Remember when google was good and gave you "search results" as best it could instead of suggestions of things it thinks you might want? In those days the search results had a white background and appeared directly below the query input. The ads were over there on the right margin with a different background and clearly identified as ads.
They used to brag about how good they were at giving you the address of something specific you were searching for with an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.
Linux nerds used to /like/ them. No really.
Nowadays they're fully compromised by both money and politics and make the old days of microsoft look good.
Google search is unbelievable frustrating these days. And yeah the free speech concerns are very real. There needs to be a level of critical mass for any company that deals in communications where they are held to the same standards as the government. If >25% of the population uses your company for some form of communication censorship should be prohibited but of course we seem to be rapidly moving in a vastly different direction.
> If >25% of the population uses your company for some form of communication censorship should be prohibited
IRL, that kind of regulations exist all over the world but they don't tend to mandate no censorship, instead they mandate censorship in the name of national security.
Unfortunately, the national security aspect is not exactly baseless. It all started with the Arab Spring, when the more authoritarian countries realised that they don't have control over the communications as they used to and the less authoritarian countries realised that foreign powers can curate the content their population sees(through fake accounts or owning the platform).
Anyway, IMHO censorship should never be an option and to deal with issues of security we just need openness. That is, platforms with significant reach should be mandated to have open algorithm and verifiable data which can be investigated against faul play. For example, 3rd parties should be able to look into the recommendations and moderation actions of YouTube.
This sort of shallow minded statement always boils down to “but we should still censor the stuff I don’t like and of course I assume everyone agrees with me”
Sorry but it’s obvious you’ve never worked on this issue. It’s not easy.
It's far from shallow minded. In Germany that's actually how the law is interpreted.
The theory is that under an indirect third party effect free speech becomes effectively limited, if large companies censor people. As a result they can be compelled not to do so within reason. For example, if a social media platform bans you, you can sue them and they have to show that they have sufficient reason and that they gave you opportunity to appeal etc. If they fail, they have to unban you.
The german term you want to look for is "mittelbare Drittwirkung". On this particular topic there is an interesting case from the Bundesgerichtshof about facebook accounts that were banned. German press release: https://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi-bin/rechtsprechung/do...
I find interesting that you’ve inserted that in, when they bring in the idea that these companies should actually be held accountable under the 1st Amendment. Probably one of if not the strongest codification of our right to freedom of speech in history.
I’m not quite convinced you’ve worked on this issue before yourself. What is the solution you’ve been working on?
Sorry for rolling my eyes a bit at this “what’s your solution?” Playground challenge.
Anyone who has worked at f/m/a/g has worked on global application of local ideals and the user base each being enraged you don’t apply their local ideals globally.
“Obviously the first amendment” is a great example of this.
Don’t be sorry, I was already laughing at your “it’s obvious you’ve never worked on this issue” comment far before this, because I’m still not convinced you’re any more knowledgeable in this field.
I’m well aware people get upset when companies outside of their culture don’t follow said culture to a tee. However, we are talking of a US company censoring US presidential candidates in a way directly contradictory to the laws they abide by. This is local ideals being applied to a local business, so excuse me if I’m a little less than sympathetic to the plight of Google dealing with an “enraged” foreign user base when they can’t even please a local one.
Additionally, if your account is supposedly no longer active, due to an anti-censorship protest, why are you replying? And in a way that tries to sideline the problem of mass censorship by moving the problem to “but the people complain otherwise, they want this”?
Let me ask you. Why are you so confrontational about this. Why are you trying to do a bunch of “oh gotcha” style comments that sound sorta silly.
I’ve worked in this in search quality and android. At a leadership level. I don’t anymore. That’s all.
We don’t just think “hey the first amendment!” We think it terms of practical utility return for users and the company. While attempting to accommodate hyper fluid and often incoherent local requirements. That’s it. It’s not a grand conspiracy.
> If >25% of the population uses your company for some form of communication censorship should be prohibited
Looking forward to the unlimited hardcore porn era on daytime TV.
(obviously you're going to reply "well that should still be censored, it's just that people should be allowed to say the fourteen racist words and not the seven dirty words, because those are different categories of thing that I refuse to examine")
What's wrong with hardcore porn on daytime TV? I mean I wouldn't watch that channel (but I don't watch TV anyway), but some people maybe would. Right now they can open porn website any time of the day, so what's the difference? Actually, is porn even really disallowed on TV in your country, or just nobody wants it?
I just laugh at the idea because it's getting us closer to full on Idiocracy where we all just dwell in our little state-owned cubicle apartments and every channel is porno or monster trucks
Would it be reasonable to restrict non-language information differently from language information? Where language information is any version of language - spoken language, written language, video depictions of written language, sung language, etc.
IMO most of the problem with restricting language information is that it can stop ideas from spreading, which is functionally very limiting for democracy from
a distributed computational perspective.
Does the same problem apply to non-language information? Especially for things other than real events (e.g. police actions, a protest, etc).
It seems possibly much easier to draw the line within e.g. video depictions than it is within language information.
So libertarians sometimes forget that a democracy is the will of the people. Now this can be ignored some, but when you push the "You can do whatever you want whenever you want because freedom" eventually you'll find that the average voter has happily decided to implement authoritarianism and the libertarian type is now the first with their back against the wall.
There is no such thing as absolute freedom, everything is a choice of how much authority one submits to and allows to control ones life. I hope it is a reasonable amount, because as it tilts too far one way or the other chaos ensues and death follows.
So, since you failed to actually respond my question and just reply with platitudes, that’s a resounding yes.
And to quickly cover your inaccuracies, because even spending this time is too much:
You described Anarchism. Anarchism doesn’t equal Libertarianism. Anarchists have no morals or base set of laws. Libertarians work from the founding documents of the USA and the basic premise of “don’t hurt others”.
The USA is not and has never been a democracy. We were a republic, that grew into a democratic republic. Thus we are not “the will of the people”. We are “the will of the elected officials chosen by the people”.
> because those are different categories of thing that I refuse to examine
Let me examine them for you:
Freedom of expression is the right to express any opinion. Pornography is not an opinion, and therefore there is no free-speech right to it. Beliefs like "race X is inferior" are opinions, and therefore protected (though threats like "kill all X," and actions like discrimination, are not). The manner in which speech is expressed can be restricted—"your honor, I blew up the Twin Towers to express my belief that the US is the great Satan, it was free speech" won't fly in court. But these restrictions must be neutral to the content of the speech.
There is one additional restriction commonly considered to apply to free expression: the government is allowed to criminalize lying (saying something you know is untrue). Defamation, fraud, false advertising, etc can be regulated.
> The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action". Specifically, the Court struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence.
If I say "politician X deserves to be killed," that's protected speech because I'm expressing an opinion. If I say, "look, politician X is in the room with us, get him!" I am going beyond opinion, and the government can punish me for breaking the law.
> Nowadays they're fully compromised by both money and politics and make the old days of microsoft look good.
