18 ms·

The following quotes are fairly interesting and ironic: > Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally pretty negative about search engines that sold ads. Append

The following quotes are fairly interesting and ironic: > Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally pretty negative about search engines that sold ads. Appendix A in their original paper says: >> "we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers" > and that >> "we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm"

carrozo 5y ago
Everybody’s got a plan until they’re punched in the face (with hundreds of billions of dollars).
- Causality1 5y ago
  Yep. Money is the one unpatchable zero-day for every platform and service on earth.
  - lifthearth 5y ago
    There is a patch thanks to contributor Marx but everyone keeps pressing "remind me later".
    - daenz 5y ago
      Does bribing not exist in that system?
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        Sure there is. I don't know which motivation you'd have to bribe someone to promite your product, though. Would also be hard to sustain if intellectual property was decommodified. Other, more pressing concerns have to be addressed, though.
        daenz 5y ago
        >your product In a hypothetical world where I don't benefit from a competitive advantage, in what sense do I own the product / company?
        uoaei 5y ago
        Consider firms which are wholly owned by either 1) every single employee (worker-owned firm), 2) every employee and every customer who opts in (consumer co-op), or 3) literally every citizen of a government (publicly owned). You own it in partnership with the other people who own it. This is, in the strictest definition, the socialism that people are so scared of.
        daenz 5y ago
        How much control do you have over the military of your government? Or even the DMV? Are these organizations behaving directly as a response to the majority will of the people? If not, how do you solve that problem before you add more organizations?
        uoaei 5y ago
        The best answer we have today, IMO, in terms of ethics of freedom and agency, is "representative democracy," which may be extended to "liquid democracy" to bridge the gap between small, direct-democracy-capable organizations and large, unwieldy ones. Unfortunately, no solution will be perfect, but that doesn't mean some aren't better than others. The problem is in essence unsolvable. Politics and civilization is an exercise in minimizing harm rather than eliminating it, maximizing utility rather than spiking it.
        6510 5y ago
        I don't know how but I do know it is much harder to make something everyone involved thinks impossible than to make something everyone thought they already had. Perhaps the problem is as simple as setting up a forum with sub forums for every government official - then throw money at it until it works.
    - CoastalCoder 5y ago
      Working example needed.
      - dclowd9901 5y ago
        Socialism, like capitalism, also has a zero day vulnerability by the name of mundane old “human corruption” that undermines its goals. Capitalism just works better because it pits people against each other, keeping the focus off authority and top level control.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - nautilus12 5y ago
      Probbably due to the memory of the deaths of millions of people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_... You get bit by a viper in the bathroom and your going to avoid that bathroom for a while.
      - erikpukinskis 5y ago
        That doesn’t really explain anything, given there are millions of deaths under capitalism too.
        toiletfuneral 5y ago
        but but but those don't count because...I've actually never heard the excuse, they always just go silent. Also, can people please stop conflating things like M4A with Stalin for even like 5min?
        throwaway3699 5y ago
        Big difference.
        heterodoxxed 5y ago
        Not to the bodies in the graves there isn't.
        heavyset_go 5y ago
        Tell that to the people who were enslaved and to the people who starved to death.
        throwaway3699 5y ago
        Slavery is not a function of capitalism, though. Capitalism is being able to 1) firstly, own yourself and your body 2) thus sell your labour however you wish. It's the alternatives economic systems that prevent you from being free.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      Let me know when we reach post scarcity and no longer need a rationing device such as money.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        People thought of this issue since 1870 and the solution they came up with is simply non-transferable rationing devices. In traditional Marxist terms this was labour vouchers but nowadays there are much better solutions. Marx himself wrote about this, in terms of primitive accumulation in socialism. For sure there are a lot of issues, but this isn't one of them. You could in theory have bribery in material terms, but this is much easier to trace than in money terms.
        edgyquant 5y ago
        My argument was with the idea that money will be gone as a rationing device. You can come up with alternatives but it’s the human nature that is the problem not the technology we use to ration resources. Let me know when this bug is fixed.
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        Well, that's not the problem we were talking about, is it? We were talking about the issue of bribery, which is made possible by the fungible nature of money.
