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Its that old issue. If you are paying you are the customer - if you aren't paying you're the product. With Google the customer is the person placing the ads an

Its that old issue. If you are paying you are the customer - if you aren't paying you're the product. With Google the customer is the person placing the ads and the product is you. The content farms are the middle man - they try and place you (the product) onto a paying page (the customer) and stop you going to a non-paying page (that doesn't pay-per-click). Google has 2 business models: * I search for an advert and Google sells me directly to the customer * I search for something and Google takes me to a middle man who sells me to a customer The first business model works great and I often search Google for an advert. The second business model is broken - because I (the user) want a search engine that takes me to my destination - if something that triggers a purchase happens along the way, fine). 1/3 of the web now consists of Google's Middlemen selling Google's ads for Google. When my (then) colleague Dale had 500,000 page views from his HTML5 pacman (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549056 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549056) he didn't put Google Ads on it because 'Google Ads are Cheap'. But then my (non-technical) customer Tim specifically said he wouldn't put Google adds on http://cyclingbibliography.org/ http://cyclingbibliography.org/ which is designed to make him income, I thought, Oh!. At Xmas my 12 year old was moaning about Google when looking for something. It has now reached the point where a page ranking algorithm which penalises sites with Google Ads would be welcomed by many people. Google's problem is that only way out is to reduce its income - when it has been tweaking its software to increase its yield.

eli 16y ago
Even when you're the one paying Google real money, the customer service is often lousy and Google's methods are still opaque.
- gscott 16y ago
  I had an adwords represenative tell me "traffic school" (and various other keywords) is not a relevant keyword to an online traffic school for traffic tickets. One can only hope that Google Search is more sane.
jimbokun 16y ago
"Google's problem is that only way out is to reduce its income - when it has been tweaking its software to increase its yield." Sounds like a case of Innovator's Dilemma.
- gordonguthrie 16y ago
  Exactly Google's problem. As Christiansen says in the Innovators Dilemma - managers don't allocate resources, customers do. One of the reasons why all Google's products except search are commercial failures.
nostrademons 16y ago
I don't have numbers, but I'd imagine that Google gets paid more when you do a search and click on AdWords than when you do a search, click on a content farm, and then click on AdSense. In the latter case, they have to split the income with the content farm.
- grhino 16y ago
  To generate income, Google prefers visitors that click on AdWords links. Do links to content farms cannibalize AdWords links? I don't think so. Content farms are producing profitable responses to search queries in the present. The negative impact of links to content farms to Google's bottom line is not due to visitor behavior during the current search but on the reduced likelihood of that visitor using Google to search again. It's possible that the average visitor is more satisfied with the results with content farms included than they are without content farms.
swombat 16y ago
Google's problem is that only way out is to reduce its income - when it has been tweaking its software to increase its yield. Interesting. Considering Google's focus on A/B testing everything, perhaps they A/B tested themselves into this. Can you A/B test your way out of a slowly decreasing local minimum?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

eli 16y ago

Even when you're the one paying Google real money, the customer service is often lousy and Google's methods are still opaque.

gscott 16y ago
I had an adwords represenative tell me "traffic school" (and various other keywords) is not a relevant keyword to an online traffic school for traffic tickets. One can only hope that Google Search is more sane.

jimbokun 16y ago

"Google's problem is that only way out is to reduce its income - when it has been tweaking its software to increase its yield." Sounds like a case of Innovator's Dilemma.

gordonguthrie 16y ago
Exactly Google's problem. As Christiansen says in the Innovators Dilemma - managers don't allocate resources, customers do. One of the reasons why all Google's products except search are commercial failures.

nostrademons 16y ago

I don't have numbers, but I'd imagine that Google gets paid more when you do a search and click on AdWords than when you do a search, click on a content farm, and then click on AdSense. In the latter case, they have to split the income with the content farm.

grhino 16y ago
To generate income, Google prefers visitors that click on AdWords links. Do links to content farms cannibalize AdWords links? I don't think so. Content farms are producing profitable responses to search queries in the present. The negative impact of links to content farms to Google's bottom line is not due to visitor behavior during the current search but on the reduced likelihood of that visitor using Google to search again. It's possible that the average visitor is more satisfied with the results with content farms included than they are without content farms.

swombat 16y ago

Google's problem is that only way out is to reduce its income - when it has been tweaking its software to increase its yield. Interesting. Considering Google's focus on A/B testing everything, perhaps they A/B tested themselves into this. Can you A/B test your way out of a slowly decreasing local minimum?

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]