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> Every single search I run has ads. Really? If you go to https://myactivity.google.com/item?product=19 https://myactivity.google.com/item?product=19 you shou
by jefftk 6y ago
> Every single search I run has ads.
Really? If you go to https://myactivity.google.com/item?product=19 https://myactivity.google.com/item?product=19 you should be able to see all your recent google searches. Here are my queries today:
* myactivity
* somerville trick or treating 2020
* Lilywise dinner
* jefftk mask usage
* How far around the world is it at the longitude of NYC
* wbz coverage map
* wbur coverage map
* wbz frequency
* radio station coverage area
* us radio station map
* time zones
* telegraph
* atlas of the historical geography of the united states
* isochrone
* travel time from dc to nyc historically
* nyc longitude and latitude
* philly longitude and latitude
* dc longitude and latitude
* wikipedia time zones
* wikipedia solar time
* fivethirtyeight
* who won the debate
Going back and searching these again, only "atlas of the historical geography of the united states" showed ads.
> I’m saying is that if there’s only a single ad and they are paying $3 because google set that limit, they could lower that to what the market will bear and start at .05 or something.
If they did that, then every query would have an ad at the top, generally a pretty irrelevant one. People would learn to ignore the ads. This would then make ads on searches like "buy insurance" much less valuable.
> Setting floors on ads doesn’t reduce the number of ads I see
Huh? Of course it does. If you set a floor, some bids are going to be below the floor. For some queries, in my experience a large majority, all bids are going to be below the floor and you see no ads.
> This is only possible as they are a monopoly.
This has nothing to do with whether Google is or isn't a monopoly. Even a very small search engine would make this kind of tradeoff, choosing not to annoy users with low value ads.
Similarly, if you try these searches on Bing or DDG (which both show ads from Microsoft Ads) you will see they are using the same approach, with many ads on highly commercial queries and no ads on most queries. They even published a paper about it: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/RankingPaper20EC20version.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...