4 ms·

I don't understand the cynicism. Do you have any evidence for this whatsoever?

• patio11 16y ago
  He's absolutely, screamingly right. They're an advertising company. Big bang changes to the website exist to sell more advertising. Everything else they do is window dressing to make people forget that they are an advertising company.
  • moultano 16y ago
    If all Google showed were ads, no one would come to the site. Furthermore, Google is already outrageously profitable. The only real threat is if people start searching somewhere else. Do you really think they would make changes that make that more likely? Google has strong competition in Bing, Yandex, and Baidu. Even if profit were the only relevant motive, short term profitability is not something Google needs to worry about. It also seems that your argument applies to every ad supported site. Are you contending that the nytimes is in the ad business and not the news business? Is the news mere window dressing for their advertisements? If not, then how are they different from Google?
    • chc 16y ago
      That's actually a better characterization of the newspaper industry than you probably mean for it to be. From the editors' perspective, of course it's all about the news (I'm sure this is true for Google's search engineers too). But from the publisher's perspective, the news basically is some very attractive window-dressing.
      • moultano 16y ago
        True, but it's Google's search engineers that made this change, not it's ad engineers.
  • statictype 16y ago
    Everything else they do is window dressing to make people forget that they are an advertising company That's a bit disingenuous. In the same way, newspapers are also advertising companies. The journalism they do is 'window dressing'.