> You’d require that the monopoly offer a straightforward full-text-based document retrieval API that implements several different ranking algorithms and bills per search. You’d forbid it from engaging in any advertising businesses. Then you’d free up people to build consumer-facing search interfaces and compete to sell advertising on them.
What does selling ads look like if search is not a monopoly? As an advertiser in the new world, I'd have to go around and buy ads on all the new search front-ends. I probably want to pay them proportionally to how much traffic they get (well, conversions, but let's say traffic). If there's a small number of large front-ends then maybe I go to each of them directly, but if there's a long tail of front-ends then probably there'd be a search middleman who the various front-ends contract with... I guess there's still Google Search, and Google AdSense, but now AdSense also sells ads on other front-ends, and Google Search works with other brokers besides AdSense?
If Google had competition they would have to lower their prices and provide better quality ads and ad tracking.
Click fraud is pretty real and I’ve had contacts say it’s 30-50% of actual ad revenue. Currently, this is just “factored in” but how neat would it be if this could be prevented. Google has no incentive to fix this as click fraud is profitable for them.
For ad auditing, Google frequently shows ads to people outside my geolocation and doesn’t audit how they do this. Would be nice to fix this as it’s a decent number of botched customer interactions.
Finally, pricing could be so much lower. I’ve advertised for low frequency terms where the minimum bid is $1 even though there’s only 1 or zero current advertisers. So the “auction” is against a floor set by google, not the market.
If no one else is buying a keyword, the minimum should be very low and climb as multiple ad buyers drive the price up. This is probably the most annoying as it would save businesses so much money.
One of Google's greatest strength was in the pre 2010 period was they were the only advertising sources that sold high quality traffic in massive volume and fraud was almost a non-issue. Go back to 2007 and try to run an ad campaign anywhere else online and it was a nightmare.
Things have changed. Google repeatedly has modified the delivery settings of their ads for active campaigns, just as you complain about the geolocation issue. My guess is that if someone did a proper investigation Google would have to back pay advertisers many billions of dollars. This is fraud anyway you cut it. They have done the same thing with mobile ads. You disable the mobile app inventory and they modify the UI and re-enable it.
> I’ve advertised for low frequency terms where the minimum bid is $1 even though there’s only 1 or zero current advertisers. So the “auction” is against a floor set by google, not the market.
Showing excessive ads wastes users' attention and teaches them not to pay attention to other higher value ads.
A price floor seems like a very reasonable way to handle this?
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
First, it’s funny that you think Google cares about wasting user attention. Have you seen the search interface.
Second, when there’s a single ad shown and the floor is $1 or $2 or $3 even that makes no sense. Having no bidders with a floor and a single ad vs 2 or 3 is done for a single reason- revenue. Any customer benefit from missed ads is wiped out by wasted costs. It’s rent seeking because Google has a search monopoly.
If there were no reserve price there would be eight ads on every single search no matter how abstruse the search and irrelevant the ads were to it. Especially since currently only a small percent of searches have ads, Google could actually make more money that way, but everyone wound find it really annoying.
They wouldn't even necessarily make more money that way, after user learning effects, if people found it annoying enough that they would use Google less or get in the habit of quickly scrolling past the ads.
> when there’s a single ad shown and the floor is $1 or $2 or $3 even that makes no sense. Having no bidders with a floor and a single ad vs 2 or 3 is done for a single reason- revenue. Any customer benefit from missed ads is wiped out by wasted costs. It’s rent seeking because Google has a search monopoly.
I'm not sure I understand what your objection is. It sounds like you're saying that you'd like Google to remove price floors and show many more ads? Is that right?
Every single search I run has ads. I’m not sure how Google can run more.
But what I’m saying is that if there’s only a single ad and they are paying $3 because google set that limit, they could lower that to what the market will bear and start at .05 or something.
If they are worried about ad space they can limit to 1-2 ads and let people bid on them. They already do this as there’s not an infinite scroll of ads, they only show 1-3 and then more on the next page. Setting floors on ads doesn’t reduce the number of ads I see, it just makes more money for Google.
* How far around the world is it at the longitude of NYC
* wbz coverage map
* wbur coverage map
* wbz frequency
* radio station coverage area
* us radio station map
* time zones
* telegraph
* atlas of the historical geography of the united states
* isochrone
* travel time from dc to nyc historically
* nyc longitude and latitude
* philly longitude and latitude
* dc longitude and latitude
* wikipedia time zones
* wikipedia solar time
* fivethirtyeight
* who won the debate
Going back and searching these again, only "atlas of the historical geography of the united states" showed ads.
> I’m saying is that if there’s only a single ad and they are paying $3 because google set that limit, they could lower that to what the market will bear and start at .05 or something.
If they did that, then every query would have an ad at the top, generally a pretty irrelevant one. People would learn to ignore the ads. This would then make ads on searches like "buy insurance" much less valuable.
> Setting floors on ads doesn’t reduce the number of ads I see
Huh? Of course it does. If you set a floor, some bids are going to be below the floor. For some queries, in my experience a large majority, all bids are going to be below the floor and you see no ads.
> This is only possible as they are a monopoly.
This has nothing to do with whether Google is or isn't a monopoly. Even a very small search engine would make this kind of tradeoff, choosing not to annoy users with low value ads.
Similarly, if you try these searches on Bing or DDG (which both show ads from Microsoft Ads) you will see they are using the same approach, with many ads on highly commercial queries and no ads on most queries. They even published a paper about it: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
They did this with the gas company where I live. Instead of buying gas from the gas company you contract with any number of 3rd parties and they turn around and pay the gas company to deliver it.
It's not clear how this is better. The gas company still exists and takes the bulk of my payment. The 3rd parties tack on their service fee. And they basically all run a bait and switch where you sign a contract for a fix term and then the price gets jacked up if you forget to sign a new one.
It's the worst of both worlds. The gas company still has a delivery monopoly. And now we've got a bunch of scummy 3rd parties running what are basically scams.
Third parties providing a nicely packaged solution to schedule ads on multiple networks would be created a short moment after the split starts. On the more technical side, common APIs would be created.
It's basically the case of skyscanner, kayak, etc. and the air travel companies.
Is this actually the most likely scenario though? I agree it's hard to compete and have a search service completely indexing the entire internet. Is breaking up the front end the most likely?
> As an advertiser in the new world, I'd have to go around and buy ads on all the new search front-ends.
And site operators presumably have to deal with many more ad platforms, which is likely to be a complication for them. Theres a certain logic to the way it works now, even if it is (arguably) anti-competitive and undesirable.
What does selling ads look like if search is not a monopoly? As an advertiser in the new world, I'd have to go around and buy ads on all the new search front-ends. I probably want to pay them proportionally to how much traffic they get (well, conversions, but let's say traffic). If there's a small number of large front-ends then maybe I go to each of them directly, but if there's a long tail of front-ends then probably there'd be a search middleman who the various front-ends contract with... I guess there's still Google Search, and Google AdSense, but now AdSense also sells ads on other front-ends, and Google Search works with other brokers besides AdSense?