10 ms·

We Don't Want to Run This Ad but Forced To

172 points by Yuval_Halevi 7y ago

lordnacho 7y ago
Another interesting one is trustpilot. According to web shop people I know, it's well known that people who complain require less motivation to write than satisfied customers. So the model is basically that you're forced to pay them to motivate positive reviews to compensate for the negatives.
- TrickyRick 7y ago
  Or it's just that most interactions with stores are really mediocre. If I buy something in a store, it was reasonably priced, it gets delivered within the promised time frame and is not damaged then that's very much par for the course in terms of what I expect from a webshop. It's not "5/5 AMAZING store, will always buy things from here!", it's just so much easier to slide downwards on that scale than move up.
  - lordnacho 7y ago
    Exactly. It's just that in the internet era you can have a restaurant with a queue of everyone who's ever gotten food poisoned, or served late, or served the wrong food, standing outside forever. The thousands of satisfied customers aren't visible. And TP's business model is to build that queue of dissatisfied people so that you have to pay to compensate for it.
    - fouc 7y ago
      That's a good point, perhaps ratings need a way to indicate the the number of satisfied customers instead of keeping them invisible. We are already used to seeing the number of reviews next to a rating score, but maybe we can add an additional "total number of customers" or a percentage of reviews-to-customers.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- lazyjones 7y ago
  > So the model is basically that you're forced to pay them to motivate positive reviews to compensate for the negatives. How does paying them result in positive reviews?
  - lordnacho 7y ago
    They start trying to motivate people to write them.
- buboard 7y ago
  smart money would pay them to write negative reviews for your competitors
  - jnty 7y ago
    surely that just drives people away from your whole market? "Oh man, don't go to any of the restaurants on that street, they all look terrible."
    - buboard 7y ago
      “Except this one!”
TekMol 7y ago
this site lets companies advertise against us using our brand Well, to be fair the "site" lets anybody advertise for any search term. Would it be better if some companies would be entitled to exlusively advertise for certain terms? I don't think so.
- dillonmckay 7y ago
  Like registered trademarks?
  - jeffdavis 7y ago
    Kind of. But the standard of trademark violation is not "did a competitor use it". The standard for violation is closer to: "was the trademark used in a way that might confuse customers over which products or services are authorized/provided by you". I'm not a lawyer so obviously this is not legal advice.
    - Certhas 7y ago
      In different jurisdictions the standard for a trademark violation is vastly different. In some European countries you can't name a competitor in an ad (so no Coke vs Pepsi ads). So this case seems to be well within the range of what trademark law could do. Simply make it illegal to run ads on keywords that are competitors trademarks. Totally not a lawyer though.
    - dillonmckay 7y ago
      Do you remember this from about a decade ago? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Louis_Vuitton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Louis_Vuitton
      - cardiffspaceman 7y ago
        The thinking in the ECJ ruling seemed to completely exclude the burden on the consumer that comes from having to sift through patently unethical listings to get the one you want. (Some people call "patently unethical" dealings "sharp" dealings or whatever supposedly complementary term but let's admit that those practices take advantage of unschooled consumers, and are only good if you think that the only worthy consumer is one who is already schooled) It may be "fun" to discover prices through haggling or learn through research that BogusHandbags.example.com[1] isn't a legitimate dealer in Louis Vuitton handbags but it is work and it doesn't scale to have every consumer have to do it for every decision. [1] using example.com purely as an example. The operators of example.com are doing a good thing for the internet.
diffeomorphism 7y ago
> this site lets companies advertise against us using our brand As they should. If your product is an alternative to $bigbrand then this gives you the best visibility. > When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own brand name, you’re forced to pay up if you want to be found. It’s a shakedown. It’s ransom. No. Your brand is the first actual result. You might argue that four is a bit much or that it should be clearer that these are adds (can you even see those when running an ad blocker?), but "our competitors are running advertisements" is definitely not a shakedown or ransom.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Advertisements look like real search results, though, and being able to bury a company just because you're paying money to run ads using their name (not a generic search term) is just bad behavior.
  - diffeomorphism 7y ago
    Last paragraph. If 4 ads is "burying", what about 3? 2? 1?
- afiori 7y ago
  I am not sure why it happens, but since about a year google became extremely aggressive with search ads. It was infuriating because they were reliably scammy ads for three-random-trending-words domains. It was my main reason for switching to duckduckgo
- mrweasel 7y ago
  I wonder, some countries have laws that forbid you to use the brand of others to promote your own product. So why would it be legal to buy other companys brand as a keyword when buying ads?
ddtaylor 7y ago
They were not forced.
- jstummbillig 7y ago
  Of course they were forced, if being forced means "having force applied to". Did they HAVE to do it? No. Were they forced to? Yes, of course. Much in the same way that you don't have to work but are very much forced to.