        edgyquant 5y ago
        Yes it is, namely this is the GP > Money is the one unpatchable zero-day for every platform and service on earth. To which the response was that Karl Marx had submitted a fix
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        Yes, and? I think you missed a few steps. Someone then answered that bribery is still possible, and I answered again.
  - narrator 5y ago
    Bitcoin at least rations out the zero-days. You don't just have one authority that can create them as needed.
- Zelphyr 5y ago
  Or, maybe, "Everybody is altruistic until they have shareholders." The idea that companies should only be beholden to shareholders that has taken firm hold over the past 50(+/-) years doesn't look to be a good one, in hindsight.
  - dimitrios1 5y ago
    It's not some idea that came about from a vacuum. Put yourself in an investors shoes: you may have some investments that you do for the sake of charity or philanthropy, however, the majority of your investments are to increase your investment. It isn't surprising then, following this basic premise, that we have arrived at the current situation. Capitalism factors in greed for the general welfare of the most people. It just seems that we underestimated the upper bound of human greed.
    - Swenrekcah 5y ago
      It's not so much an underestimation as it is a systematic breakdown of constraints and personal responsibility for owners/directors of large corporations.
  - wnevets 5y ago
    They don't have to be. Everyone just chooses to do it that way because its easier to make loads of money.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Past 50 years, really? "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." - Adam Smith, 1776
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Smith had very few good things to say of joint-stock (shareholder-owned) corporations. They were comparatively scarce at the time. Most businesses of his time, including the "baker and butcher" line you quite, were sole proprietorships or family-owned and operated. The interests he writes of are those of the butcher and baker to themselves. Not to their shareholders. "Shareholder value" is a recent error attributed to Milton Friedman.
ModernMech 5y ago
That's not irony, it's evidence of mens rea.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
https://imgur.com/t/funny/fjqdCZz https://imgur.com/t/funny/fjqdCZz I like the whole quote. There’s one more gem in the middle. It shows they were good once. That they know. Any chance it can return?
- erezsh 5y ago
  No. I don't think it's in their hands anymore.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    Systems work in funny and unexpected ways. When they started their company Brin and Page may have truly believed they could go in the non-profit direction. But the forces at play in late capitalism worked inexorably to extract value, and little by little, possibly before they realized it, Brin and Page were no longer in control of what they created.
sseagull 5y ago
Wasn't this also the story of a dating site (whose name escapes me. OKCupid? PoF?)? Original owner wrote an article about how paying for a dating site is a bad idea. Money is offered, article disappears. Searching is failing me at the moment edit: Was OKCupid: https://www.themarysue.com/okcupid-pulls-why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating-match-com/ https://www.themarysue.com/okcupid-pulls-why-you-should-neve...
- dheera 5y ago
  From the article > 12-moth plan > 6-month plan Why would a dating site have a 12-month plan, and why would a user of a dating site want a 12-month plan? Not only would you hopefully want to be off the site within 12 months, as soon as you found someone compatible, you would hopefully delete the app, but you've unnecessarily paid for months you will (hopefully) never use. I don't understand why anything but month-to-month would make sense for dating, specifically. I mean, if you are a dating app, you should be striving to get users to delete your app as fast as possible (for the right reason), not hang onto an annual subscription.
  - fho 5y ago
    Kind of related: one of the dating platforms in Germany advertises with "every 10 minutes a single falls in love on XYZ" ... 1 year / 10 minutes = 52560 ... that's a pretty bad success rate for a platform that supposedly has millions of users.
  - langitbiru 5y ago
    I'm building a dating app, SwanLove (https://swan.love https://swan.love). It's still in MVP mode and centralized mode. I'm thinking of pivoting into this kind of business model: B2B. So I make my dating app something like GitLab or WordPress. You can install it and host it yourself. You pay me every month if your users exceeds 100. Say, you are a priest or a gym owner. You have a community. You want your people in the community (church, gym) to have a chance to find a romantic partner inside the community. Anyone who wants to register in your dating app needs to be a member of your community first (church, gym). This way, I don't even hold the data (avoiding becoming a honeypot for hackers). I just want the money (in an ethical way). What do you think? Is this ethical business model for a dating startup? For the centralized dating app, maybe the subscription package can help them foster their relationship. I don't know. I'm still thinking about it. Or you can create a bounty in the dating app for someone who can introduce a wonderful person to you. Then if you get married, the dating startup gets a cut from the bounty. The problem is how you verify whether people get married or not. Can we do something like bootcamps offering ISA that can access their students' tax records?