The problem is that Big Money entered the Internet... Eternal September just with companies.
I'd say even an entity the size of Google gets dwarfed by the amount of people and money that is out to defeat them. You have everything from scammers looking to find victims for malware, unscrupulous people shilling penis enlargement and other questionably legal/useful/toxic "supplements", to Russian and Chinese propaganda aiming to destabilize our societies, and North Korean and Iranian hackers looking for funds for their nuclear programs.
IMHO the solution is to follow the money and punish bad actors instead of trying to hotfix the effects: get China, NK, Iran and Russia off of the public Internet, sanction Turkey and India until they close down their scam callcenters, and get the domestic helpers of all the criminals (e.g. money mules) arrested. It is completely inexcusable that people like Pierogi of Scammer Payback have to do the job instead of the police tackling all the cybercrime.
Remove the financial incentive for SEO spam and other cybercrime and watch the Internet get better on its own.
Sure. Indian callcenters mostly target English-speaking countries (most notoriously the US, which is where Scammer Payback, Jim Browning and other scambaiters are as well), Turkish callcenters target German-speaking countries. Damages have been estimated to the tune of at least 100 million € a year in 2017 [1], a single gang that did get in front of a court in 2022 was suspected to have made over 120 million € [2]. Others don't just limit themselves to callcenter scams, they have "fake policemen" to physically take cash from victims [3].
> Remember when google was good and gave you "search results" as best it could instead of suggestions of things it thinks you might want? In those days ...
"in those days" - is that they key to this argument though?
Has Google evolved to what the majority want? Ie. "stuff" rather than "information"
Are we, on HN, in an echo chamber? Curious people, on the fringes, still wanting information whilst our "normal" peers are just interested in breaking their previous weekly Amazon delivery record?
Maybe Google are serving their customer base. We're just not it anymore.
I'm not sure I see the connection between Google search integrity and Youtube choosing to or not choosing to host a video from a conspiracy theorist who thinks that "Wi-Fi opens your blood brain barrier" and whose candidacy is propped up by far-right Bannon types. Why bring him up (surprising?) if you don't particularly like him (not surprising).
YouTube refusing to host a video doesn't stop someone putting their content in Vimeo or PeerTube. His right to free expression hasn't been impacted; only his ability to post on YouTube, which is a privilege and not a right.
There is no honest reading of the first amendment that requires a private party to broadcast someone else's message without violating their first amendment rights. The freedom of association is just as vital as the freedom of speech (THEY ARE IN THE SAME AMENDMENT) and anything that compels the speech of a private individual is a violation in several ways of those rights.
If you don't like that the private company has a strong presence in the market because of normal free market process, maybe we should be talking about that Anti-Monopoly thing we used to do.
Youtube takes down HISTORY videos plenty of the time, and I do find that stupid, but that's not an argument for violating their right to choose who to associate with.
Youtube is actively hostile to the creators I watch, but that doesn't mean they should be legally compelled to broadcast any and all content that someone uploads. They are well within their right to control the narrative that exists on their private platform.
This is just like how elon is well within his right to control the narrative on Twitter now, and make it a safe haven for right wing trolls. I don't like that, but you won't see me advocating ending his right to freely run his business. That's authoritarian. Nobody puts a gun to my head to use twitter, so I don't use it.
There are multiple alternative video platforms out there, including small ones started by the edutainment youtubers and there is nothing preventing all the right wing youtubers from starting their own system. Hell, Nebula was literally using a white label private video distribution platform for a long time! All they have to do is sign a check and they can run their own youtube!
Not providing a megaphone to conspiracy theory nutjobs is a good thing, actually. We need a lot more of that, and I choose to give my business to platforms that have those kinds of policies, and not to those that don't. YouTube booting RFK Jr from their platform gives me better feelings about YouTube.
Well it's a good thing Google always has and always will have the correct ideas about who the nutjobs are.
I'm so glad the gatekeepers for the only meaningful platforms where you can get ideas in front of people always have our best interests in mind and wouldn't ever censor ideas that are bad for the bottom line of payment processors.
RFK Jr is a long-time, well-known conspiracy theory whacko. This isn't some questionable edge case, hosting his content is straight up unquestionably providing a megaphone for harmful public health misinformation. The only reason for feeling otherwise about RFK Jr is if you're unfamiliar with him, or are deep in the hole yourself.
Yeah he seems like an idiot. Don't care. We need to protect the ability for people to say crazy and unpopular things or the power will be abused to censor people who aren't crazy, just unpopular. Which is already happening.
Ignaz Semmelweis was persecuted in the medical community for his insane idea that doctors working in maternity wards should wash their hands and he later died in a pysch ward from his mental breakdown over it. If it happened today he would have been banned from YouTube too.
We're not post-science, in 2020 people were ridiculed and banned from social media for saying covid came from a lab and that's a pretty accepted theory now. I'm sick of only hearing popular opinions that are run by as brand-friendly from banks and payment processors. I want to hear from people who say things that aren't popular.
I wasn't familiar with that story, so I read a brief summary. That anecdote mostly predates the modern scientific method, taking place in the 1840s. PNAS, for example, wasn't founded until 1915, and double-blind testing didn't begin formally until 1950[0]. Anecdotes like that are exactly what informs our modern scientific method. Medical research doesn't occur in the form of politicians spreading thoroughly debunked misinformation on YouTube. There is no legitimate research being suppressed here. Real research occurs in well-established journals, with well-understood and justified research methodologies. There is still room for improvement, of course, in both research and practice. But these days, the incentives are mostly well aligned to prevent that kind of story happening, and get the best results out to people as soon as possible. You will have a hard time coming up with a modern example of overlooked medical research that is well supported by research.
> I want to hear from people who say things that aren't popular.
Why, though? What have you gotten out of that experience? Are you an expert in epidemiology and immunology, to evaluate the studies yourself? You can't "decide for yourself" in the field of medical research. You need years of education and a career to even begin to operate in that arena. You need to rely on experts and the established methods and organizations to do the research and synthesize best practices. If you really want to contribute to the conversation about immunology and vaccine safety, you need to go get a medical degree and hop into the established field of research. If you can't do that (I sure can't!), then you need to trust real medical experts. Politicians on YouTube are not real medical experts.
RFK Jr isn't proselytizing some new, well-supported medical theory rejected by the establishment. He's just spouting complete nonsense that has been debunked to an absolutely ludicrous degree. Spreading this misinformation has a real, human cost. Vaccine refusal is directly responsible for tens of thousands of preventable deaths in the US annually[1,2]. Spreading medical misinformation has real, serious consequences. It is absolutely correct for platforms that care about public health to refuse to provide people like RFK Jr a megaphone.
> He's just spouting complete nonsense that has been debunked to an absolutely ludicrous degree
As someone who has only recently become aware of rfk in any form other than people referring to him as a kook, I'm surprised by statements like these.