  - eloisant 7y ago
    Their choice is either do it, or lose a significant portion of their business. For some business, maybe not Basecamp, it would mean going out of business if you don't have enough visibility on Google. Because Google has a quasi-monopoly on Internet search, something that ideally should be a neutral infrastructure service.
    - makomk 7y ago
      Google also use their near-monopoly in web browsing, obtained by leveraging their search monopoly, to hide and downplay direct URLs to sites so that people don't know any other way to get there than via their search.
  - ddtaylor 7y ago
    Who forces you to work?
    - yifanl 7y ago
      My need to acquire capital to purchase the goods required to survive forces me to work, being the only reliable manner to acquire said capital. If your counterclaim is that no one forces me to survive then I suppose I don't have an answer beyond that.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
PostOnce 7y ago
And they wonder why we block ads. If I search for medicine, maybe they'll show me an ad for homeopathy. Maybe I'm gullible. If I search Reliable Product X and I get an ad for Garbage Product Y... Eventually, doesn't this de-value Google's own brand as being the place where you go to find... what you typed into the search bar?
- buboard 7y ago
  It does! But adblockers work in google's favor here: they make it impossible for competing ad agencies to grow Google doesn't have an awesome ads platform at this time. They just have no competition
asah 7y ago
Could adblockers disable/filter these specific types of ads ("brand ransom"), including competitors? Naive algorithm: if (search term exactly matches the domain of one of the ads) { disable_all_search_ads(); } (Extend to handle partial matches, alternate spellings, etc)
philshem 7y ago
previous posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20871677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20871677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874268 and direct link to twitter thread: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016
lordnacho 7y ago
This article motivated me to figure out why I see those ads in the first place. If you're on uBlock Origin, go to the dashboard and look for a filter list under "annoyances". Mine was switched off.
rahkiin 7y ago
When I search in the Dutch App Store for 'Coolblue', a big online retailer here, the first thing I see is an ad for the 'Bol.com' app, the biggest online retailer here (our Amazon-like website, with the same shady partner practices). Below that is the actual Coolblue app. So this is what happens when the competitor pays more for ads on your own name than you do.
- Shivetya 7y ago
  however in this came, basecamp, is close to generic and easily associated with products and activities.
  - oarsinsync 7y ago
    From https://www.dictionary.com/browse/base-camp https://www.dictionary.com/browse/base-camp: > base camp, noun, a main encampment providing supplies, shelter, and communications for persons engaged in wide-ranging activities, as exploring, reconnaissance, hunting, or mountain climbing. Meanwhile from https://basecamp.com/features https://basecamp.com/features: > Basecamp combines all the tools teams need to get work done in a single, streamlined package. With everything in one place, your team will know what to do, where things stand, and where to find things they need. I'm not sure 'basecamp' as a generic word has anything to do with project management, or any of the other things that basecamp.com product offers.
Angostura 7y ago
Might trademark law have something to say about this practice?
- howard941 7y ago
  In the US the only things that matter in trademark are Lanham Act matters, specifically whether there's a likelihood of confusion (ignoring for the moment active use in commerce and other infringement elements). Simply returning a competitor's ad when searching someone else's trade name isn't enough (citation needed). You might ask whether state bar ethics rules have a different take? And the answer is yes, with results all over the place. This DDG search may be of interest: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22bar%22+buying+competitors+keyword&t=ffab&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22bar%22+buying+competitors+keywo...
- Uw7yTcf36gTc 7y ago
  If you have a registered trademark you can have Google block other advertisers from visually using your trademark in an ad. However, that doesn't prevent them from using the trademark as the keyword target (the non-visible part of the ad).
satya71 7y ago
Yeah, I had wondered why companies advertise on their own name. The other day I was looking up ad word ideas, and the cheapest option was to run it against a top player in the field. Search volume was as high as a generic search, but only cost 1c instead of $4 for the generic keyword. Couple that with how most people click the first link on the page (no accident mind you), it’s just downright extortion by Google.
- jefftk 7y ago
  Which brand did you check? If the disparity is really as high as 1¢ vs $4 then my guess is the brand is sending cease-and-desist letters to people who advertise on their trademark. (Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on search ads. This is coming from my experience buying search ads pre-Google)
  - r0bbbo 7y ago
    And companies respond to those letters? Is there any legal obligation there?
    - jefftk 7y ago
      I don't know what the law is here, but we used to respect the letters
  - chrshawkes 7y ago
    that is wrong. https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/GEICO_v._Google https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/GEICO_v._Google Google has been doing this since forever.
    - papln 7y ago
      Your comment does not contradict parent, it supports it.
    - jefftk 7y ago
