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>The person wants to bypass actual quality and compete by advertising instead of on merits. The person was me, and you're completely mistaken about what I said

>The person wants to bypass actual quality and compete by advertising instead of on merits. The person was me, and you're completely mistaken about what I said, much less the intent. "Actual quality" is not an objective metric, and many ads are promoting new products that are high quality. >So either you're not a good enough plumber to be working on your own, or you've worked with an experienced plumber and have built up your reputation that way. I call BS. You've obviously no real experience promoting a product or service from scratch. You could have 30 years of experience as a plumber and go out on your own as an independent contractor and you'd be starting from ZERO. Not from experience. You can't just take your former employer's customers; that's unethical and typically against your employment contract. So you have to find new customers under a new brand. And it's arguably worse for promoting other products or services today. I had 20 years of experience when I struck out and started my own company again; that experience opened doors when I made personal connections to work with people, but it meant crap for my indie game release. Most popular games would fail without being propped up by advertising (and some would be less valuable to their players if they weren't as popular -- I'm thinking of games where you play against others, and so the more people who play, the more valuable the game is to everyone. Standard network effect). >You're talking about this in the context where people need to manipulate their rankings to compete Ranking in Google isn't magic. It's an algorithm based (in large part) on popularity. You're basically saying no new business or product ever has the right to exist, because anything that isn't popular now has no right to become popular. How exactly do you expect something to become popular quickly enough for a company not to go out of business without getting the product in front of enough consumers?

prawn 11y ago
Exactly - I have worked with countless new small businesses starting out on the web, all with genuine products and services, and all of them find it really challenging to gain traction. Often Google's model of SEO with the importance placed on backlinks and unique content does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more trading links or writing keyphrase-laden blogs or whatever else.
- copsarebastards 11y ago
  > Exactly - I have worked with countless new small businesses starting out on the web, all with genuine products and services, and all of them find it really challenging to gain traction. There are two sides to this coin. You could argue that they have a hard time gaining traction because they aren't advertising. But I'm arguing that they are having a hard time gaining traction because other people are advertising. > Often Google's model of SEO with the importance placed on backlinks and unique content does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more trading links or writing keyphrase-laden blogs or whatever else. Often your model of advertising does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more buying ads. Just because Google also fails doesn't mean that ads are a successful way to find information. Ads and Google's search can both be bad heuristics.
copsarebastards 11y ago
> The person was me, and you're completely mistaken about what I said, much less the intent. "Actual quality" is not an objective metric, and many ads are promoting new products that are high quality. And many aren't. The question is: what heuristic better matches the average person's definition of "actual quality". Let's look at this as if you were approaching this as a fresh, new problem: you're trying to design a heuristic that finds products that most closely match what people want. You'd have to be an idiot to think that "products that paid me to rank them higher" is a good heuristic. Even very naive heuristics would be better. Paid advertising serves advertisers and people creating crappy products who can artificially inflate their image. It doesn't serve consumers or people creating quality products. > Ranking in Google isn't magic. It's an algorithm based (in large part) on popularity. You're basically saying no new business or product ever has the right to exist, because anything that isn't popular now has no right to become popular. No, I'm saying that advertising breaks popularity as a good metric. If it weren't for ads, organic popularity would be a good metric of quality. But advertising allows people to manipulate popularity in their favor without actually providing quality. > How exactly do you expect something to become popular quickly enough for a company not to go out of business without getting the product in front of enough consumers? I don't. I think that creating something good takes time. Why do you think people are entitled to a get-rich-quick scheme?

prawn 11y ago

Exactly - I have worked with countless new small businesses starting out on the web, all with genuine products and services, and all of them find it really challenging to gain traction. Often Google's model of SEO with the importance placed on backlinks and unique content does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more trading links or writing keyphrase-laden blogs or whatever else.

copsarebastards 11y ago
> Exactly - I have worked with countless new small businesses starting out on the web, all with genuine products and services, and all of them find it really challenging to gain traction. There are two sides to this coin. You could argue that they have a hard time gaining traction because they aren't advertising. But I'm arguing that they are having a hard time gaining traction because other people are advertising. > Often Google's model of SEO with the importance placed on backlinks and unique content does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more trading links or writing keyphrase-laden blogs or whatever else. Often your model of advertising does little but serve the plumber who does less actual plumbing and more buying ads. Just because Google also fails doesn't mean that ads are a successful way to find information. Ads and Google's search can both be bad heuristics.

copsarebastards 11y ago

> The person was me, and you're completely mistaken about what I said, much less the intent. "Actual quality" is not an objective metric, and many ads are promoting new products that are high quality. And many aren't. The question is: what heuristic better matches the average person's definition of "actual quality". Let's look at this as if you were approaching this as a fresh, new problem: you're trying to design a heuristic that finds products that most closely match what people want. You'd have to be an idiot to think that "products that paid me to rank them higher" is a good heuristic. Even very naive heuristics would be better. Paid advertising serves advertisers and people creating crappy products who can artificially inflate their image. It doesn't serve consumers or people creating quality products. > Ranking in Google isn't magic. It's an algorithm based (in large part) on popularity. You're basically saying no new business or product ever has the right to exist, because anything that isn't popular now has no right to become popular. No, I'm saying that advertising breaks popularity as a good metric. If it weren't for ads, organic popularity would be a good metric of quality. But advertising allows people to manipulate popularity in their favor without actually providing quality. > How exactly do you expect something to become popular quickly enough for a company not to go out of business without getting the product in front of enough consumers? I don't. I think that creating something good takes time. Why do you think people are entitled to a get-rich-quick scheme?