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> The main problem here is that if Williams Sonoma was not advertising on that search term, Lodge and Food52 etc etc would, and then those companies would be ab

• aesyondu 5y ago
  I purposely click the non-ad link when searching in Google (because I'm too lazy to type the full url). Does that help at all, i.e., prevents unnecessary ad spend from bidding?
  • hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    I do the same, but 99% of people do not, so it's really a drop in the bucket. I do wish there were some regulation such that if a user is searching for a trademarked or copyrighted term, that the best organic search result for that term should be required to show up first. I'm fine with showing competitor ads, but I don't think they should be able to show up above the trademark owner's ads.
    • figassis 5y ago
      And would be trivial for google, with all their content id tech
    • verve_rat 5y ago
      It feels like it is close (but not really) to a trademark violation. If I search for "A" and get a screen full of results for "B", if I need to scroll to even see mentions of "A", then that feels like it is really close to "passing off". I could see an argument for saying that this "passing off" causes customer confusion that requires trademark enforcement. I realise that would probably be an impossible argument to win under current law (IANAL), but it _feels_ so very close.
      • GeneralMayhem 5y ago
        US case law is extremely clear that bidding on and running ads on trademarked keywords is not a trademark violation, so long as you aren't misrepresenting that the replacement is the trademarked thing; see e.g. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/business-torts-unfair-competition/practice/2017/keyword-advertising-and-trademark-infringement/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/bus....
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • account42 5y ago
    Why not go a step further and configure your browser so that the ad links are not shown at all? Only takes a couple of clicks. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...
• Puts 5y ago
  Sometimes I click on Google ads just because I don't like a brand and feel a little bit of joy knowing I just cost them a dollar.
  • drevil-v2 5y ago
    Way more than a dollar. If you really want to cost a company a pretty penny, click on the ad after searching for an "intent" to do something rather than the exact brand. Some of those Adwords cost many tens of dollars.
    • JacobThreeThree 5y ago
      I haven't seen anyone mention the fact that a big factor that contributes to how the Google Ads "black box" determines how to rank ads is via an Ad Quality measurement. Each ad is given a quality score, and since your own website will be guaranteed to be the most authoritative source for a keyword search with your own branded keyword(s) in it, by default the quality of your own ads will be much higher than your competition. This means in practice that the cost for a brand to be shown first on their own branded keywords is much lower than their average CPC, let alone the cost for their competitors to be there.
      • titzer 5y ago
        The very fact that you have to bid on clicks for your own damn website by paying Google, because Google has prioritized ads to the point of displaying them higher and making them almost indistinguishable from the "organic" search result proves they have intentionally created a tax on the internet. It will get worse, to the point where to get auto-completed in the omnibox you'll have to pay. TBH I am not even sure if that isn't already the case!
        • alphabetting 5y ago
          I'd rather ignore some ads which are less intrusive than places like Amazon than pay a subscription fee to use search, gmail and docs which are funded by ads.
• thomasahle 5y ago
  > I like to call these effectively the "Google Tax" because publishers/retailers are forced to pay Google for the traffic they would have already received had the ad not been there. Isn't this just the usual problem with advertising? You have to do it because the other players are doing it. If nobody did it, it would still be the same cake to be shared. This case is more on the nose, but only because of some fairness assumption that "Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet" _ought_ to be traffic for Williams Sonoma.
  • mc32 5y ago
    When people search Pepsi Cola they expect to get a link to Pepsi or information about it. They don’t expect to see Coca Cola or RC Cola, etc. now in this case Pepsi makes sure search isn’t polluted by paying Google good money to always be the top results for that term. Now, if you searched on the generic ‘cola’ or ‘soda pop’ then yes you expect to see those who bid higher to be at the top and at the bottom those who bid nothing unless organically somehow they ended elsewhere.
    • thomasahle 5y ago
      I guess that's more a customer satisfaction problem for Google, than it is a problem for advertisers.
      • lillecarl 5y ago
        Advertisers are the customers, or am I missing something? To be fair, I don't consume any adblockable ads or TV ads (maybe once a quarter for TV) so I don't know if people click them, how much does purchasing ads affect the normal search score?
        • thomasahle 5y ago
          Sorry, I should have written "users".
  • finnh 5y ago
• jayd16 5y ago
  >pay Google for the traffic they would have already received had the ad not been there. But this line of reasoning begs the question. If this system wasn't in place, then Google search would not exist as it does and the search traffic would not necessarily exist in the same way, no?
  • tshaddox 5y ago
    I don't see why the search engine would work differently or be any less popular if Google used its algorithms to determine intent (that's Google's whole thing) and then automatically (or via human moderation) prevent companies from showing ads when there is clear intent to find another company's brand. Google would be somewhat less profitable, perhaps, but the search product would still work fine (arguably even better) for the people searching.