      Your link is about GEICO suing Google for trademark infringement, while I'm talking about a situation where GEICO threatens to sue a competitor.
sm4rk0 7y ago
Why do people still use Google? https://duckduckgo.com/?q=basecamp https://duckduckgo.com/?q=basecamp
- The_rationalist 7y ago
  Why should I use an inferior product (duck) on so many metrics? If you really want to disable ads and tracking uBlock Origin fixe the issue.
  - theshrike79 7y ago
    80% of the time DDG results are "good enough" and I'm contributing zero data to the Alphabet Empire. If the first page of DDG doesn't yield results it's about a second's work to do the same search, but with !g appended anywhere in the query.
    - torstenvl 7y ago
      A process which is unnecessarily cumbersome. If DDG wanted people to use it, they'd make the top five or so bang switches clickable. Click and it redoes the current search pretended by a bang.
      - StavrosK 7y ago
        Ooh, seeing "if they wanted people to use it" and "clickable" in the same sentence gave me feelings. To me, having to take my hands off the keyboard is the exact opposite of usable.
        torstenvl 7y ago
        Okay... If you scroll with your keyboard, how do you get back to the search field more quickly than with the mouse? If you scroll with the mouse, how is a one-click solution with the device you already have in your hand not more efficient? BL: DDG makes bang switches unwieldy. They should fix that. EDIT: The / key is DDG's shortcut for going back to the search box. That helps a little. Doesn't mean that a clickable button wouldn't help usability a ton. Additionally, since editing a search is probably the most common use case (rather than replacing the search terms entirely), going to the search box should start with the cursor at the beginning or end of the box, rather than with the whole field highlighted.
chrischen 7y ago
In my case a competitor used almost the same name us, ran ads against our brand, and google wouldn’t do anything about it.
tokai 7y ago
I tried to find garmin basecamp, but this IT company is squatting the results with an add. How could google let some no-name steal from garmin?
- laputan_machine 7y ago
  I get https://www.garmin.com/en-US/software/basecamp/ https://www.garmin.com/en-US/software/basecamp/ as the first result when I search for 'Garmin Basecamp', so I'm not sure what your point is. I'd also argue that Basecamp (the service) is more known than Garmin Basecamp, _especially_ in these circles, DHH is definitely not some 'no-name' :)
  - tokai 7y ago
    My point is that Basecamp does not have a just claim to be no. 1 when you search for the term basecamp.
    - laputan_machine 7y ago
      Which isn't the point of the initial complaint from Basecamp, their point is that they _are_ the number 1 search, but even being the number 1 search places them below several spaces advertising for 'Basecamp'. If Garmin were the number 1 space, perhaps the argument would hold less weight, sure :)
      - tokai 7y ago
        They are not number one for me. Nor is Garmin. A nonprofit organisation working with student living spaces are no. 1 for me. No one is owed any position on google results, as they are not universal.
        m45t3r 7y ago
        The point is, when they're the no. 1 result, they're kind not because there is two or three competitors that shows up as ads above the search results.
Porthos9K 7y ago
Can't Basecamp trademark their name and then pursue a trademark claim against Google, or is it too late for that?
Brendinooo 7y ago
I think the only thing at fault here is Google's UI. I don't have a problem with companies having two tracks to the front page of Google (organic and paid placement), but the ads take up so much space at the top, and they are so poorly differentiated from organic results. My analogy is the yellow pages, which is two things: A vehicle for ads, and a reference list of phone numbers. The sections are distinguished, by white/yellow pages for business/personal numbers, and with ads standing apart and looking different on the page. And YP never screwed with alpha order. They can make their money on ads and you can use the phone book for its raison d'être: a list of businesses/people.
Yizahi 7y ago
Went to my default search (DDG) - Basecamp is the first result on top and then third result. Wikipedia page about them is also on top to the right side. Disabled adblocker - surprise surprise, got same results :) . Opened Google without adblocker - now that's pathetic - two ads on top from Monday and Teamwork companies, then third result is Basecamp. Wikipedia result is below the fold, 8th result. This is one of the reasons why I dropped Google as main search engine two years ago and opened it maybe five or ten times this year (for non-english highly sepicific queries). Google search is simply not the top one now and privacy concern too.
- mrweasel 7y ago
  Try searching for building materials, The entire first page is pretty much just ads. I did a local search for garden tiles, 9 actual search results, somewhere between 7 and 22 ads (depending on what you count as "one" ads). In many cases Google is just an online ad catalog, not a search engine.
  - beerandt 7y ago
    It's been this way ever since they delisted product pages, at the same time they started charging for "shopping" tab listings. Idk if it was a coincidence, but it seems like that exclusion filter was (and is) overly aggressive. IMHO, this spawned the era of fake reviews and crappy commission websites. Google forced multiple layers of un-needed middle management, which of course spawned multiple layers of advertising. (Search ads to find reviews site. Banner ads on review site. Commission links to get to actual product page. Instead of just search and click product page.) The same perverse "layering" system seems to have happened for recipe sites, although I'm not sure why. Search results list tons of home chefs, reviewers, and the crappy sites that think adding 3 paragraphs of shitty narrative improves the quality of their knock-off recipe.