Maybe his positions in the past were more extreme? This is from a town hall tonight, I'm curious if this is the kind of complete nonsense that you mean:
The highlights seem to be that he and his kids are vaccinated, but that he wants to see childhood vaccines subjected to placebo controlled trials (and he claims with some substantiation that the existing ones have not had placebo controlled trials, though I can't validate that).
I don't know, it didn't seem all that whacky to me.
What you're missing is the "why?". Why is vaccine safety such an important issue to him that he's bringing it up during a presidential candidate town hall? What problem is he trying to fix with these new studies? The answer is he's bought into a bunch of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. His demand for improved vaccine safety is based on a false premise that vaccines cause various problems. That premise is what has been thoroughly discredited, and everything about his argument falls apart from there. He's not trying to fix any real problem, because there is no problem to fix. The only result here is spreading misinformation about vaccine safety, which increases vaccine hesitancy, which increases preventable deaths.
There are plenty of links to sources on his Wikipedia page, if you'd like more information.
> Why is vaccine safety such an important issue to him that he's bringing it up during a presidential candidate town hall?
I didn't catch this particular part of the live broadcast, but if it's anything like the rest of it, either the moderator or the audience asked him about it.
It seems like everyone associates him with vaccines, so it's a question that would obviously come up in the context of "how are you not a kook", and so he has to talk about it. I've seen him say explicitly in another interview that he's not running on vaccines, but if people ask him about it he'll respond.
Yeah, no system is perfect! But I can point to a zillion real-world problems caused by false negatives (nutjobs provided with a platform), and really can't think of any examples of problems that have been caused by false positives (not-notjubs denied a platform). I think we could stand to nudge the slider over a few notches before we start to see the problems you are worried about.
I'd also really like to break up the big tech companies so no single company has so much power.
YouTube is a private platform. You don't get to force them to host anything, same way as traditional broadcasters don't give voice to every nutcase out there.
Most would be outraged if NBC hosted talks about public health with shamans and science deniers. What's the issue with YouTube acting the same way?
Considering you immediately moved to relating him to a “nutcase”, it sounds more like you’re fine with it because you agree with who they’re censoring, and not the actual ethics of allowing a platform with 75% market share censor people for legal content.[0]
The cries of “private platform” only go so far when you’re an effective monopoly on the space. Especially when you opaquely censor legal content, while keeping millions of illegal videos up with ads.
And to reiterate, the issue is blatant: defending an effective monopoly like YouTube, who has such a tight stranglehold on information, is incredibly dangerous. Even if you don’t disagree with them now, authoritarians rarely stop finding people to target.
> it sounds more like you’re fine with it because you agree with who they’re censoring...
Yes, I agree that harmful pseudoscience should not have any room in the mainstream. That is essentially what I suggested on the last sentence in my original comment.
> The cries of “private platform” only go so far when you’re an effective monopoly on the space.
YouTube is not a monopoly. A monopoly is not established when something is too popular, otherwise any dominant technology company would effectively be a monopoly, e.g. would Twitter be a monopoly in the microblogging space? Was Tesla a monopoly on EVs?
Being more popular than anyone else does not make them a monopoly.
It would be trivial for this guy to find another space, as he did when he published his BS on Twitter. Even more, it is trivial to open a website and spout all the pseudoscience there. He is playing the victim because it plays great among his followers.
I will worry about this when authoritative information about important topics gets removed from all platforms at the whim of one or two companies, buying and bullying a hundred others.
Lastly, that hypothetical 75% market share does not account for Facebook Video or TikTok. TikTok has ~90 million monthly active users, compared to ~230 million of YouTube, that alone invalidates the claim.
> > it sounds more like you’re fine with it because you agree with who they’re censoring...
> Yes…
Well, at least you’re honest about supporting censorship of the “right” people.
> I will worry about this when authoritative information about important topics gets removed from all platforms at the whim of one or two companies
By then it’d already be too late. Though again I doubt you’d care even as long as the “right” people disappeared from your view. You don’t seem particularly worried about authoritarianism as long as the content you’ve been told is “harmful” has been “reviewed” and summarily removed.
> Well, at least you’re honest about supporting censorship of the “right” people.
I support that a media company is not forced to host content that is deemed against their ToS, especially when there are a myriad of publishers and alternatives out there.
Is that censorship? Has this guy been silenced? He is still in YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, plus he is given air time in places like FOX news. Him complaining about censorship is akin to a billionaire crying about the cost of living.
If we would consider this as "censorship", is porn being "censored" in YouTube? Is nazi content? And if so, should we force YouTube to host such things?
Either way, the naive libertarian notion that everything should be allowed unless it harms others, does not fit here either, for a myriad of reasons, starting with the fact that "harm" is poorly defined, and there is a case to be made about this guy being actively harmful to society as a whole. But again, that is too big of an idea to fit in the libertarian framework.
Google is evil but Microsoft owns every new monopoly:
- LinkedIn,
- GitHub,
- OpenAI,
- And the 50% monopoly that O365 is,
The evil is that they can use AI to generate startups: They have both business plans and code. Imagine starting an O365 spreadsheet with Copilot and being suggested how much you should spend on ERP or HR or AWS, because so many startups fed the AI before yours. Imagine competing with startups who have this information. It’s extremely hard to avoid Microsoft products, such as Gh which is the reference over competitors.
Google is evil but I’d still trust them more because they seem fairly incompetent with AI (or even ads).
You forgot Windows which is bundled with every Laptop sold even if the user does not want it.
And the scary part with Microsoft is not how much share they have in each individual part, but that they have a big part of almost every field in computing.
Cloud servers, cloud storage, OS, search, AI, Video conf, team chat, web browser, office tools, PC hardware, Tablets, ERP, gaming HW, gaming SW, developer tools, developer frameworks, compilers, ad network, education, IT security and the list goes on.
And they cross sell and force you to use all the other crap if you already use one or two of it.
This first point is less true than it use to be; Microsoft's desktop market share has been declining for years and is driven by the corporate market, where the bundling I think is less relevant since it's mainly enterprise licences, and customers are buying hardware to run Windows apps anyway.
For people buying their own laptops, Macs in particular are really strong competitors, if not dominant depending on the region.
Monopoly, despite the plain meaning of the word, does not mean "literally one seller." It means that a seller holds a commanding position in the market. Depending on the market, 50% could be enough to lead the rest of the sellers around by the nose.
Someone here asserted that DoubleClick bought Google with Google’s money. But that was 2008 and that timeline doesn’t sound particularly convincing to me. But something changed for sure.
Google was never really interested, culturally, in making money. The ads thing sort of happened by accident. Then when double click was acquired, they were quarantined within the company so as not to pollute the real work swes were doing. Eventually, executive changes happened and the board demanded more profit. Ads were easy so they got integrated everywhere instead of burdening the busy engineers with having to figure out how to monetize their products. This led to ads taking over the entire company over time.
> Google was never really interested, culturally, in making money.
People find it really easy to say money isn't the important thing when they are rich. But see that wealth challenged and their behavior changes very quickly (with some exceptions, of course).