kumarvvr 5y ago
Haha. I remember an interview of Eric Schmidt by Stephen Colbert. Stephen asks a great question in the interview. Stephen : So the goal of Google is "not be evil" Eric : Yes. Not be evil. Stephen : How low would the stock price have to go for your to start being evil? (or a similar question to that effect)
cletus 5y ago
At this point, the snide dismissal of all things advertising is nothing short of boring. To be sure there are many forms of advertising annoyance: auto-playing sound/video, remarketing (or what I like to call advertising a product I've already bought), interstitials, popups (to be fair, there are many non-advertising forms of these eg "sign up to our newsletter" dialogs) and so on. But what made Google a money-printing machine is that search advertising is actually largely aligned with the interests of the user. That is, just by searching for something the user has shown an intent that other advertising doesn't have (where generally it's just attention thievery). Imagine I search for "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here? I get that it's popular to just hate on all advertising but that's just shallow. As long as search results are marked as ads when they are ads and paying for ads doesn't improve your organic search ranking (aka the Yelp business model) then I'm completely fine with it. There is a lot of crap in search results and this is a constant battle of whack-a-mole. At one point it was content farms. As someone who has search for a lot of home furnishing stuff recently I can tell you a big problem is affiliate link blogspam. There'll be some real-sounding domain like mattressreviews.com but it becomes pretty clear it's just mass-produced "content" to justify affiliate links. Honestly, this will probably get to the point (I hope) where Google does the same thing it did to content farms and starts downranking sites with affiliate links (cough Pinterest cough).
- cratermoon 5y ago
  > "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here? Late to the party, but I want to say here the answer is "maybe". However, the idea that the solution to every problem or need is to buy something is pretty regressive and is kind of at the core of the problem with consumerism and rapacious capitalism. For a person to buy something, that something has to have been manufactured, shipped, sold, shipped again, etc. All that is extractive and depends on externalities that are too-often finite. Also, the person buying has to have money, which they made through some kind exchange for labor, possibly fairly, possibly not. For capitalism, incentivizing people to treat a want or need as an opportunity for a financial transaction is essential, even when there are other solutions. Remember, for example, that the Listerine company essentially "invented" bad breath as a problem requiring a product to solve. Not that people didn't legit deal with bad breath before, just that they weren't sold a pre-packaged "cure". So the question "how do I sleep on an airplane" has many answers other than "buy something".
zitterbewegung 5y ago
The AI that makes Google work is not the algorithms they use to index the web its AdWords which uses a general purpose algorithm to auction ads. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/35261.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... Sure, google search was the core prototype that used algorithms to give great search results but without Adwords google wouldn't be google.
- johndags 5y ago
  I think this is largely misunderstood about Google. It seems like ads placed in search results only accounts for a small portion of their revenue. Not sure how much the targeting of ads by analyzing your search history actually contributes either. I think Google just figured out how to scale online ad sales really well.
  - rkagerer 5y ago
    It seems like ads placed in search results only accounts for a small portion of their revenue. Do you have a source for that? Last time I checked (which granted was some years ago) my understanding was that over 90% of their revenue came from advertising, and I think most of that was driven by search results.
mcguire 5y ago
At roughly that same time, doubleclick.net was the most hated company on the Internet. Then Google bought them.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/google7.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/google7.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/google4.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/google4.html "Currently most search engine development has gone on at companies with little publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented (see Section ?). With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm." They never delivered on this "strong goal" to make web search an academic endeavour. They managed to domainate web search but the endeavour is now 100% commercial. It is intentionally nontransparent (due to commercial incentives) and remains a "black art". Don't try this at home. "Also, it is interesting to note that metadata efforts have largely failed with web search engines, because any text on the page which is not directly represented to the user is abused to "spam" search engines. There are even numerous companies which specialize in manipulating search engines for profit." "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine the top result for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's home page when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."