- cloogshicer 7y ago
  May I ask what you use instead now? I've tried replacing Google search a few times but was never successful.
carty76ers 7y ago
It’s true. When I searched for a Tier 1, popular university by their acronym (XYZ), 2-3 other unrelated Tier 2 results were in the top above it.
DoubleGlazing 7y ago
This is pretty normal, especially when their are lots of rival companies doing the same thing. I used to work for a food ordering company and they felt they had no choice but to advertise their own name as rivals were using their brand name as a keyword. It wasn't cheap either, some weeks it could be as much as a few hundred euro. Personally, I feel it crosses am ethical line. As a customer if I search for foo.bar and the first couple of result are for rival companies then Google isn't providing me with the service it claims it would. And as a business I would be forced to effectively double spend. Firstly, I would be spending time and effort on SEO to get to the top of the rankings, and then spent again to get to the top of the adverts that are obfuscating the real search results. I know Google is a for-profit company operating in a free economy, but they still have to be ethical in what they do.
- jiveturkey 7y ago
  I'm not buying it. Why does Google "have to be" ethical? If Google has to be ethical, doesn't Uber have to be ethical? If Google and Uber have to be ethical, doesn't Blackwater/Xe/Academi have to be ethical?
  - taborj 7y ago
    Since we're in a free market economy, we really should be forcing companies to be ethical by voting with our dollars (or, in today's online work, site visits). The problem is not enough people give it enough thought. > If Google and Uber have to be ethical, doesn't Blackwater/Xe/Academi have to be ethical? The problem with this argument is Blackwater/Xe/Academi serve a specific niche that inherently straddles the line of ethicality. They're not akin to Google or Uber; they don't have "general purpose" products that everyone needs/wants. Ergo it's not as black and white as Google and Uber (which in itself isn't as black and white as we'd like to think).
    - jiveturkey 7y ago
      Wait, do I hear you correctly? Google and Uber have to be ethical because we expect them to be, and Blackwater does not have to be ethical because we don't expect it of them?
ShrinkingWild 7y ago
There's no force involved here, this is just Basecamp being upset they now have to pay Google for what they do. Basecamp made a value judgement that the value google provides through its search results is worth the price of paying for ads. This is revealed preference in action, Google has done nothing wrong here other than be the best at what they do.
3xblah 7y ago
There was a time, before Google existed, when the "top result" was not assumed to be the "best" result. The researcher was expected to examine more than just the first entry in a list of citations. Google advertising targets users who place considerable confidence in the ordering of results, despite not knowing the details of the algorithm used.
- SamBam 7y ago
  Google was always extremely proud of the fact that, unlike Yahoo, Altavista, etc., you couldn't buy the top spots. The organic results looked very different from the couple one-line ads at the top or side. Now, if I search without an ad block for something like "screws" I get 1. Two ads that look like search results (same 3-4 line excerpt, same links into internal results, same "more" dropdown), except for a little box that says "Ad". This takes up 1/2 of my screen. 2. A full-screen height worth of map and links to physical stores (have no idea if they're paid for or not) 3. My results
macinjosh 7y ago
I can't find my tiny violin for Jason anywhere; too bad. :( This is the most entitled blog post I have ever seen. As much as I personally dislike Google et al. I don't believe the ownership of a trademark or even just a brand entitles you to be the top of page for that word. Also... if someone is searching for Basecamp specifically (i.e. using the search team "basecamp") they likely aren't going to click an ad for something they aren't looking for. I have a very hard time feeling bad for Basecamp in this situation.
sulam 7y ago
FWIW Amazon does exactly the same thing. If we want the buy box for our own brand, we have to advertise.
ncmncm 7y ago
This is not ransom, it's protection money, or monopoly rent in economics jargon. For an amusing experience, look up "programming questions answered" on Google and Bing and see where Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange show up. If they do. Google serves up a "hongkiat" site that mentions them, but you would need to step deeper that I did to actually find either. Does this mean that SO and SE are refusing to be coerced?
rdlecler1 7y ago
What do you expect? Big companies like this don’t exactly have slogans proclaiming “don’t be evil”
dwild 7y ago
I have seen worse, in the escape room industry, some even use the name of the competitor in the title. I'm pretty sure they were able to get them down the few times I saw it happens, but it was certainly not quick nor easy.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
chrischen 7y ago
The Google tax is real. Merchants see it as a cost of business, consumers are insulated from it to the point where all they see is a wonderful “free” product from Google. The reality is if we didn’t have to do defensive ads on our organic results my company could probably offer 30% lower pricing. But because there’s no easy way to discriminate against google ad clickers we have to charge the Google tax to everyone, as most businesses do. The end result is that nobody cries foul to the search monopoly and its cost to society. Google gets to charge monopolistic pricing without anyone noticing.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

