distinct enough is just a matter of opinion. So instead the author has taken something that's not a matter of opinion but a clear fact ("there are ads above the search results") and just made up the part about the doc critiquing this. It's genius, because everyone loves a good story of corporate hypocrisy. But it's also not true. Why exactly are we looking to reward dishonest clickbait?

jeffbee2• 4 years ago

Exactly what information were you hoping to glean from a search like "new car"? There are searches that are too insipid to be considered as part of search quality signals.

There is a corresponding meme where people complain about the quality of the results for "best pants" where they have to amend it to "best pants reddit". Well, I have news for you: "best pants" is not a search that can be usefully answered. There is no such thing as "best pants".

fellowniusmonk2• 4 years ago

Google Serps definitely tested not having inline ads at different stages, I don't remember if is was ever solely sidebar ads, I think it was keyword dependent going back pretty far.

I've got three wayback machine links below and the nostradomous one eschewed inline ads in 2002 so I think the experience was somewhat dependent on what keywords you were searching.

But going back to 2000 (when scraping DMOZ was still how everyone seeded quality), you can see that "inline ads" above organic results were a relatively early thing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20021002224152/http://www.google...

https://web.archive.org/web/20001205201000/http://www.google...

https://web.archive.org/web/20021105030346/http://www.google...

Looked through old posts from the google dance days on webmasterworld, I couldn't see any discussion of ads repositioned from the sidebar to inline, so yeah, I think inline placement was around a long time, certainly by the time this google blog post was first published.

hn_throwaway_992• 4 years ago

Glad to see this up in the comments. This is why I hate so many internet discussions, in that they are deliberately made in bad faith, even when the general topic under discussion is valid.

It's quite clear to anyone who has used Google over the past decade that:

1. When you search for anything remotely commercial, your first page is essentially all ads, especially on mobile. It used to be possible that, if you were a site but had the top spot in Google for a commercial term, you had a great opportunity. That is no longer the case now, in that you are forced to pay "the Google tax", because there will be 4-5 ads above your primary search position if you don't pay for an ad.

2. Over time Google has made the distinction between organic results and ads much less clear. All you get now is teeny bolded "Ad" text in the upper left corner, everything else looks the same.

These are valid criticisms. Saying "Google critiqued the practice of displaying ads above search results" is simply not true based on the poster's own linked screenshot.

JeremyNT• 4 years ago

You may be correct, but I don't think the "letter of the law" is a particularly useful standard to judge Google by. So you can't pay to have your site ranked higher? Who even cares now? At this point you can pay Google to deploy dark patterns that trick people into clicking on ads thinking that they're actually organic results. In a sense that is even better than a higher page rating...

brimble8• 4 years ago

I just looked at it and your post doesn't seem related at all. The post is pointing out that Google says they don't sell search result positioning, which is equivocation because if you watch any normal person use Google or just look at their search results page they absofuckinglutely do. "Oh but it's not 'in the search area'" yeah OK, so they're both tricking people and are disingenuous about it, like that apparently-Google-employee (Danny Sullivan) who shames themselves by pathetically defending it in the Twitter thread. That's not better.

colmvp• 4 years ago

I can't imagine navigating the web without an ad-blocker.

monkeybutton• 4 years ago

There's some interesting images of the evolution of what ads looked like in Google's search results over time. Starting with distinct background colours and slowly fading to looking more and more identical to organic results with just a little icon.

wldcordeiro• 4 years ago

It's always felt like something that should be regulated away. Ads should be very distinct not a single tiny text label saying "sponsored" but 100% distinct from any non-ad content.

thefingerer• 4 years ago

I may the only greybeard arund here who remembers (and has the screenshots to prove it), used to be from 2005--2008 when you would open a message in Gmail, all of the sponsored ads would show up over on the right-hand-side of your email message, and would all be related to keywords from the inside of the email.

Making it grotesquely blatant, how very much the Google computers were reading all your email.

At least now they conceal it a little better, by storing your keyword/interests in a giant permanent database, then bringing the advertisements up on other, non-Google pages!

dpark7• 4 years ago

Didn’t they announce that they stopped scanning email for ad purposes? (Presumably because it wasn’t actually very lucrative.)

passivate2• 4 years ago

Is there any user data that passes through Google owned servers that DOESN'T get data mined?

rurp• 4 years ago

Eh, sort of. They released a statement to give that impression but the wording was fairly weasely. They likely stopped using email content for directly targeting ads in Gmail, but there's almost no chance email content isn't being used to target people in other contexts.

marcosdumay• 4 years ago

Yeah, I quite liked the contextual ads and did go to Google many times just to look at the ads, ignoring the rest of the contents (not only for gmail, for search too).

