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> If Google were a book shop.. On the Amazon-CEO news yesterday, someone posted an interview of JB from 1997 [0]. In the first 2-3 minutes he explained exactly

> If Google were a book shop.. On the Amazon-CEO news yesterday, someone posted an interview of JB from 1997 [0]. In the first 2-3 minutes he explained exactly that (but for books). There are X million titles on books, they keep a tiny fraction of that in stock for 'next day delivery'. Kinda what Google does (or many search engines). Usually you find the 'most popular' answers on the first page. But when I have a tech problem, I have usually tried the 'first 5 pages' of solutions before I even try to duck it (DDG) for a solution (dear wikihow, yes I did restart my PC!). I assume HN has the type of readers that already KNOW the first 10 pages of solutions, and thus need that tiny level of detail that one gets after digging deep (stackexchange, forums, etc.) Question if anyone who knows: does Google search engine give preference to websites that display Google ads, or it is agnostic? I assume Google's crawlers can 'read' if a website is using X, Y, or Z advertiser's ads. (I haven't used Google for many many years and I usually block any google search and ads related IPs and URLs)(and ads in general). [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM I suggest you spend the 5mins to watch this video. He made it sound so easy..

shadowgovt 6y ago
> does Google search engine give preference to websites that display Google ads, or it is agnostic? Officially, Google claims it does not [https://ads.google.com/home/resources/seo-vs-ppc https://ads.google.com/home/resources/seo-vs-ppc]. The most accurate (sacrificing probability) answer is "Google's ranking algorithm is proprietary; nobody can independently verify whether they up-rank sites that display Google ads by looking at the source code." Attempts to figure that out from the outside via black-box testing are complicated by the simple ubiquity of Google ads; there's a lot of conflating signal that would have to be tuned out (even if one observes correlation between top search results and Google ads, one has to control for the probability that any random site has Google ads on it, or that ads pay for the SEO and information collection that tends to result in a site that ranks highly in Google results, or even the probability that a site without ads, having found itself high in the rankings because it's delivering data that Google concludes is valuable to users, wouldn't respond to that observation by putting Google ads on their site to capture money otherwise left on the table).

shadowgovt 6y ago

> does Google search engine give preference to websites that display Google ads, or it is agnostic? Officially, Google claims it does not [https://ads.google.com/home/resources/seo-vs-ppc https://ads.google.com/home/resources/seo-vs-ppc]. The most accurate (sacrificing probability) answer is "Google's ranking algorithm is proprietary; nobody can independently verify whether they up-rank sites that display Google ads by looking at the source code." Attempts to figure that out from the outside via black-box testing are complicated by the simple ubiquity of Google ads; there's a lot of conflating signal that would have to be tuned out (even if one observes correlation between top search results and Google ads, one has to control for the probability that any random site has Google ads on it, or that ads pay for the SEO and information collection that tends to result in a site that ranks highly in Google results, or even the probability that a site without ads, having found itself high in the rankings because it's delivering data that Google concludes is valuable to users, wouldn't respond to that observation by putting Google ads on their site to capture money otherwise left on the table).