172 points by Yuval_Halevi 7y ago

Another interesting one is trustpilot. According to web shop people I know, it's well known that people who complain require less motivation to write than satisfied customers. So the model is basically that you're forced to pay them to motivate positive reviews to compensate for the negatives.

TrickyRick 7y ago
Or it's just that most interactions with stores are really mediocre. If I buy something in a store, it was reasonably priced, it gets delivered within the promised time frame and is not damaged then that's very much par for the course in terms of what I expect from a webshop. It's not "5/5 AMAZING store, will always buy things from here!", it's just so much easier to slide downwards on that scale than move up.
- lordnacho 7y ago
  Exactly. It's just that in the internet era you can have a restaurant with a queue of everyone who's ever gotten food poisoned, or served late, or served the wrong food, standing outside forever. The thousands of satisfied customers aren't visible. And TP's business model is to build that queue of dissatisfied people so that you have to pay to compensate for it.
  - fouc 7y ago
    That's a good point, perhaps ratings need a way to indicate the the number of satisfied customers instead of keeping them invisible. We are already used to seeing the number of reviews next to a rating score, but maybe we can add an additional "total number of customers" or a percentage of reviews-to-customers.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
lazyjones 7y ago
> So the model is basically that you're forced to pay them to motivate positive reviews to compensate for the negatives. How does paying them result in positive reviews?
- lordnacho 7y ago
  They start trying to motivate people to write them.
buboard 7y ago
smart money would pay them to write negative reviews for your competitors
- jnty 7y ago
  surely that just drives people away from your whole market? "Oh man, don't go to any of the restaurants on that street, they all look terrible."
  - buboard 7y ago
    “Except this one!”

TekMol 7y ago

this site lets companies advertise against us using our brand Well, to be fair the "site" lets anybody advertise for any search term. Would it be better if some companies would be entitled to exlusively advertise for certain terms? I don't think so.

dillonmckay 7y ago
Like registered trademarks?
- jeffdavis 7y ago
  Kind of. But the standard of trademark violation is not "did a competitor use it". The standard for violation is closer to: "was the trademark used in a way that might confuse customers over which products or services are authorized/provided by you". I'm not a lawyer so obviously this is not legal advice.
  - Certhas 7y ago
    In different jurisdictions the standard for a trademark violation is vastly different. In some European countries you can't name a competitor in an ad (so no Coke vs Pepsi ads). So this case seems to be well within the range of what trademark law could do. Simply make it illegal to run ads on keywords that are competitors trademarks. Totally not a lawyer though.
  - dillonmckay 7y ago
    Do you remember this from about a decade ago? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Louis_Vuitton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Louis_Vuitton
    - cardiffspaceman 7y ago
      The thinking in the ECJ ruling seemed to completely exclude the burden on the consumer that comes from having to sift through patently unethical listings to get the one you want. (Some people call "patently unethical" dealings "sharp" dealings or whatever supposedly complementary term but let's admit that those practices take advantage of unschooled consumers, and are only good if you think that the only worthy consumer is one who is already schooled) It may be "fun" to discover prices through haggling or learn through research that BogusHandbags.example.com[1] isn't a legitimate dealer in Louis Vuitton handbags but it is work and it doesn't scale to have every consumer have to do it for every decision. [1] using example.com purely as an example. The operators of example.com are doing a good thing for the internet.

diffeomorphism 7y ago

> this site lets companies advertise against us using our brand As they should. If your product is an alternative to $bigbrand then this gives you the best visibility. > When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own brand name, you’re forced to pay up if you want to be found. It’s a shakedown. It’s ransom. No. Your brand is the first actual result. You might argue that four is a bit much or that it should be clearer that these are adds (can you even see those when running an ad blocker?), but "our competitors are running advertisements" is definitely not a shakedown or ransom.

saagarjha 7y ago
Advertisements look like real search results, though, and being able to bury a company just because you're paying money to run ads using their name (not a generic search term) is just bad behavior.
- diffeomorphism 7y ago
  Last paragraph. If 4 ads is "burying", what about 3? 2? 1?
afiori 7y ago
I am not sure why it happens, but since about a year google became extremely aggressive with search ads. It was infuriating because they were reliably scammy ads for three-random-trending-words domains. It was my main reason for switching to duckduckgo
mrweasel 7y ago
I wonder, some countries have laws that forbid you to use the brand of others to promote your own product. So why would it be legal to buy other companys brand as a keyword when buying ads?

ddtaylor 7y ago

They were not forced.