Google may have had ideals, but they were still a company filled with directors and managers and employees who weren't rich (enough) yet. They weren't paid off from the initial rainfall of money. They were going to use all tools at their disposal. It is no surprise it happened, even if the founders weren't too concerned with money (which I don't believe).
Maybe interested isn't the right term. Profitability was seen as a necessary evil. Something that is required but should more be happen stance... a natural evolution of the real work swes did.
What this meant culturally is that Google became a company where technical merit alone is what was rewarded. In my 15+ years of working for the company, not once did I touch a budget. The teams that did handle that sort of stuff were always made to plead their cases to engineering instead of it being the other way around.
sounds more like a recruiting and management fable than anything material and had idealized views of the direction given to you and your peers. all you've said is you were below level of being exposed to budget.
Another milestone was when Google started offering personalised results, based on things like your behaviour when logged in or geography, instead of just serving up the results like before.
I remember PG quipping words to the effect of "google searches are like scientology, what's true, is what's true for you" so the trend was clear even at that time (maybe 10-ish years ago?)
People talk about how the US is the only country with truly “free” speech. But they should ask themselves how free are they really if keeping a job means not saying the wrong things publicly and having healthcare means having a job.
I think this is a reality that neither Twitter mobs nor American exceptionalist conservatives want to admit. If you believe all people deserve healthcare, then that includes people you might like to punish by contacting their employer. And for free speech to actually be free, one of the consequences of that speech should not be to lose healthcare.
That’s the whole American kayfabe in a nutshell: create a boogeyman out of state power, while allowing businesses to stomp all over everyone. You have a greater right to free speech (in the absolute sense) in most European workplaces than you do in the US because your boss can’t take away your kids’ medical care because he doesn’t like some remark you made about politics or whatever.
People underestimate how responsive companies are to feedback, especially from customers, much much more responsive than governments. And again, you can switch jobs much easier than countries.
The entire current censorship issues are because of a small group of very organised people who want to enforce their worldview on the world. It's not views held by the majority, but companies still comply as they'd rather do that than fight.
But have a look at what happened to Bud light, they are in serious trouble because of one advertising deal. They changed their tune extremely quickly. This doesn't really happen with governments.
Bud Light is not in “serious trouble”. They are a brand owned by a multinational beverage conglomerate.
But that’s beside the point. Whether or not these corporations are pro or anti LGBT depends on which way the wind is blowing today. It’s not fundamental to their business, so they don’t deeply care about your opinions on the matter. Try talking about something more fundamental, like labor rights, and you’ll quickly see the difference.
The counter argument to this is that the First Amendment is the reason you’re not afraid of the police knocking in the middle of the night over something you said. The law and 250 years of jurisprudence made it so.
Having your healthcare removed as a result of your publicly stated opinions is just one of many other possible negative outcomes that has not been prevented in America. I might go so far as to say that the US doesn’t have free speech so much as decriminalized speech.
(It’s not a perfect analogy in the sense that losing your job and healthcare isn’t identical to a fine, but it fits in reflecting the fact that prison isn’t the only punishment one can receive. Plus there are people financially situated such that the financial penalties of unpopular speech are immaterial. I’ll work on it.)
Oh come on, that’s just silly. There’s such a labour shortage anyone with a job can almost certainly get another one pretty quickly. And the more skilled you are the more likely.
I don’t think Google is evil. I also don’t think they were ever “good”. I think they are mostly just caught in a world where they have become the worlds largest advertising company but their primary platform is turning out to be less valuable. Yet because they are an advertising company they struggle to sell any products that aren’t advertisement.
I spent a long time in the Danish public sector, and if you don’t know this, the EU public sector is a billion dollar industry in terms of selling cloud services, and Google was never really an option. Which is sort of silly when you look at the tech. They had Office365 before it was cool, but because they couldn’t/wouldn’t guarantee privacy concerns they were never really able to sell it outside of education. So Microsoft casually strolled along and now dominate the market completely. Google has firebase (I think it’s called) which is arguably one of the best backends for 95% or the applications that I’ve seen build in the Danish public sector, and it’s used for 0% of them because Google never understood that what Microsoft sells to IT departments in non-tech enterprise organisations isn’t tech, it’s support. When something goes wrong with Azure, your CTO can tell the organisation that they are getting hourly updates on the situation directly from Redmond. When something goes wrong with Google Cloud, your CTO can use the same chat-bot you and I can, despite the multi-million budget difference. I think the most interesting part was how Amazon entered the market with a Google mentality, but then when AWS kept loosing to Azure they figured out why and are now even more compliant to what EU enterprise wants than even Microsoft. I mean, Azure still can’t completely live up to every aspect of the GDPR in terms of who services Azure global, AWS has been compliant since around 2020. I still remember how around 2018-2019 we went from taking with whatever Amazon support you and I probably talk to, to having a sales representative call us and get us hooked up with all sorts of compliance officers. Mean while Google sort of got even worse.
I mean, Google actually managed to do really well in education. At least here in Denmark, but “big Google” once again got in the way. This wasn’t for lack of trying by Google education, they have this really great team of people, and I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be for them to have “big Google” stomp on all their decade long efforts by not giving things like Chromebooks and Google education better privacy tools for kids.
I think it’s the same story for search. Search is a business for them and over the years the MBAs have focused too much on profits and too little on products. Fair enough, things like social media has made things harder. I mean, the reason you and I type “Reddit” in to our google searches isn’t only because Google got played by SEO, it’s also because people started putting their thoughts into social media instead of running blog wheels and using smaller forums.
I hope Google pulls around. I don’t think they are more evil than Microsoft. As an enterprise worker I love Microsoft, they sell you support and they listen to your business needs, and all those privacy invasive tools they are pushing these days are disabled in enterprise. But they aren’t doing it because they are “good” they are doing it because that is how you sell licenses. I do think their cloud dominance may get challenged as Azure pricing a keep rising and alternative options get cheaper, but who’s going to compete with Microsoft on Office365? But as a personal user, have you used the basic windows 11? It literally has commercials in your operating system, and since Windows 10 they have been “pre-installing” stuff like Minecraft and whatever that popular mobile game they own is called. And that is in their paid product, at least google search doesn’t charge you money on top of their advertising.
As an anecdote I think it was also interesting to see how Apple became very enterprise “unfriendly”. They owned education before google swooped in, and one of the primary reasons Apple lost initially was because they wouldn’t let IT departments “enroll” (sorry I’m not sure what “owning” the device and OS is called in Operations terms) their devices, which meant schools couldn’t block students from doing what they wanted. That’s since been fixed, but Apple is still what I’d call enterprise “unfriendly”. That works for Apple though, they obviously have a business strategy that’s doing well. But Google doesn’t similarly have one now that the floor is sort of falling out from under a lot of these “pay with your privacy” services.
Microsoft was "evil" in the as a FOSS hacker or competitor sense. Google are evil in the as a human sense.
