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.