jstummbillig 7y ago
Of course they were forced, if being forced means "having force applied to". Did they HAVE to do it? No. Were they forced to? Yes, of course. Much in the same way that you don't have to work but are very much forced to.
- eloisant 7y ago
  Their choice is either do it, or lose a significant portion of their business. For some business, maybe not Basecamp, it would mean going out of business if you don't have enough visibility on Google. Because Google has a quasi-monopoly on Internet search, something that ideally should be a neutral infrastructure service.
  - makomk 7y ago
    Google also use their near-monopoly in web browsing, obtained by leveraging their search monopoly, to hide and downplay direct URLs to sites so that people don't know any other way to get there than via their search.
- ddtaylor 7y ago
  Who forces you to work?
  - yifanl 7y ago
    My need to acquire capital to purchase the goods required to survive forces me to work, being the only reliable manner to acquire said capital. If your counterclaim is that no one forces me to survive then I suppose I don't have an answer beyond that.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

PostOnce 7y ago

And they wonder why we block ads. If I search for medicine, maybe they'll show me an ad for homeopathy. Maybe I'm gullible. If I search Reliable Product X and I get an ad for Garbage Product Y... Eventually, doesn't this de-value Google's own brand as being the place where you go to find... what you typed into the search bar?

buboard 7y ago
It does! But adblockers work in google's favor here: they make it impossible for competing ad agencies to grow Google doesn't have an awesome ads platform at this time. They just have no competition

asah 7y ago

Could adblockers disable/filter these specific types of ads ("brand ransom"), including competitors? Naive algorithm: if (search term exactly matches the domain of one of the ads) { disable_all_search_ads(); } (Extend to handle partial matches, alternate spellings, etc)

philshem 7y ago

previous posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20871677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20871677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874268 and direct link to twitter thread: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016

lordnacho 7y ago

This article motivated me to figure out why I see those ads in the first place. If you're on uBlock Origin, go to the dashboard and look for a filter list under "annoyances". Mine was switched off.

rahkiin 7y ago

When I search in the Dutch App Store for 'Coolblue', a big online retailer here, the first thing I see is an ad for the 'Bol.com' app, the biggest online retailer here (our Amazon-like website, with the same shady partner practices). Below that is the actual Coolblue app. So this is what happens when the competitor pays more for ads on your own name than you do.

Shivetya 7y ago
however in this came, basecamp, is close to generic and easily associated with products and activities.
- oarsinsync 7y ago
  From https://www.dictionary.com/browse/base-camp https://www.dictionary.com/browse/base-camp: > base camp, noun, a main encampment providing supplies, shelter, and communications for persons engaged in wide-ranging activities, as exploring, reconnaissance, hunting, or mountain climbing. Meanwhile from https://basecamp.com/features https://basecamp.com/features: > Basecamp combines all the tools teams need to get work done in a single, streamlined package. With everything in one place, your team will know what to do, where things stand, and where to find things they need. I'm not sure 'basecamp' as a generic word has anything to do with project management, or any of the other things that basecamp.com product offers.

Angostura 7y ago

Might trademark law have something to say about this practice?

howard941 7y ago
In the US the only things that matter in trademark are Lanham Act matters, specifically whether there's a likelihood of confusion (ignoring for the moment active use in commerce and other infringement elements). Simply returning a competitor's ad when searching someone else's trade name isn't enough (citation needed). You might ask whether state bar ethics rules have a different take? And the answer is yes, with results all over the place. This DDG search may be of interest: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22bar%22+buying+competitors+keyword&t=ffab&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22bar%22+buying+competitors+keywo...
Uw7yTcf36gTc 7y ago
If you have a registered trademark you can have Google block other advertisers from visually using your trademark in an ad. However, that doesn't prevent them from using the trademark as the keyword target (the non-visible part of the ad).

satya71 7y ago

Yeah, I had wondered why companies advertise on their own name. The other day I was looking up ad word ideas, and the cheapest option was to run it against a top player in the field. Search volume was as high as a generic search, but only cost 1c instead of $4 for the generic keyword. Couple that with how most people click the first link on the page (no accident mind you), it’s just downright extortion by Google.

jefftk 7y ago
Which brand did you check? If the disparity is really as high as 1¢ vs $4 then my guess is the brand is sending cease-and-desist letters to people who advertise on their trademark. (Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on search ads. This is coming from my experience buying search ads pre-Google)
- r0bbbo 7y ago
  And companies respond to those letters? Is there any legal obligation there?
  - jefftk 7y ago
    I don't know what the law is here, but we used to respect the letters
- chrshawkes 7y ago
  that is wrong. https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/GEICO_v._Google https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/GEICO_v._Google Google has been doing this since forever.
  - papln 7y ago
    Your comment does not contradict parent, it supports it.
  - jefftk 7y ago
    Your link is about GEICO suing Google for trademark infringement, while I'm talking about a situation where GEICO threatens to sue a competitor.

sm4rk0 7y ago

Why do people still use Google? https://duckduckgo.com/?q=basecamp https://duckduckgo.com/?q=basecamp

