Ads team begging for worse search results so that ads team can hit their goals

https://twitter.com/pdrmnvd/status/1707395736458207430

by vinnyglennon • 3 years ago

178 38 3 years ago

The email ends with "Just to be clear, the reason I haven't pushed back on a recall is that I don't want the message to be" and doesn't have the "Redacted" stamp. Bizarre.

thehours• 3 years ago

I assumed he edited his email to move that statement earlier and forgot to delete that piece on the end before sending.

rmellow• 3 years ago

Wisdom imparted in an accounting class in my undergrad, in the context of "what's the line I can't cross":

"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.

hutzlibu• 3 years ago

"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?

xordon• 3 years ago

The front page test is a policy I've seen, ie: if this was on the front page of the newspaper (or hacker news) would it be positive or negative?

satori99• 3 years ago

You can talk about your nefarious strategy openly if it is with a single person at a time.

Aeolun2• 3 years ago

Both. If you need to say something that can’t be printed, discuss it in person.

godelski• 3 years ago

So is it to have your strategy guided by general accepted ethics

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.

conductr• 3 years ago

Is this unethical though? Maybe it’s just not clear to me. I feel like we collectively view it negatively, but that’s also built on the premise that we search users consume a free utility that Google provides to us and is now some ethical requirement for them to maintain. They have no ethical obligation to do that.

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

TT2048• 3 years ago

User value and company revenue, in general, form a [pareto frontier](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_front). The company can pick an "angle" (trade off some user value for more profits and vice-versa) but both extremes are bad in the long term. They need to strike a balance.

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_.

oldtownroad• 3 years ago

The title doesn’t match the content of the email. The email isn’t “begging for worse search results” rather they’re begging for more searches in the context of recent (at the time) Google Chrome changes that had reduced search volume.

fshbbdssbbgdd3• 3 years ago

In one part of the email, Jerry asks “Are there other ranking tweaks we can push out very quickly?”

It’s not clear what exactly that means, but search ranking seems more likely than a Chrome UI change.

delroth2• 3 years ago

In context it's pretty obvious this is talking about omnibox suggestion rankings (which is also what changed and had the claimed "unwanted" impact), not search rankings.

Aeolun2• 3 years ago

Maybe people don’t need to search so much?

ars• 3 years ago

Agreed, I've flagged it, so we can hopefully get a new title.

The document actually requests a change in Chrome to make the search box more prominent, it's not about search results at all!

dredmorbius• 3 years ago

Email mods at hn@ycombinator.com with your concern, and any potentially better / more accurate titles.

HN prefers titles that come from the article or submission itself. I'd suggest either tweet or email.

blindriver• 3 years ago

When I worked at a large well-known internet company, one of the teams rolled back a feature because it made the site easier to use, which resulted in less accidental ad clicks. And it was common to stuff more ads on pages if revenue was looking short for the quarter. This is going back almost 20 years ago now.

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.

thisisthenewme• 3 years ago

So much missing context here, at least for me.

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.

jsnell• 3 years ago

The context is missing because the link is to somebody posting a screenshot of one page of a pdf of a scan of a printed email thread on Twitter. The full email thread was discussed extensively yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467

belval2• 3 years ago

If you are going to be that brazen about it, perhaps having a quick meeting instead of just laying everything out in an email like that is the better approach.

Best approach would be to not do it at all but I guess that's too much to ask.

Enginerrrd• 3 years ago

Sorry but there is something really appalling about what you are saying. You are basically saying "if you're going to do something you think is illegal, make sure not to leave a paper trail so it can be proved in court." You're basically advising people not to get caught rather than to not do the bad thing. What is wrong with your world view that leads you to jump to that sentiment?

belval2• 3 years ago

Did you miss the "Best approach would be not to do it at all"?

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.

choppaface• 3 years ago

Exactly. Google even coaches their employees against leaving a paper trail like this. That’s why the email is pretty remarkable: if this one leaked imagine how brazen the behind-closed-doors stuff is.

totetsu• 3 years ago

This was discussed here the other day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467

tomlockwood• 3 years ago

Tooting my own horn but:

"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...

johnea• 3 years ago

He said... in the twitverse...

asperous• 3 years ago

Just to add another perspective, isn't sales like this at any large company? Sales is pushed hard on quotas/targets and so look for any way possible to hit those. In other words were these requests taken seriously by the product managers and leadership?

wilg• 3 years ago

What a difficult to parse email!

ahmedfromtunis• 3 years ago

Can someone please show me where in the email "worse search results" are referenced? I read it 3 times and still unable to get where they were mentioned!

dools• 3 years ago

@pdrmnvd quote tweets his own 2023 tweet about Google "filtering b2b emails", saying he "nailed it", with a screenshot of an email about increasing search volume in 2019 ...

How is this on the front page of HN? Flagged.

readthenotes1• 3 years ago

Isn't ads well-known for mucking search and affinity lists?

Did the tweeter just say he fucking nailed predicting the sun would rise?

dang• 3 years ago

This was discussed in another thread within the last week. I can't find it now. Anyone?

Edit: here it is – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467. Thanks to the user who emailed!

justinclift• 3 years ago

Ugh. That Twitter page is only the first page of the much longer thread:

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.

Ads team begging for worse search results so that ads team can hit their goals

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