Facebook and Google are way worse than MS ever was, and sadly MS seems hell bent on joining their club with Windows 10+. By default Windows now spy on the user and shoves algorithmically manipulated "news" (propaganda) down their throat on the former start menu.
One can only rationally extrapolate that the next iteration of so-called "big tech" will be the final nightmare.
The conditions for that outcome are getting ripe, with the near elimination of cash and the control of official digital identity the main change drivers.
Imagine having your driver ID revoked randomly because some Google ML thought your driving patterns were suspicious ...
Ye. Neither cash nor ID is something we need "big tech" to solve. IDs being a problem in the first place is a US and third world problem anyways. Just like Uber solved a US only problem (medallion monopoly and shortage).
Reason you might want to target queries for your own site with ads is that your competitors will do so and you want to outbid them. If I search for the name of a therapist group in my city, the top result right now is a competing firm which does online therapy. But I agree that bids with specific intent for your site should at least cost less than bids for queries for products in your industry
This situation is always the most frustrating to deal with. It is borderline phishing and should be as simple of a fix as making it a ToS violation. Just like all of Google's dead products, this type of behavior speaks volumes to their disregard for users, both individual search consumers and enterprise ad buyers.
It’s also a huge vector for actual phishing, especially because google ads doesn’t use puny code, so it’s easy to buy ads for sites that differ by just a diacritic
That's how my stepdad got hacked. He didn't understand bookmarks or urls or homepages, so he just opened his browser at google.com, searched for the name of his bank, clicked the first ad, and went to log in. Usually that worked for him, but once, he got a scam site, and he was on the phone with a call center in India giving them remote desktop access before a single alarm bell went off in his head.
Granted, it's partly my fault for letting a loved one be that computer un-savvy, but that kind of ad should have been detected and blocked before it was ever served.
Agreed. There are so many failures on Google’s end to let this happen. One of which was allowing the advertiser to display a legitimate URL in the ad while redirecting to an illegitimate one. I really hope this isn’t the case any more.
In fact, the FTC did the opposite, ruling that 1-800 Contacts unlawfully harmed competition when it sued competitors who bid on its name and obtained settlements preventing them from doing so.
Reading the linked judgement seems to imply there was more nuance. It seems 1800 contacts actively colluded with competitors to not cross bid on common terms, negative terms, etc. It would be interesting if this was only about “exact phrase” matches and trademarks, but it seems a bit more complicated than that at an initial scan.
Please correct me if I misinterpreted the findings though.
How is it trademark violation to put up, say, Toyota billboards around the Honda dealership? Advertise the NYT in the Washington Post? Have a big freakin' Coke banner at the end of the soda aisle?
Yes, this kind of advertising is a stupid zero-sum game, but our society in general, and free markets in particular have a lot of stupid zero-sum games. I see no reason why this one should be illegal.
I mean if your site is trying to deceive visitors then sure. If I search for Nike and I get an ad for N1ke.com then yeah that's bad. But if I search for Nike and I see an ad for Adidas and I proceed to buy Adidas shoes then I guess I didn't really want Nike that much to begin with?
But 99.999% of the time someone searching for jkl corp, gets and ad for jkl corp that jkl corp paid for and clicks it because it's at the top of the results.
It's PURE google protection racket money paid by jkl corp so it gets the traffic of people who want to visit jkl corp.
Mafia as business model is one of the many evils that google does and is.
Jkl corp doesn't have to buy ads. Users will still be able to find it via Google. I challenge you to find a company for which its site is not discoverable via Google search. If users who really want to go to jkl corp actually can't find it via Google, then they'll probably stop relying on Google to find things.
There are examples given in this very thread of people being conned by clicking the top link which was an ad interposed by google when someone was trying to get the website of their bank.
But that's because of the phishing aspect. If a search for "Chase mortgages" leads me to Bank of America mortgages through an ad, there's no deception going on.
so why do you think companies buy their own trade marked brands as keywords so that they can pay google for their organic traffic? Because they're idiots?
Why do you think google moved the ads from the side where they were clearly marked and obviously not search results to the top of the search results and made it much harder to tell "this link is actually an ad"? I mean obviously for money but why do you think it made them money? What do you think of google's plans to offer deep discounts to advertisers for traffic from keyword searches for their brand or corporate identity? Reasonable?
So there'd be no issue in google getting ads well away and separate from search results in an obvious way like they use to. Wouldn't hurt their revenue in that case. Top result is actually the result you were looking for. Ads to the right, shaded background. No problem at all, right? They'd all still pay just as much for their own brand names in keyword advertising. And there would be the exact same number of clicks of it.
I don't believe that and i'm not sure how anyone does tbh.
People used to buy consumer electronic magazines for product reviews, and those magazines had pages of flashy ads at the beginning. I guess that was mafia stuff too. Or just one of million examples of an advertising-based business model.
The condescension is unnecessary and against the guidelines around here.
Did the phone company put your calls through to your competitor if you paid them to do that or would they be in big trouble for doing so. It's not "advertising" it's getting between you and your customers and tolling the infrastructure to the highest bidder.
The phone company was regulated very heavily as a utility just like google isn't.
Government regulates some parts of telecom business, a lot of it it doesn’t. I couldn’t find any regulations pertaining to yellow pages, that’s why I was asking. I doubt there are any.
I could literally not care less about google's policy, as enforced by google. It is of zero relevance nor significance to anything at all.
Google have deliberately made ads much harder to distinguish from results. They have done so for money and it has been successful. No policy of theirs changes this, excuses this nor makes it go away nor makes it less relevant. I care as much about google's "policy" on google's clear misbehaviour as I do about mafia citing their "code" in a criminal trial. You should try assuming people lie for money when there are no consequences until shown to be otherwise.
Try all the standard, accepted and common google ad techniques on yellow pages ads and see how far you get. I'm betting on that being nowhere and usually because it is illegal.
So… no evidence? Putting ads at the top of the page is nothing like your original claim that Google lets advertisers impersonate other businesses. I didn’t ask if you care about Google’s policy on impersonation, but whether you have an example where I type business name X and Google shows me an ad that says it will take me to X but it takes me somewhere else.
What can or can’t be done in yellow pages is irrelevant. I also can’t click on things in yellow pages, does that mean presenting links should be illegal?
They don't care about impersonation at all but yes it happens as is evidenced in this very thread.
What they want is for the majority of punters using google to search for the url for xyz corp to click the ad for that url rather than that same url the search result. This is why they changed the ads to look like search result and put them above. It's incredibly lucrative. It's exactly what MBA types talk about monetisation of the infrastructure to "toll the way." And the rest of us refer to as "protection money." That was and remains the claim. It's pretty solid.
But good on you for sticking up for google so hard, it's unfashionable to take the side of the gazillion dollar behmoth with all the market power and it needs to be respected that you're trying.