When they started with the permanent database, the ads immediately got useless.

the_biot• 4 years ago

IIRC Google was clear about this even when they launched Gmail: they were doing it so they could read your emails and use that info to add to your ad profile.

I couldn't even *believe* at the time why anyone would sign up for that. Still can't believe it.

reidjs• 4 years ago

"I have nothing to hide"

bmitc2• 4 years ago

Just like I've been actively moving away from Amazon, I've been actively moving away from Google. These companies are leeches on society.

dpark7• 4 years ago

You can certainly hate Google and not support them. I don’t know how you can classify them as “leeches on society”, though. I remember the days before Google, when web search was utter garbage, free email providers gave you 10mb of storage and stuck ads on the bottom of every email you sent, map apps were limited to about 400x300 for some inexplicable reason, and Android didn’t even exist. Google very much seems like a net positive historically.

macilacilove• 4 years ago

I am dpark from 2032. I have absolutely no human rights, and I never need to think about what to buy/watch/read, because Google consolidated all markets. I don't vote anymore because every aspect of life is controlled by G anyway. I have access to a shiny new tech that you don't yet have a name for! Google is still a net positive "historically".

everything you think you know about "history" is misinformation. In 2032 Google AI-generates colorful VR videos of the Real Past and boy, I am telling you, we are much better off now!

Keep Googling, dpark, 2032

bmitc2• 4 years ago

They were useful once upon a time I think, but those days are long and gone in my opinion. And they are leeches. They are the prime example of making money off of people's data (which is at least one instance of their being parasitic). Maybe back in the day this was acceptable because their search and Gmail benefitted users, but I don't see that anymore. For Gmail, I currently use Gmail because it just happened to be the best e-mail 18 years ago, and it's hard to switch. There's very little about it today that makes it the best.

Over the past six years, they've made $755 billion and not a cent paid to people for the use and sell of their data. And all because they provide services like ads above searches and link to shopping websites and Wikipedia, meanwhile selling people's data to whoever? Honestly, it's so hard to use Google as an actual search engine it feels like Google is more like a directory these days. Like, when I have to input a search as:

    "yes" "i" "really" "want" "to" "search" "these" "terms"

something is broken. The only other product of Google that I really use besides their search and Gmail is YouTube, and that's only because it's entrenched. It's pretty adversarial towards, well, everyone except copyright holders.

rightbyte• 4 years ago

Google has turned just 24 years old and is allready a monster since more than a decade. Historical Google was just us being blazed by the promises of the future.

They single handedly lead the assault on our online privacy. Not that no others were trying, but they succeeded.

properparity• 4 years ago

I remember the days before Google, when web search was utter garbage

I remember altavista giving me interesting results from actual personal websites and I could tweak it by being more precise. On google today the top results are pretty much always garbage SEO optimized aggregate nonsense.

ndiddy• 4 years ago

This enables rent-seeking from Google. If you sell a product and don’t buy an ad for it, your competitor can pay Google to put their product on top of the results for anyone searching for your product.

silentguy• 4 years ago

The cost of ad placement depends on the SEO match of the website. It will cost competitor more for the same ad. It's not as blatant.

The ethics of ad is murky. How do you think a search company should make money? Subscription?

zriha• 4 years ago

I would say, this is misleading, as often do Google Ads campaigns, and I follow Google, well, from first day of Google Ads advertising, the position of Google was always the sam regarding ads - there is no way you can buy a position in the search results.

Yeah, there are SEO tactics, but they don't grant you fixed position. And Google Ad, well Search Ad is always different (from day one) than the organic search result.

And even so, Google Ad can't be misleading, because it directly affects the search result for the user, so you have some parameters like Quality score of the ad and the keyword, and yeah, if you try to mislead, they will disapprove your ad.

coding123• 4 years ago

Actual ordering by Google:

- Ads results

- Sites that display Google Ads

- Google's original algorithmic results

tester7562• 4 years ago

to be fair nothing in this post is really weird except

"Every ad on Google is clearly marked and set apart"

I opened Chromium based browser without AdBlock and they actually put "Ad" next to those first result(s).

It is marked as an Ad, but the thing is whether it is "clearly". I'd say not really.

iJohnDoe• 4 years ago

Many companies have to spend big dollars on their trademarked terms or company name to get it listed as the top result only via a paid ad.

Google artificially pushes down those company results to keep forcing them to pay big bucks for the top result only via advertising. Pretty slimy business Google is in these days. Like paying the local thugs to protect your grocery store.

billyhoffman• 4 years ago

The full version of Brin and Page's classic paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" [1], which describes the early architect of Google and is an interested read in its own right, literally has "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives." Highlights include:

-"We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. "

- "We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

- "A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines."

To be clear: the "we" in these quotes are the founders of Google.

[1] https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...

