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> But recently, Google has started to use their power as the effectively sole search provider in a few really extortive ways. First, the Basecamp situation abo

by bko 7y ago

> But recently, Google has started to use their power as the effectively sole search provider in a few really extortive ways. First, the Basecamp situation above: by making a design choice to stuff so many ads above organic searches for a company’s own name, businesses like Basecamp are effectively forced to pay up whatever Google wants in order to access search traffic for customers searching for them directly. That’s pretty extortive. On the flip side, if I were a competitor to Basecamp, I love the access I have by advertising on Google on Basecamp. If Basecamp's business suffers from users going to an alternative, perhaps their product offering isn't as unique or valuable as they would like to think. Also I would point out that people searching Basecamp on Google rather than going to Basecamp.com may look for Basecamp type products. It's like if I search band-aid. Maybe I mean band-aid branded products, but giving me access to similar offerings is great for me as well as competitors

rypskar 7y ago
And then you have all the users who goes to the address bar, type basecamp, hits enter before clicking on the first link in the search result without even looking at the link
tomp 7y ago
Too bad you're downvoted. I agree. For example, Apple barely needs to advertise, as (until recently at least) its products are a quality class above everyone else, so basically, every non-Apple laptop is an Apple advertisement. I haven't used Basecamp so I'm not so sure about them, but ... maybe they're just not that good?
- navigatesol 7y ago
  >Apple barely needs to advertise Apple has a $2B marketing budget and has advertising everywhere, all the time.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Indeed, absent advertising, how would the previous poster, like so many others, have come to believe the fiction that Apple products have better quality than their competitors'? What they do have is higher prices. They could, in principle, deliver better quality, but Apple's record-breaking pile of cash demonstrates clearly that they are not spending it to give customers better quality, but rather pocketing it. So, what are customers getting for their extra money, instead? They are displaying an ability to spend wastefully, a social dominance signal. They feel like they benefit, and Apple actually does benefit. Everyone who thinks they attracted a more desirable mate via such a display has, instead, attracted a mate who was fooled by such a display. What is the correlation between quality and foolishness? It must surely be negative.
- chimi 7y ago
  Apple's value is it's advertising and brand. It's products are objectively not higher quality. People just say that because they have been told that by other people. High quality products last a long time. Apple's products are engineered to not last a long time. There's absolutely no reason I should be forced to buy a new macbook pro to run xcode. Either xcode is a low quality product, the macbook is a low quality product -- or both, which is the case. There are vastly superior products to both the macbook pro and xcode.
  - tomp 7y ago
    I've a 2013 MacBook Pro and am in a market for a new laptop. Please suggest a higher quality product. Even just matching this product, is a challenge - keyboard, trackpad, retina display, battery life, operating system (Windows is spyware, Linux hardly works on laptops). Not to mention that e.g. Apple's ecosystem (iCloud, iPhone, MacBooks, ...) are way better integrated than anything else. Privacy advantages (iPhone is literally the only sensible option for a privacy-oriented consumer). I could go on. Look. I wish any other company would step up and make anything even remotely similar. But they just keep dropping the ball. Closest are probably XPS laptops, but (1) they run inferior OSs, (2) the hardware is probably subtly inferior (e.g. trackpad, battery life, heating & ventilation, plastic chassis (LOL), weight, ...), so for the price I might just buy Apple again (or stay with my old laptop, which, contrary to your comment, still works very well - though admittedly I don't have to use XCode).