The_rationalist 7y ago
Why should I use an inferior product (duck) on so many metrics? If you really want to disable ads and tracking uBlock Origin fixe the issue.
- theshrike79 7y ago
  80% of the time DDG results are "good enough" and I'm contributing zero data to the Alphabet Empire. If the first page of DDG doesn't yield results it's about a second's work to do the same search, but with !g appended anywhere in the query.
  - torstenvl 7y ago
    A process which is unnecessarily cumbersome. If DDG wanted people to use it, they'd make the top five or so bang switches clickable. Click and it redoes the current search pretended by a bang.
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      Ooh, seeing "if they wanted people to use it" and "clickable" in the same sentence gave me feelings. To me, having to take my hands off the keyboard is the exact opposite of usable.
      - torstenvl 7y ago
        Okay... If you scroll with your keyboard, how do you get back to the search field more quickly than with the mouse? If you scroll with the mouse, how is a one-click solution with the device you already have in your hand not more efficient? BL: DDG makes bang switches unwieldy. They should fix that. EDIT: The / key is DDG's shortcut for going back to the search box. That helps a little. Doesn't mean that a clickable button wouldn't help usability a ton. Additionally, since editing a search is probably the most common use case (rather than replacing the search terms entirely), going to the search box should start with the cursor at the beginning or end of the box, rather than with the whole field highlighted.

chrischen 7y ago

In my case a competitor used almost the same name us, ran ads against our brand, and google wouldn’t do anything about it.

tokai 7y ago

I tried to find garmin basecamp, but this IT company is squatting the results with an add. How could google let some no-name steal from garmin?

laputan_machine 7y ago
I get https://www.garmin.com/en-US/software/basecamp/ https://www.garmin.com/en-US/software/basecamp/ as the first result when I search for 'Garmin Basecamp', so I'm not sure what your point is. I'd also argue that Basecamp (the service) is more known than Garmin Basecamp, _especially_ in these circles, DHH is definitely not some 'no-name' :)
- tokai 7y ago
  My point is that Basecamp does not have a just claim to be no. 1 when you search for the term basecamp.
  - laputan_machine 7y ago
    Which isn't the point of the initial complaint from Basecamp, their point is that they _are_ the number 1 search, but even being the number 1 search places them below several spaces advertising for 'Basecamp'. If Garmin were the number 1 space, perhaps the argument would hold less weight, sure :)
    - tokai 7y ago
      They are not number one for me. Nor is Garmin. A nonprofit organisation working with student living spaces are no. 1 for me. No one is owed any position on google results, as they are not universal.
      - m45t3r 7y ago
        The point is, when they're the no. 1 result, they're kind not because there is two or three competitors that shows up as ads above the search results.

Porthos9K 7y ago

Can't Basecamp trademark their name and then pursue a trademark claim against Google, or is it too late for that?

Brendinooo 7y ago

I think the only thing at fault here is Google's UI. I don't have a problem with companies having two tracks to the front page of Google (organic and paid placement), but the ads take up so much space at the top, and they are so poorly differentiated from organic results. My analogy is the yellow pages, which is two things: A vehicle for ads, and a reference list of phone numbers. The sections are distinguished, by white/yellow pages for business/personal numbers, and with ads standing apart and looking different on the page. And YP never screwed with alpha order. They can make their money on ads and you can use the phone book for its raison d'être: a list of businesses/people.

Yizahi 7y ago

Went to my default search (DDG) - Basecamp is the first result on top and then third result. Wikipedia page about them is also on top to the right side. Disabled adblocker - surprise surprise, got same results :) . Opened Google without adblocker - now that's pathetic - two ads on top from Monday and Teamwork companies, then third result is Basecamp. Wikipedia result is below the fold, 8th result. This is one of the reasons why I dropped Google as main search engine two years ago and opened it maybe five or ten times this year (for non-english highly sepicific queries). Google search is simply not the top one now and privacy concern too.

mrweasel 7y ago
Try searching for building materials, The entire first page is pretty much just ads. I did a local search for garden tiles, 9 actual search results, somewhere between 7 and 22 ads (depending on what you count as "one" ads). In many cases Google is just an online ad catalog, not a search engine.
- beerandt 7y ago
  It's been this way ever since they delisted product pages, at the same time they started charging for "shopping" tab listings. Idk if it was a coincidence, but it seems like that exclusion filter was (and is) overly aggressive. IMHO, this spawned the era of fake reviews and crappy commission websites. Google forced multiple layers of un-needed middle management, which of course spawned multiple layers of advertising. (Search ads to find reviews site. Banner ads on review site. Commission links to get to actual product page. Instead of just search and click product page.) The same perverse "layering" system seems to have happened for recipe sites, although I'm not sure why. Search results list tons of home chefs, reviewers, and the crappy sites that think adding 3 paragraphs of shitty narrative improves the quality of their knock-off recipe.
cloogshicer 7y ago
May I ask what you use instead now? I've tried replacing Google search a few times but was never successful.

carty76ers 7y ago

It’s true. When I searched for a Tier 1, popular university by their acronym (XYZ), 2-3 other unrelated Tier 2 results were in the top above it.