As an aside, I've been reading a bunch of academic papers about early web crawlers and search engines. It's a fun and interesting subject. Mercator [2] (which became Alta Vista) is another early search engine and one of the few that discusses its architecture in detail.

[2] https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-173.pdf

hubraumhugo• 4 years ago

Another interesting paragraph talks about search engine bias:

"Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors.

--------

This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results."

llaolleh• 4 years ago

I remember reading the first paper and my impression is that a lot of the engineering limitations back then no longer apply in 2020+.

aantix• 4 years ago

It'd be interesting to see a breakdown of their add revenue and what portion come from these top level ad results.

My guess is it's a majority of their revenue.

It's such a slimy practice.

tyingq• 4 years ago

Well, and they've gone way beyond 3 or 4 ads on top of the search results if the query terms are particularly valuable.

Try "vegas hotels" or "mortgage rates" as queries on google and see how far you have to scroll down to find something that isn't an ad, ad widget, etc.

brimble8• 4 years ago

So much of it's making companies pay to be at the actual-top, when they're already result 1 or 2 in the natural results and are obviously what the searcher wanted. I go out of my way not to click these but most people I observe do click them, even when the non-ad link is also above the fold. That's a "success" for Google, maybe a "success" for the company's marketing department, a loss for the company in fact, and at best neutral for the searcher.

Then there's tricking (largely) old people into clicking pages they didn't want, thinking it was a search result. Sometimes even scams.

IMO Google's core business model has become scamming advertisers, helping scammers to fool unsophisticated users, and extorting companies, all heavily driven by their inline ads move. I consider them contemptible for continuing it for years when they have to know that's the case, and likely have all along.

I hate seeing the same on DDG—and they seem to be getting worse. It must be super effective, but of course tricking people is effective. It's also very, very wrong.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 4 years ago

Bait and switch. "Look at our more transparent search engine in the academic realm." Gotcha. Look again. Google is not an unbiased search engine. Its ~100% funded by advertising.

Google collects more data about users than it does about the topics that users want to search, all for the ultimate purpose of selling advertising services, and often under the guise of a parallel construction with respect to the purpose of such collection, e.g., "to improve user experience".

abandonliberty• 4 years ago

Not in 1998

freediver• 4 years ago

"Canceling" someone for what they said/claimed in the past is a double-edged sword.

ninkendo• 4 years ago

Nobody brought up “canceling” anything, I’m not sure why your comment is relevant.

frabjoused• 4 years ago

It's frustrating that there's no date associated with this, at least without digging. Time is very important in evaluating something like this and the tweet doesn't bother to state it.

ShaneMcGowan• 4 years ago

This headline is misleading, the image in this tweet says you can't buy better search placement. Ads shown at Google are labelled as ads, the person is not buying a better search result placement. I do say this ignoring the fact that Google's labelling of ads has been getting more and more subtle over time but that is a separate unrelated issue. This seems to be another attempt of generating hype around "google bad"

jb1991• 4 years ago

It was a different time. Google's motto was also, "don't be evil" which they retracted years later. It's a different era now.

AtNightWeCode• 4 years ago

This is fake, or the person is very not aware of how Google search was intended to work in the first place. The whole USP of Google search was to index ads in the same way as other content and display it in the search results. It has always been more about target practice where the “ads” are placed.

dannysullivan• 4 years ago

What was tweeted isn't what the page says. I work for Google Search. That's about our Honest Results policy, which means we don't allow people to buy better rankings in non-paid Search results: https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/

Like many newspapers separate ads and editorial, Google has a strict separation between our Ads departments and our Search departments -- and our results. Buying ads will not gain you any better ability to rank in the non-paid Search results. Nor will it get you any special support.

That's what the page explains. It never says we don't have ads that show at the top of the page and, in fact, acknowledges that we do: "While advertisers can pay more to be displayed higher in the advertising area." Nor is it true that at the time, we only had ads that appeared on the right-side of the page. Google's first ads appeared at the top of the page way back in 1999.

In addition, we continue to keep ads separated from Search and labeled so they can be identified.

I totally get that some people would like to see fewer ads. I don't work on the Ad side of Google, but I know that feedback has been heard.

NelsonMinar• 4 years ago

Thank you for correcting this Danny.

tofuahdude• 4 years ago

Google has a long history of making their ad placements look more like their search placements.

The ads used to be a clearly yellow block. Then it became more and more faded yellow-to-white. Today, the ads have literally the exact same CSS, except that they do say "Ad" at the start, the legally mandated minimum disclosure.

How do you reconcile this?

To me, "honest" is already dishonest, in that Google deliberately tries to make ads vs search results visually ambiguous and thus the ads at the top are barely different from paid search placement.

sullivandanny• 4 years ago

The Honest Results policy is that we're not going to allow advertisers or partners or any one with a relationship to Google to have an advantage in our unpaid search results.