    - neutronicus 7y ago
      The keyboard on my wife's MacBook Pro is already malfunctioning pretty egregiously after like a year of ownership so even the latest Apple stuff is not a great 2013 MacBook replacement.
      - tomp 7y ago
        Yeah, I agree, but to catch up to 2013 Apple, 2019 Apple only has to fix the keyboard and a few other hardware updates, whereas other manufacturers have a whole new OS to write :)
- kazinator 7y ago
  > Every non-Apple laptop is an Apple advertisement. Really? Does this work for cars? Is every Hyundai Elantra on the road a BMW advertisement? How about watches? Every Timex or Casio is a Rolex advertisement?
Ididntdothis 7y ago
“Also I would point out that people searching Basecamp on Google rather than going to Basecamp.com may look for Basecamp type products” From what I have seen most people don’t even know the difference. They type in “basecamp” and Click the first link.
- ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y ago
  How many people have you personally observed searching for Basecamp? I mean, it can't be that many, right? Or, do you mean, most people you've watched use Google just click the top link for whatever they're searching for? But even then, how often do you look over people's shoulders when they're searching? Maybe I'm weird but, like, I don't have any idea how my friends or colleagues use Google, and I work in the industry. So I'm really curious via what mechanism you were able to gather enough samples that you feel you can make a strong statement on this one way or another. Are you in SEO? A UX researcher? Do you have a business interest in the way people use Google, somehow?
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    I work in ML for search engines and have been part of very large cohort (n > 5000) user studies carried out by a former employer to measure eye saccade movements over search result pages to understand where user attention is drawn in different search modalities. In list form results, users typically just click whatever is the first thing without much consideration for its relevance. In gallery form results, users will scan in a ”backwards C” shape along the first row, down the far right column, then from right to left along the bottom row above the fold, pretty consistently, but still usually just click things in the first row. The cohort was meticulously designed to allow controlling for factors like age, search interface familiarity (users completed tasks in sessions prior to the eye measurement portion), country, language, etc.
    - ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y ago
      Interesting! It might go without saying, but just to check: I assume the study intentionally included some cases where the first result was not the most relevant one, right? Did the study find differences in the rate of clicking on the first result when the first result was irrelevant?
arafa 7y ago
As a counterpoint (also discussed in other threads below), often few other people want to bid on those keywords, so it's not as expensive. It's still a crappy thing to do.
tachyonbeam 7y ago
It seems to me that a larger company could use this to crush smaller competitors, keep them from gaining market share by advertising using the smaller business name as a keyword, and constantly outbidding the smaller competitor. Enabling that kind of anti-competitive practice is pretty horrible.
- the_watcher 7y ago
  Placement isn't solely based on your bid. My experience has been that branded kw bidding requires only token spending to be the top result for your brand term.
unkulunkulu 7y ago
> Also I would point out that people searching Basecamp on Google rather than going to Basecamp.com may look for Basecamp type products. It does not make much sense from pure search engine quality perspective, top hit for a navigational query should be the main url, it also better redirect right away from browser addressbar context (“I’m feeling lucky” like) Alternatives are fine if the query contains the word “alternative” or other intent markers