I think you’re under the impression that google.com is some sort of a public good, while it’s actually a privately owned platform. I think your issue might be with capitalism. Or maybe it’s with people who don’t want to switch to another search platform, or with people who click on ads instead making sure they scroll down to the first link that’s not an ad. In any case, nobody’s forcing you or anyone else to be one of those people.
If G bought Bing or DuckDuckGo or any of the alternative search engines that appear as choices in people’s browsers, and not just that but did so under a threat of violence, you’d be right to call it a mafia. If it threatened to kneecap Apple executives to be the default search engine on their devices instead of paying Apple billions yearly for the privilege you’d be right to call it a mafia. Otherwise they don’t extort anyone any more than any property owner asking to be paid for use of their property.
There’s a lot of shady shit that Google does, but it’s childish and silly to expect a trillion plus company to be some embodiment of a non-capitalist utopia embedded in a capitalist society, and call them mafia if they fall short of that ideal.
I might be shilling for Google, but your great hope is the government? Haven’t those people been known to employ deadly force at home and overseas in all kinds of disgusting ways?
Sure, but the point is that you have to know what category someone is search for in order to apply the ad filtering rules. If people search for "windows", Google has to take its best guess on whether you want Windows 11 or quotes on replacing your wall-holes.
Even then, what counts as an ad that competes with Microsoft? Can ubuntu advertise their Windows alternative? Can an authorized reseller advertise themselves as the best place to buy a copy?
This problem sounds almost impossible to me, and the cure almost sounds worse than the disease.
I suspect there are very few searches for the single word “windows”. Google probably knows the category for the vast majority of searches from additional words, previous queries, etc.
But I think it would be crazy to prohibit competitive advertising in the first place.
This is false. Apple applied for a trademark of a black-and-white depiction of an apple. They aren’t suing any Swiss organization over infringement of a trademark.
The Wired article makes it seem like Apple is going after someone here, but they’re ‘just’ filing for a trademark.
Whether you agree or disagree with the tactics, what they’re doing isn’t what you claim they’re doing.
Please stop spreading this incorrect version of the story.
Apple is not suing anyone; it has asked for a re-ruling from the Swiss trademark authorities. As far as I have been able to see, this is based on the ownership of the Apple Corps trademark, and the Swiss fruit association is making unnecessary noise that has been amplified by the credulous because anything about Apple (Designed in California) makes for more clicks.
It's not a grey area if you're putting out an ad for a product in the same category as the registered trademark.
Putting up a "Nintendo Switch" ad on the "Steam Deck" search term, and vice versa, is wrong. Even more so when big companies camp on the trademarks of smaller startups.
What is preventing customer acquisition costs from eating almost all profits? Why should a company not bit for every potential customer up to their potential profits if only to benefit from increased scale?
What's the endgame? Companies can only reduce ad expenses if they have monopolies or agreements among themselves.
This is such an egregious attempt at fraud that I actually feel bad enough to scroll past the ads, when I'm searching for a particular company or website by name, and always make sure to click the actual search result. I really should not care about a large corporation paying a few cents to get me to their website, but it is so unnecessarily unfair on Google's part that it bothers me greatly.
A noticeable trend in ecommerce over the past year or two is sites adding a "Why not use our app?" popup modal or banner when you hit the site or you add something to a cart. This is directly related to search ad costs. Companies are trying to reduce their reliance on search engines to drive traffic because customer acquisition costs are crazy high while the average customer spend is falling. At some point it stops being worth capturing the customer with a search ad.
This is especially true for brand adverts where the customer would have reached the site organically but you have to outbid a rival because they're trying to bid on your brand keywords. It's a "Google tax" for having a popular brand name. It really sucks.
This is especially true for brand adverts where the customer would have reached the site organically but you have to outbid a rival because they're trying to bid on your brand keywords. It's a "Google tax" for having a popular brand name. It really sucks.
When my business was new in 2003, and Google Ads too, we had a competitor bid on our name as a search term. We were outraged and found that Google had a page on, I think abusive search terms or something? But to action anything you had to write a letter to Mountain View. So we did that, citing deceptive practices or some pseudo-legal rubbish. And they actioned it! For years afterwards we saw no ads on our little UK company's name.
I wonder if they actioned it globally or just to UK IP addresses? The UK has the ASA, so adverts aren't totally unregulated here and it's not a fraud free-for-all.
"According to a study, 40 percent of small business owners stated that their Google Ads campaign yielded no leads. Whereas, an additional 33% of business owners noted that these campaigns produced very few leads."
I've worked at large companies and every single one of them saw negative returns on their campaigns.
You have to optimize and test constantly for AdWords to pay off (disable content network advertising, geographic targeting on a schedule that follows the sun, a/b testing copy) and build methods of retaining users that don't buy to eventually convert (email newsletters, add us on Facebook, sign-up for this free ebook, blah blah). My guess is small business doesn't have the time to tweak all these things.
There are also small tricks about writing copy to make it economical. Social media sites have the retention mechanics built for you so I'm not surprised they convert better. Just my 2 cents as a guy who does marketing for some spare pocket change.
Yep, people spend $120b a year on Google ads, crushing the old ad industry, because it doesn't work. It's just idiots in marketing departments all the way down.
(I've worked with 50+ company ad accounts and any large business will have profitable campaigns at x level spend)
Enterprises can be classified in different categories according to their size; for this purpose, different criteria may be used, but the most common is number of people employed. In small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) employ fewer than 250 people. SMEs are further subdivided into micro enterprises (fewer than 10 employees), small enterprises (10 to 49 employees), medium-sized enterprises (50 to 249 employees). Large enterprises employ 250 or more people
And what might that be? Because all I see is what it says on the tin: Google Ads are innately unprofitable, and as others added require intense optimization to even reach profitability.
This was specifically forbiden by Google eons ago. You could not create an ad with Pepsi in it, unless you were Pepsi.
What we have today is intentional, they have the system to prevent this but they choose to no longer use it. It might be that your own ad with your own brand in it is way cheaper than the competitors ads with your brand in them. Maybe they just want some money from you even when the user searched for your brand specifically. Maybe they want to train users to always click on ads (hard no to when the ad is exactlly what you searched for)
Shocking that a company without any real competition that cares about its stock price doesn't go out of its way to lower profits. Shocking. I'm shocked.
If only they'd cut advertiser's costs, we could have more advertising. And that would also be cheaper, pushier, advertising. And it would be a pity that there was a lot less cash then for things like actual content, but the important thing is to maximise the number of adverts right? Right?
For most businesses today, Google ads are not cost-effective. This applies double when you are buying ads for your company's name: you would have gotten the clicks even if you weren't paying!
But people still do it, presumably on the "nobody got fired for buying IBM" theory.
> For most businesses today, Google ads are not cost-effective. This applies double when you are buying ads for your company's name: you would have gotten the clicks even if you weren't paying!
Source?
It’s always extremely funny to read engineers on hacker news to make claims about ads, with no understanding of how the business work. And the underlying assumption that companies throw away billions of dollars away, with no results to show for it.