carrozo 5y ago

Everybody’s got a plan until they’re punched in the face (with hundreds of billions of dollars).

Causality1 5y ago
Yep. Money is the one unpatchable zero-day for every platform and service on earth.
- lifthearth 5y ago
  There is a patch thanks to contributor Marx but everyone keeps pressing "remind me later".
  - daenz 5y ago
    Does bribing not exist in that system?
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      Sure there is. I don't know which motivation you'd have to bribe someone to promite your product, though. Would also be hard to sustain if intellectual property was decommodified. Other, more pressing concerns have to be addressed, though.
      - daenz 5y ago
        >your product In a hypothetical world where I don't benefit from a competitive advantage, in what sense do I own the product / company?
        uoaei 5y ago
        Consider firms which are wholly owned by either 1) every single employee (worker-owned firm), 2) every employee and every customer who opts in (consumer co-op), or 3) literally every citizen of a government (publicly owned). You own it in partnership with the other people who own it. This is, in the strictest definition, the socialism that people are so scared of.
        daenz 5y ago
        How much control do you have over the military of your government? Or even the DMV? Are these organizations behaving directly as a response to the majority will of the people? If not, how do you solve that problem before you add more organizations?
        uoaei 5y ago
        The best answer we have today, IMO, in terms of ethics of freedom and agency, is "representative democracy," which may be extended to "liquid democracy" to bridge the gap between small, direct-democracy-capable organizations and large, unwieldy ones. Unfortunately, no solution will be perfect, but that doesn't mean some aren't better than others. The problem is in essence unsolvable. Politics and civilization is an exercise in minimizing harm rather than eliminating it, maximizing utility rather than spiking it.
        6510 5y ago
        I don't know how but I do know it is much harder to make something everyone involved thinks impossible than to make something everyone thought they already had. Perhaps the problem is as simple as setting up a forum with sub forums for every government official - then throw money at it until it works.
  - CoastalCoder 5y ago
    Working example needed.
    - dclowd9901 5y ago
      Socialism, like capitalism, also has a zero day vulnerability by the name of mundane old “human corruption” that undermines its goals. Capitalism just works better because it pits people against each other, keeping the focus off authority and top level control.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - nautilus12 5y ago
    Probbably due to the memory of the deaths of millions of people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_... You get bit by a viper in the bathroom and your going to avoid that bathroom for a while.
    - erikpukinskis 5y ago
      That doesn’t really explain anything, given there are millions of deaths under capitalism too.
      - toiletfuneral 5y ago
        but but but those don't count because...I've actually never heard the excuse, they always just go silent. Also, can people please stop conflating things like M4A with Stalin for even like 5min?
      - throwaway3699 5y ago
        Big difference.
        heterodoxxed 5y ago
        Not to the bodies in the graves there isn't.
        heavyset_go 5y ago
        Tell that to the people who were enslaved and to the people who starved to death.
        throwaway3699 5y ago
        Slavery is not a function of capitalism, though. Capitalism is being able to 1) firstly, own yourself and your body 2) thus sell your labour however you wish. It's the alternatives economic systems that prevent you from being free.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    Let me know when we reach post scarcity and no longer need a rationing device such as money.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      People thought of this issue since 1870 and the solution they came up with is simply non-transferable rationing devices. In traditional Marxist terms this was labour vouchers but nowadays there are much better solutions. Marx himself wrote about this, in terms of primitive accumulation in socialism. For sure there are a lot of issues, but this isn't one of them. You could in theory have bribery in material terms, but this is much easier to trace than in money terms.
      - edgyquant 5y ago
        My argument was with the idea that money will be gone as a rationing device. You can come up with alternatives but it’s the human nature that is the problem not the technology we use to ration resources. Let me know when this bug is fixed.
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        Well, that's not the problem we were talking about, is it? We were talking about the issue of bribery, which is made possible by the fungible nature of money.
        edgyquant 5y ago
        Yes it is, namely this is the GP > Money is the one unpatchable zero-day for every platform and service on earth. To which the response was that Karl Marx had submitted a fix
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        Yes, and? I think you missed a few steps. Someone then answered that bribery is still possible, and I answered again.
- narrator 5y ago
  Bitcoin at least rations out the zero-days. You don't just have one authority that can create them as needed.
Zelphyr 5y ago
Or, maybe, "Everybody is altruistic until they have shareholders." The idea that companies should only be beholden to shareholders that has taken firm hold over the past 50(+/-) years doesn't look to be a good one, in hindsight.
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  It's not some idea that came about from a vacuum. Put yourself in an investors shoes: you may have some investments that you do for the sake of charity or philanthropy, however, the majority of your investments are to increase your investment. It isn't surprising then, following this basic premise, that we have arrived at the current situation. Capitalism factors in greed for the general welfare of the most people. It just seems that we underestimated the upper bound of human greed.
  - Swenrekcah 5y ago
    It's not so much an underestimation as it is a systematic breakdown of constraints and personal responsibility for owners/directors of large corporations.
- wnevets 5y ago
  They don't have to be. Everyone just chooses to do it that way because its easier to make loads of money.
- simonh 5y ago
  Past 50 years, really? "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." - Adam Smith, 1776
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Smith had very few good things to say of joint-stock (shareholder-owned) corporations. They were comparatively scarce at the time. Most businesses of his time, including the "baker and butcher" line you quite, were sole proprietorships or family-owned and operated. The interests he writes of are those of the butcher and baker to themselves. Not to their shareholders. "Shareholder value" is a recent error attributed to Milton Friedman.