by bko 7y ago

rypskar 7y ago

And then you have all the users who goes to the address bar, type basecamp, hits enter before clicking on the first link in the search result without even looking at the link

tomp 7y ago

Too bad you're downvoted. I agree. For example, Apple barely needs to advertise, as (until recently at least) its products are a quality class above everyone else, so basically, every non-Apple laptop is an Apple advertisement. I haven't used Basecamp so I'm not so sure about them, but ... maybe they're just not that good?

navigatesol 7y ago
>Apple barely needs to advertise Apple has a $2B marketing budget and has advertising everywhere, all the time.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Indeed, absent advertising, how would the previous poster, like so many others, have come to believe the fiction that Apple products have better quality than their competitors'? What they do have is higher prices. They could, in principle, deliver better quality, but Apple's record-breaking pile of cash demonstrates clearly that they are not spending it to give customers better quality, but rather pocketing it. So, what are customers getting for their extra money, instead? They are displaying an ability to spend wastefully, a social dominance signal. They feel like they benefit, and Apple actually does benefit. Everyone who thinks they attracted a more desirable mate via such a display has, instead, attracted a mate who was fooled by such a display. What is the correlation between quality and foolishness? It must surely be negative.
chimi 7y ago
Apple's value is it's advertising and brand. It's products are objectively not higher quality. People just say that because they have been told that by other people. High quality products last a long time. Apple's products are engineered to not last a long time. There's absolutely no reason I should be forced to buy a new macbook pro to run xcode. Either xcode is a low quality product, the macbook is a low quality product -- or both, which is the case. There are vastly superior products to both the macbook pro and xcode.
- tomp 7y ago
  I've a 2013 MacBook Pro and am in a market for a new laptop. Please suggest a higher quality product. Even just matching this product, is a challenge - keyboard, trackpad, retina display, battery life, operating system (Windows is spyware, Linux hardly works on laptops). Not to mention that e.g. Apple's ecosystem (iCloud, iPhone, MacBooks, ...) are way better integrated than anything else. Privacy advantages (iPhone is literally the only sensible option for a privacy-oriented consumer). I could go on. Look. I wish any other company would step up and make anything even remotely similar. But they just keep dropping the ball. Closest are probably XPS laptops, but (1) they run inferior OSs, (2) the hardware is probably subtly inferior (e.g. trackpad, battery life, heating & ventilation, plastic chassis (LOL), weight, ...), so for the price I might just buy Apple again (or stay with my old laptop, which, contrary to your comment, still works very well - though admittedly I don't have to use XCode).
  - neutronicus 7y ago
    The keyboard on my wife's MacBook Pro is already malfunctioning pretty egregiously after like a year of ownership so even the latest Apple stuff is not a great 2013 MacBook replacement.
    - tomp 7y ago
      Yeah, I agree, but to catch up to 2013 Apple, 2019 Apple only has to fix the keyboard and a few other hardware updates, whereas other manufacturers have a whole new OS to write :)
kazinator 7y ago
> Every non-Apple laptop is an Apple advertisement. Really? Does this work for cars? Is every Hyundai Elantra on the road a BMW advertisement? How about watches? Every Timex or Casio is a Rolex advertisement?

Ididntdothis 7y ago

“Also I would point out that people searching Basecamp on Google rather than going to Basecamp.com may look for Basecamp type products” From what I have seen most people don’t even know the difference. They type in “basecamp” and Click the first link.

ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y ago
How many people have you personally observed searching for Basecamp? I mean, it can't be that many, right? Or, do you mean, most people you've watched use Google just click the top link for whatever they're searching for? But even then, how often do you look over people's shoulders when they're searching? Maybe I'm weird but, like, I don't have any idea how my friends or colleagues use Google, and I work in the industry. So I'm really curious via what mechanism you were able to gather enough samples that you feel you can make a strong statement on this one way or another. Are you in SEO? A UX researcher? Do you have a business interest in the way people use Google, somehow?
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  I work in ML for search engines and have been part of very large cohort (n > 5000) user studies carried out by a former employer to measure eye saccade movements over search result pages to understand where user attention is drawn in different search modalities. In list form results, users typically just click whatever is the first thing without much consideration for its relevance. In gallery form results, users will scan in a ”backwards C” shape along the first row, down the far right column, then from right to left along the bottom row above the fold, pretty consistently, but still usually just click things in the first row. The cohort was meticulously designed to allow controlling for factors like age, search interface familiarity (users completed tasks in sessions prior to the eye measurement portion), country, language, etc.
  - ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y ago
    Interesting! It might go without saying, but just to check: I assume the study intentionally included some cases where the first result was not the most relevant one, right? Did the study find differences in the rate of clicking on the first result when the first result was irrelevant?

arafa 7y ago

As a counterpoint (also discussed in other threads below), often few other people want to bid on those keywords, so it's not as expensive. It's still a crappy thing to do.

tachyonbeam 7y ago

It seems to me that a larger company could use this to crush smaller competitors, keep them from gaining market share by advertising using the smaller business name as a keyword, and constantly outbidding the smaller competitor. Enabling that kind of anti-competitive practice is pretty horrible.

the_watcher 7y ago
Placement isn't solely based on your bid. My experience has been that branded kw bidding requires only token spending to be the top result for your brand term.

unkulunkulu 7y ago

> Also I would point out that people searching Basecamp on Google rather than going to Basecamp.com may look for Basecamp type products. It does not make much sense from pure search engine quality perspective, top hit for a navigational query should be the main url, it also better redirect right away from browser addressbar context (“I’m feeling lucky” like) Alternatives are fine if the query contains the word “alternative” or other intent markers