I wonder if someone from marketing chimed in on a testing topic, to point out that for most lines of code written today, unit tests and integration tests aren't cost effective, and that companies are wasting billions of dollars on writing and running tests that pass 99% of the time, anyways...
If it was a marketing person with serious stats chops using the data to make the case I'd absolutely listen to their case.
Yeah marketing serious stats chops, never seen it yet. Show us the flipping data if you want to make the case for something otherwise the /only/ option is to update your prior with bayes.
xyz corp & co spends billions on it = must work. Reasonable.
every small co. I've heard of loses money at it- looks bad.
Businesses built on brand advertising, chanel, coca cola, etc don't use google at all. Why not? Looks bad.
Modern, internet marketing maestros who have built major brand names on the internet did not pay google a cent. Tesla - rivals mercedes with no ads at all, Trump maga etc. (no I don't like them not that it's relevant). - Looks bad.
Google, advertising to /internet/ /users/ don't use google to do it, they have tv ads! Because google advertising works so effectively?
I dunno, I guess it could work. It could work badly but fashionably for large cos? It could be a group-think crock.
The last 2 shouldn't be as plausible as they are though. Why has google let them be that plausible if their stuff works and they can produce the numbers? Or maybe they, I dunno, can't?
The world of marketing is much deeper than you make it out to be. Brands spend millions - obviously if someone smart came in and did testing to prove it was ineffective thus move that money elsewhere.
You can easily test branding dollars with things like brand lift studies, but I’ll skip over branding.
The majority of small business and good chunks of large companies ad spend is spent on performance marketing. These campaigns have strictly enforced goals of return on ad spend (or sometimes net profit return on ad spend). When a new client starts running big budgets they run incremental alit y tests with their internal data science team, a neutral third party vendor (paid regardless of the outcome), and with the platform their spending money on. Each team shares their analysis but brands usually just ignore the platforms numbers. The advertiser can determine in their own, with legit statistical analysis, whether purchases would’ve occurred even if they hadn’t seen an ad.
I don’t work on one of those teams, but I think it’s basically you spend 80% if your budget like normal on 80% of users. Then on 20% of users you use the same targeting but serve 1 single blank ad. Then you compare how the test and control groups make purchases, and how much of a lift in purchases the advertising drives. They also compare the user buckets before even doing the test to ensure users are evenly split so each group was making the same amount of purchases on average before the campaign begins. They remove outliers, etc.
It’s not a bunch of rich old established men in a room high giving themselves, it’s data scientists who don’t at all trust the guys spending their money. So they test the shit out of it over and over.
All of the raw data can be seen by the advertiser, and they track each individual impression, click, etc. that data can also be filtered through vendors to identify potential fraud, brand safety, etc.
I’ve had more than a couple client run an incrementality test and then stop spending on the platform because the results were too low. But I’ve had many many more be happy with their own internal analysis and increase budgets, then run another test at that budget level. I have clients who only pay us if we spend $1 and they get $2 in incremental revenue from users who their data science team would not have purchased without the ad. Those teams don’t care if they spend money, and they even get bonused on increasing incremental revenue so they constantly test new vendors and move spend to whoever performs the best.
Nothing there anyone can check which makes it indistinguishable from "I know more than you and I can tell you you're wrong." That may even be correct for all I know, it's just not at all useful.
Which non-internet company is on record claiming they see better returns from google ads on racist blogs than on say, tv ads for example? Must be a few, surely. Where?
What brand ever advertised on google? Pick a good one. I want to see the campaign.
I've had this discussion before and it's usually at this point of wanting any data or examples that it sort of melts away like morning fog in the sun or gets needlessly nasty. Hopefully this time will be better. It's not like I'm trying to push something here.
I’m not sending you client data, just like any dev on here would not send their company’s data. Campaign architecture is kept secret as competitors/etc can use that info to their advantage.
I’m explaining how an entire industry works and you’ve just closed your eyes and said everyone is lying. It doesn’t make sense to assume everyone in an entire industry is lying - then that industry would be dope for disruption as any brand not spending marketing dollars would be hugely more profitable than competitors. Show me a startup that doesn’t have an advertising team/agency.
Your client data? No never asked for it. Any data, from anywhere relating to this, ie showing google ads success.
Google publishing success stories maybe? Anything.
Conversation works better if you don't claim people said things they didn't say. I guess we're going the second route? Seems a shame.
But sure for disruption we have Tesla - brand strength to rival Mercedes. Ad spend $0. We have Trump, became president. I strongly doubt google ads were the key part of his presidency push. Both of those marketing campaigns were pretty disruptive.
Never seen a google internet ad for the google pixel. Seen plenty of tv ads. That seems like an interesting data point? Lots of tv ads for chrome in my sport among the gambling ads too.
I'm looking for data as evidence of the claim made by google that paying them is worthwhile which I don't see much of.
So yeah you can update your prior with "people pay for it so it must be good" It has some weight. I mentioned something pretty similar right up top when I went through the anecdotal evidence we have.
a nobel prize for it where he announced there were never any negative side-effects or outcomes(!). To as room full of serious and successful scientists. Meh.
Group think really does happen. We find out if it has when there is direct evidence, which we don't yet have here, which continues to be a shame. When it comes up I'm always hopeful someone will say "Yes we do!" and link some good data.
If you weren't paying for a search for your company name, your competitors would be paying to have their ads displayed on a search for your company name.
All the major ad networks let you run all sorts of comparisons and experiments for ad ROI. If ROI was routinely negative, the billion-dollar budgets would have long been pulled back by beancounters and cost-cutters in the buying firms, especially when they have the excuse of a recession to do so.
Yes, occasionally you get 'I run a boutique business and I find that <X advertising system has horrible ROI>' blog posts on HN. Maybe they are structuring their ad campaigns wrong. Maybe their business shouldn't be advertised at all. Maybe they are using the wrong channel (Search, display, social) to advertise with. It's a pain in the ass to figure this out if you're a small business.
But larger businesses with serious ad devote a lot of effort to figuring this out - and will reshuffle their marketing budgets to the high ROI channels.
> For most businesses today, Google ads are not cost-effective.
Is that true? I've been in this game for quite a while now and the cast majority of business have ROI positive ads. I haven't kept record but would think 8/10 businesses type ratio.
This article is correct in the lack of transparency is concerning, but the simplify eneed view is incorrect IMO.
"I think Google Ads should be simpler to use (dumb it down), should be more transparent with its costs and bids, and should offer more options to control ad appearance"
Firstly, more options won't simplify most likely.
Secondly google has been 'simplifying' for a long time, to their advantage. Increasingly Google push people down the performance/CPA path saying our smart systems will get you the best results 'believe us we're Google' but it's mostly not true. The best results are often from a manual as possible campaign and they make this an ever harder option to take. There needs to be far better regulation here.