ModernMech 5y ago

That's not irony, it's evidence of mens rea.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

https://imgur.com/t/funny/fjqdCZz https://imgur.com/t/funny/fjqdCZz I like the whole quote. There’s one more gem in the middle. It shows they were good once. That they know. Any chance it can return?

erezsh 5y ago
No. I don't think it's in their hands anymore.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Systems work in funny and unexpected ways. When they started their company Brin and Page may have truly believed they could go in the non-profit direction. But the forces at play in late capitalism worked inexorably to extract value, and little by little, possibly before they realized it, Brin and Page were no longer in control of what they created.

sseagull 5y ago

Wasn't this also the story of a dating site (whose name escapes me. OKCupid? PoF?)? Original owner wrote an article about how paying for a dating site is a bad idea. Money is offered, article disappears. Searching is failing me at the moment edit: Was OKCupid: https://www.themarysue.com/okcupid-pulls-why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating-match-com/ https://www.themarysue.com/okcupid-pulls-why-you-should-neve...

dheera 5y ago
From the article > 12-moth plan > 6-month plan Why would a dating site have a 12-month plan, and why would a user of a dating site want a 12-month plan? Not only would you hopefully want to be off the site within 12 months, as soon as you found someone compatible, you would hopefully delete the app, but you've unnecessarily paid for months you will (hopefully) never use. I don't understand why anything but month-to-month would make sense for dating, specifically. I mean, if you are a dating app, you should be striving to get users to delete your app as fast as possible (for the right reason), not hang onto an annual subscription.
- fho 5y ago
  Kind of related: one of the dating platforms in Germany advertises with "every 10 minutes a single falls in love on XYZ" ... 1 year / 10 minutes = 52560 ... that's a pretty bad success rate for a platform that supposedly has millions of users.
- langitbiru 5y ago
  I'm building a dating app, SwanLove (https://swan.love https://swan.love). It's still in MVP mode and centralized mode. I'm thinking of pivoting into this kind of business model: B2B. So I make my dating app something like GitLab or WordPress. You can install it and host it yourself. You pay me every month if your users exceeds 100. Say, you are a priest or a gym owner. You have a community. You want your people in the community (church, gym) to have a chance to find a romantic partner inside the community. Anyone who wants to register in your dating app needs to be a member of your community first (church, gym). This way, I don't even hold the data (avoiding becoming a honeypot for hackers). I just want the money (in an ethical way). What do you think? Is this ethical business model for a dating startup? For the centralized dating app, maybe the subscription package can help them foster their relationship. I don't know. I'm still thinking about it. Or you can create a bounty in the dating app for someone who can introduce a wonderful person to you. Then if you get married, the dating startup gets a cut from the bounty. The problem is how you verify whether people get married or not. Can we do something like bootcamps offering ISA that can access their students' tax records?