As for ad labeling, I don't work on the ad side. I work on the Search side. My understanding from those on the ad side is that the labels are visible and do work. And ads are always labeled.

runnerup2• 4 years ago

I totally get that some people would like to see fewer ads.

I'd like to be very clear: On the google Search property, it's less about the number of ads, and more about "ads look very, very, very similar to the actual search results". Therefore, selling ads above the results is becoming very, very close to "selling search results". In fact for many of your customers, that is already a distinction without a difference. If you want to be taken seriously on this it's best to respond to a steel-man of the public's argument, even if the actual line of argument from the public is somewhat weakly presented. After all, you are the professional in public communication, we are the amateurs.

Most readers on HN are already well aware of the narrow distinction between "selling search results" and "selling ads above search results that (to many users) look exactly like search results". Some people are here trying to bring this issue to the forefront of discourse in order to help Google take action to strengthen their Search property.

It's hard to take your word as an official "PR Liaison for Search" word at face value on this when it lacks sufficiently rigorous introspection. The primary revenue-generating division for a $2 trillion company should be able to afford real introspection!

nemacol• 4 years ago

I wonder if there is something like “The Peter Principle” for businesses.

everyone is promoted to their level of incompetence

Where the business sees some success and grows until they lose the thing that everyone liked about them to begin with

Business outgrows their market or something.

Blizzard stops producing highly polished experiences for money.

Googles search results are degraded and littered with ads for money.

Microsoft shifts from software to consumer data collection and now my servers all have Xbox services and a touch UI for some stupid reason (sorry, for money).

ocdtrekkie4• 4 years ago

"Either you die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

It applies to politicians and businesses alike.

hn_throwaway_992• 4 years ago

While I'm glad to see the comments pointing out that, no, the tweet's linked screenshot did NOT say anything about displaying ads "above search results", I do think this highlights the need for better regulation around having more visual distinction between ads and organic results. And this doesn't just go for Google, should also go for things like Amazon and Instagram influencer paid posts.

From a response tweet:

To be fair, the approach taken by Google (and most search engines) abides by the rules as set down by folks like the Advertising Standards Authority which let "Ad" work as a get out of jail free card regardless of context or visuals.

At the very least I think there should be a requirement of a different color background, along what Google used to have in their "Sponsored Links" section at the top of results.

GeekyBear3• 4 years ago

Am I the only person who remembers Google criticizing their competitors for mixing search results and ads in the same list at all?

This was back when Google still placed text only ads off to the side of the results page in a blue box to make them even more distinctly separated from the search results.

jeffbee2• 4 years ago

At the time, Google's competitor Yahoo!/Overture were 100% pay-for-placement. There was no such thing as organic results.

GeekyBear3• 4 years ago

The company I remember them criticizing was Alta Vista, which did include organic search results intermixed with ads at the time.

Google may be big with the cyber-cognescenti, but AltaVista is still reaching a lot more users. While AltaVista reaches 17.7% of Web users, Google gets just 7%, according to the latest Media Metrix numbers.

https://www.forbes.com/2000/10/20/1020alta.html?sh=68521b3e7...

They weren't bought by Overture until 2003.

phkahler• 4 years ago

A few weeks ago I was looking for Free Software (as in freedom) so I searched for GPL <category> and the top 4 results were ads for commercial software in the category. I was going to provide a link here to such result with a hahahaha but Google isn't behaving that way now...

ChildOfChaos• 4 years ago

This is standard practice though in pretty much everything.

A new upstart criticises the way it is being done, comes in and changes things, then takes over and then slowly becomes the big guy they were fighting against in the first place.

There is are reason to criticise what is being done because it's not the best for the consumer, but there is a reason it's done that way because it's good for business. So the upstart takes over by building a better product but soon corporate needs become a bigger priority once the company reaches scale, so it's prioties change.

bagacrap• 4 years ago

title (and Twitter post) highly editorialized. Google said nothing about layout of ads on page, but about being "clearly marked" and "set apart" from search results. It's subjective what is "clear" but I don't see why the only way for something to be clear is delta X.

pokoleo• 4 years ago

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -Sinclair

julienchastang• 4 years ago

Now I am seeing some Google search results that are nothing but ads on the first page. I recently switched to DuckDuckGo and so far I have been entirely happy with it. I recommend everyone give it a try.

bitwize• 4 years ago

Yes, and EA was once ideologically opposed to copy protection; today they are the DRM kings.

Welcome to capitalism. The pursuit of profit ruins everything.

scotty79• 4 years ago

DuckDuckGo has a nice browser fir android that uses their search engine as default one.

Google critiqued the practice of displaying ads above search results

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