Marketing is one of those skills where art meets science. If you let the algorithms take over they'll often look good at a base metric but as soon as you dig around you find you're sacrificing wider goals or mostly getting sales you would have anyway, or paying crazy amounts to finish off the budget type etc.
Google is a great advertising platform, but adding your money, limited controls and trusting google systems to work it out is a horrible way, and something I see all too often. I suspect it's largely because you can spend an < an hour setting the easy way, or spend a day or more setting up a well researched and manual way, but on both client/agency side people don't want to spend the time/money getting foundations right, or simply have the time or aptitude.
I say the best thing is for some regulator body to go over the system changes over the years and ask why features plus analytics were removed, hidden or changed and put rules about these controls and ongoing changes to live up to the level playing field tenent of good capitalism. Maybe it is happening somewhere but I haven't seen it, and it is long overdue.
Would respectfully disagree. Matching a consumers query to an ad, and optimizing that outcome at a given return on investment threshold is a task best left to a computer to optimize. It is a perfect use case for reinforcement learning, and a computer can work 24 hours a day and you need to sleep. In my experience, 100/100 times the machine beats the confident manual optimizer. We (humans) don't have a great track record in beating computers at these kinds of problems, certainly not a game as simple as optimizing for a high score (driving results from an ad).
If the goals for all parties are the same, yes. Google is optimizing for their own fill rates and ePM, _then_ the advertiser's CPA/goals. If there are 100 equally valued conversions for $10 and 500 for $40, you would want all $10 conversions first. This is possible with manual bidding on exact match terms you know convert. With broader match types or many automated bidding strategies, you get a mix of everything (Epsilon greedy/multi-armed bandit strategy) and the CPA will almost always trend towards/exceed the $40 point.
The challenge with that approach is the variation in both (a) queries and (b) other players.
(a) There are a small % of queries that are knowable for you to target on exact, or you are required to update and prune infinitely over time. [https://twitter.com/Google/status/1493681643290300425?lang=e...].
(b) A mix is better than a fixed CPA at a set price, up to to the player to pick the acceptable range. At a fixed price and many players competing for the same 100 10$ conversions, the price would quickly rise for those same conversions anyways. You're replicating the work the computer is doing, but doing so with the illusion of control.
It does require manual intervention, and the campaign strategy is typically called "alpha beta" where the beta is a broader match type, with the goal of a lower IS (via budget-- not always AP). As you state, there is in fact more competiton for these terms (for a reason) in efficient markets (both from other manual bidders and automated bidding), but it still works (many times you end up with competitors who hit their budget caps due to their other misaligned spend). In situations where the bids cause CPA to exceed target, you simply choose to lose IS due to bids and shift resources. With automated bidding, you don't always have this option. The key concept that people miss is that automated strategies optimize fill rate for Google-- so you end up with tons of longtail spend that will likely never convert and is hard to identify. Automated strategies will also abstain from auctions if they can't hit specific goals, or will have severely limited volume.
Auctions may vary-- most of my managed spend (mid 8 figures, so not huge) has been in high CPC (think $5-25) verticals like home services, movers, insurance, mortgage and mattresses (insane period from 2015-2018). I have set things up manually, let Google AEs setup the "recommended" bid strategies (and even run longer than their suggested timeframe) and utilized known agencies, and the manual bidding (always accompanied by aggressive negatives, high AP/IS goals) always won by large (30%+ lower CPA with higher volume) amounts. Performance may be drastically different in ecommerce niches where everyone is using automated strategies, as well as other factors like number of auction participants, participant budgets, sophistication and even objectives (executive spite is a valid reason-- hence Google's target outrank share strategy). Anyone who has done PLAs/shopping ads will be incredibly cynical due to their targeting methodology of being all inclusive with the onus of exclusions on the advertiser when the majority of errant spend is in the longtail-- good luck talking to 99% of marketers about tokenization, stemming and lemmatization for identifying negative matching strategies.
So yes, automated bidding can work better than just YOLO'ing some broad match campaigns, but most people shouting their praises, that I have encountered, are parroting their ad rep's talking points. Any competent performance marketer (not many) will be able to outperform automated bidding strategies, but things like scale (why bother saving 20% on 5k spend?), principal/agent problem, or workload (or being lazy, relying on salespeople to do their job) will also have an impact.
Google’s Ad business needs to be separated from search. Search should become like any other SaaS company, providing an API to its results and charging companies who want to run ads on top of the results. Those companies would compete among themselves, offering choice and value. They could also in theory choose another search API, providing pressure on old Google to improve and focus on its search results, divorced of any conflicting pressures from trying to operate both businesses.
This anecdote is largely irrelevant, since by virtue of the way Google positions ads in search results, it’s fair to assume that you’re simply the exception.
Not even the exception, in the best case something like 1-2% of users click adds on average. The median user won't interact with them, advertising isn't for the median user. It's also fair to say this topic is explicitly focused on ads, therefore on people who would click on ads.
No, they probably can't find the 'sponsored' text, but they are also conditioned to know that the stuff at the top and the stuff on the side is probably ads, because every friggin website on the internet has ads in those locations.
Sometimes I get the result I am looking for in the top ad, why wouldn't I click on it? It's mostly companies which buy ads for their own brand names, for example if I search for Nike all the ads are from the official store or website.
On mobile the first ad almost fills the whole screen so I'm not going to waste time scrolling further.
Hell I've accidentally clicked the sponsored results on Amazon, because my adblocker didn't remove them and it took me a minute to realize Amazon had started doing that.
Ads are just another kind of tax. Eventually everybody pays for it as it is a part of the cost price of every product. Google's aim is to make us pay the highest possible tax.
Ads should be free (but limited in the way they distract us). The most important reason is that we want the market to reward the best product, not the one with the biggest advertising budget.
That would hurt so many businesses. People might not even know that your product exists or that they are potentially interested in your product until you advertise it. This means that small businesses are hurt because no one knows to look them up and no one knows them because their brand is weak. Ad space prices don't go higher and higher. It is auctioned off. If demand for the space goes down then the price will also go down.
I don't think so. If you want to actively find stuff there are ways to do it, like going to a tech show near you.
Businesses survived before advertising was as crazy as it is today, so we can tune it down a _lot_ before bad things start happening to businesses in general.
I never said we have to take an extremist position wrt ads. If we can allow 1% ads for tech shows, and confine the remainder of 99% ads to special places like Yellow Pages and tech shows, that's a huge win.
X costs you 100. A person tells you they'll sell you a service to allow you to buy X for 90. How much would you pay for that service? You'd pay up to 10, which the person then pockets. That happens because the person has to competition, so knowing that X costs 100 and you're getting it for 90, they'll charge you 10.
That's google. They don't have competition in search.
They used to brag about how good they were at giving you the address of something specific you were searching for with an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.
Linux nerds used to /like/ them. No really.
Nowadays they're fully compromised by both money and politics and make the old days of microsoft look good.
I see things like this :https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/16737835968285696...
From a politician I don't particularly like or support fwiw and think "How dare they?"
Google are fully evil.