DoubleGlazing 7y ago

This is pretty normal, especially when their are lots of rival companies doing the same thing. I used to work for a food ordering company and they felt they had no choice but to advertise their own name as rivals were using their brand name as a keyword. It wasn't cheap either, some weeks it could be as much as a few hundred euro. Personally, I feel it crosses am ethical line. As a customer if I search for foo.bar and the first couple of result are for rival companies then Google isn't providing me with the service it claims it would. And as a business I would be forced to effectively double spend. Firstly, I would be spending time and effort on SEO to get to the top of the rankings, and then spent again to get to the top of the adverts that are obfuscating the real search results. I know Google is a for-profit company operating in a free economy, but they still have to be ethical in what they do.

jiveturkey 7y ago
I'm not buying it. Why does Google "have to be" ethical? If Google has to be ethical, doesn't Uber have to be ethical? If Google and Uber have to be ethical, doesn't Blackwater/Xe/Academi have to be ethical?
- taborj 7y ago
  Since we're in a free market economy, we really should be forcing companies to be ethical by voting with our dollars (or, in today's online work, site visits). The problem is not enough people give it enough thought. > If Google and Uber have to be ethical, doesn't Blackwater/Xe/Academi have to be ethical? The problem with this argument is Blackwater/Xe/Academi serve a specific niche that inherently straddles the line of ethicality. They're not akin to Google or Uber; they don't have "general purpose" products that everyone needs/wants. Ergo it's not as black and white as Google and Uber (which in itself isn't as black and white as we'd like to think).
  - jiveturkey 7y ago
    Wait, do I hear you correctly? Google and Uber have to be ethical because we expect them to be, and Blackwater does not have to be ethical because we don't expect it of them?

ShrinkingWild 7y ago

There's no force involved here, this is just Basecamp being upset they now have to pay Google for what they do. Basecamp made a value judgement that the value google provides through its search results is worth the price of paying for ads. This is revealed preference in action, Google has done nothing wrong here other than be the best at what they do.

3xblah 7y ago

There was a time, before Google existed, when the "top result" was not assumed to be the "best" result. The researcher was expected to examine more than just the first entry in a list of citations. Google advertising targets users who place considerable confidence in the ordering of results, despite not knowing the details of the algorithm used.

SamBam 7y ago
Google was always extremely proud of the fact that, unlike Yahoo, Altavista, etc., you couldn't buy the top spots. The organic results looked very different from the couple one-line ads at the top or side. Now, if I search without an ad block for something like "screws" I get 1. Two ads that look like search results (same 3-4 line excerpt, same links into internal results, same "more" dropdown), except for a little box that says "Ad". This takes up 1/2 of my screen. 2. A full-screen height worth of map and links to physical stores (have no idea if they're paid for or not) 3. My results

macinjosh 7y ago

I can't find my tiny violin for Jason anywhere; too bad. :( This is the most entitled blog post I have ever seen. As much as I personally dislike Google et al. I don't believe the ownership of a trademark or even just a brand entitles you to be the top of page for that word. Also... if someone is searching for Basecamp specifically (i.e. using the search team "basecamp") they likely aren't going to click an ad for something they aren't looking for. I have a very hard time feeling bad for Basecamp in this situation.

sulam 7y ago

FWIW Amazon does exactly the same thing. If we want the buy box for our own brand, we have to advertise.

ncmncm 7y ago

This is not ransom, it's protection money, or monopoly rent in economics jargon. For an amusing experience, look up "programming questions answered" on Google and Bing and see where Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange show up. If they do. Google serves up a "hongkiat" site that mentions them, but you would need to step deeper that I did to actually find either. Does this mean that SO and SE are refusing to be coerced?

rdlecler1 7y ago

What do you expect? Big companies like this don’t exactly have slogans proclaiming “don’t be evil”

dwild 7y ago

I have seen worse, in the escape room industry, some even use the name of the competitor in the title. I'm pretty sure they were able to get them down the few times I saw it happens, but it was certainly not quick nor easy.

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chrischen 7y ago

The Google tax is real. Merchants see it as a cost of business, consumers are insulated from it to the point where all they see is a wonderful “free” product from Google. The reality is if we didn’t have to do defensive ads on our organic results my company could probably offer 30% lower pricing. But because there’s no easy way to discriminate against google ad clickers we have to charge the Google tax to everyone, as most businesses do. The end result is that nobody cries foul to the search monopoly and its cost to society. Google gets to charge monopolistic pricing without anyone noticing.

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