kumarvvr 5y ago

Haha. I remember an interview of Eric Schmidt by Stephen Colbert. Stephen asks a great question in the interview. Stephen : So the goal of Google is "not be evil" Eric : Yes. Not be evil. Stephen : How low would the stock price have to go for your to start being evil? (or a similar question to that effect)

cletus 5y ago

At this point, the snide dismissal of all things advertising is nothing short of boring. To be sure there are many forms of advertising annoyance: auto-playing sound/video, remarketing (or what I like to call advertising a product I've already bought), interstitials, popups (to be fair, there are many non-advertising forms of these eg "sign up to our newsletter" dialogs) and so on. But what made Google a money-printing machine is that search advertising is actually largely aligned with the interests of the user. That is, just by searching for something the user has shown an intent that other advertising doesn't have (where generally it's just attention thievery). Imagine I search for "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here? I get that it's popular to just hate on all advertising but that's just shallow. As long as search results are marked as ads when they are ads and paying for ads doesn't improve your organic search ranking (aka the Yelp business model) then I'm completely fine with it. There is a lot of crap in search results and this is a constant battle of whack-a-mole. At one point it was content farms. As someone who has search for a lot of home furnishing stuff recently I can tell you a big problem is affiliate link blogspam. There'll be some real-sounding domain like mattressreviews.com but it becomes pretty clear it's just mass-produced "content" to justify affiliate links. Honestly, this will probably get to the point (I hope) where Google does the same thing it did to content farms and starts downranking sites with affiliate links (cough Pinterest cough).

cratermoon 5y ago
> "how do I sleep on an airplane". Isn't a neck travel pillow an appropriate result here? Late to the party, but I want to say here the answer is "maybe". However, the idea that the solution to every problem or need is to buy something is pretty regressive and is kind of at the core of the problem with consumerism and rapacious capitalism. For a person to buy something, that something has to have been manufactured, shipped, sold, shipped again, etc. All that is extractive and depends on externalities that are too-often finite. Also, the person buying has to have money, which they made through some kind exchange for labor, possibly fairly, possibly not. For capitalism, incentivizing people to treat a want or need as an opportunity for a financial transaction is essential, even when there are other solutions. Remember, for example, that the Listerine company essentially "invented" bad breath as a problem requiring a product to solve. Not that people didn't legit deal with bad breath before, just that they weren't sold a pre-packaged "cure". So the question "how do I sleep on an airplane" has many answers other than "buy something".

zitterbewegung 5y ago

The AI that makes Google work is not the algorithms they use to index the web its AdWords which uses a general purpose algorithm to auction ads. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/35261.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... Sure, google search was the core prototype that used algorithms to give great search results but without Adwords google wouldn't be google.

johndags 5y ago
I think this is largely misunderstood about Google. It seems like ads placed in search results only accounts for a small portion of their revenue. Not sure how much the targeting of ads by analyzing your search history actually contributes either. I think Google just figured out how to scale online ad sales really well.
- rkagerer 5y ago
  It seems like ads placed in search results only accounts for a small portion of their revenue. Do you have a source for that? Last time I checked (which granted was some years ago) my understanding was that over 90% of their revenue came from advertising, and I think most of that was driven by search results.

mcguire 5y ago

At roughly that same time, doubleclick.net was the most hated company on the Internet. Then Google bought them.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/google7.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/google7.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/google4.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/google4.html "Currently most search engine development has gone on at companies with little publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented (see Section ?). With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm." They never delivered on this "strong goal" to make web search an academic endeavour. They managed to domainate web search but the endeavour is now 100% commercial. It is intentionally nontransparent (due to commercial incentives) and remains a "black art". Don't try this at home. "Also, it is interesting to note that metadata efforts have largely failed with web search engines, because any text on the page which is not directly represented to the user is abused to "spam" search engines. There are even numerous companies which specialize in manipulating search engines for profit." "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine the top result for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's home page when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."