  • mbesto 5y ago
    > Google search would not exist as it does and the search traffic would not necessarily exist in the same way, no yes and no. Google search didn't have as intrusive and competitive ads as it did before and the search function was effectively the same. Nowadays, if you search "Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet" you get 5~6 ads and 2-3 scrolls to get to the real organic results. 6~8 years it was like 1 ad and you could see the first result.
    • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      At this point I'm actually wondering how much more discussion will be required about "Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet" to get HN among the top search results. Another reason why ads for "Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet" exist are not just to combat Williams Sonoma competitors but also scummy SEO search engine spam, I mean what if you don't pay to have your stuff in the first results and some hustle comes along that makes fake product review sites off of scraped results and engineers getting their stuff all among the first results, since UX research shows people not finding a relevant hit in the first few results do not go to the next page in results it implies that ads are required to give the correct research for something obvious like this because otherwise you have to take a chance with the present day subpar google results.
• aerosmile 5y ago
  I agree with the rant how Google introduced a tax that wouldn't have existed in a world without Google. And, technically speaking, it would have been possible for Google to not charge for that tax (but would you have done that in their shoes? It's not like their market share is suffering). But if you are implying that brands should not invest in on-brand search campaigns, then this is a really bad advice. It's a known fact that targeting your competitors' branded terms is ROI positive, which definitionally means that the affected brand is unable to capture all the customers who were initially searching for it.
  • mbesto 5y ago
    > But if you are implying that brands should not invest in on-brand search campaigns, then this is a really bad advice. I'll be more explicit - you should test the difference. I usually recommend companies do a blackout month where they turn off all programmatic ads and then do a like-for-like comparison. To further emphasis my point before, I've seen ad ops agencies say "hey you've got an overall 15x ROAS" and then find out that 80% of their ad spend is on-brand (give them 25x or whatever) and the off-brand (which is 20% of the spend) is giving them 5x. So their ROAS is inappropriately distributed to try to reach an overall ROAS goal.
    • aerosmile 5y ago
      There are bad actors in every field. I would just be careful in using such anecdotes to distract from the overall message, which as you spelled it out in detail seems sound (with perhaps just a note that a 5X ROAS is not bad for most unbranded campaigns, but I get your point).
• btown 5y ago
  It’s less the Google tax than the “advertising is now efficient” tax. Any other medium would theoretically have the same problem: if Ovaltine doesn’t sponsor kids’ radio shows in the 1950s and someone thinks they can deploy capital to grow a competitor, that someone will buy that slot. People couldn’t do this because there were human processes and relationships slowing this marketplace down. The thing that Google did was make it possible to test this at small scale.
  • ohyeshedid 5y ago
    They weren't bidding on keywords, though, just airtime. That's an entirely different advertising model and market.
• z3rgl1ng 5y ago
  It’s pretty shocking. Had similar discussions w/ co’s dominating organic and paying ~~fucking con artists~~ affiliate marketers. IMO those are faaaaar worse than poorly allocated search spend..
• worker767424 5y ago
  It's not a tax, it's a protection racket. You wouldn't like it if someone looking for Williams Sonoma saw results for Sur La Table, would you? Pay up.
  • vkou 5y ago
    An ad directing shoppers to your competitors who pay them is not a protection racket, no more than a travel agency directing travelers to businesses that they have a relationship with. It's the entire business model of aggregators and intermediaries and middle men, which compose roughly half the world's working population.
    • betenoire 5y ago
      But they call it a search engine. That would be a fairer point if they called it an ad-lookup engine
    • SilasX 5y ago
      lol yes, from Firefly: "About fifty percent of the human race is middlemen, and they don't take kindly to being eliminated."
    • floatingatoll 5y ago
      You tell a cab driver to take you to Morton's Meats and instead they take you to Shelly's Steaks (who pays them a kickback each time they do this), and then charge you for that detour to earn their kickback when you demand they take you to Morton's like you asked in the first place. Is this appropriate behavior by the taxi driver? Would a regular person consider this deserving of punishment? Is Google's search results advertising bidding system ethically equivalent to this?
      • IX-103 5y ago
        You ask the waiter for a Coke, they ask you if you want Pepsi instead (because they get kickbacks to sell Pepsi). Is that appropriate behavior for a restaurant? How much is Google charging you for your searches? I get them for free. Sure, sometimes it's a pain to scroll down past the ad results when they're not relevant but it only costs me time and attention.
• ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  This sucks for me as a consumer too. I want a WS skillet, and the first X results are for lodge... I don't need a lodge, I don't want a lodge, i want a WS, and google is not showing me what I want.
  • Marsymars 5y ago
    This is a problem on app stores too. If I search for my bank's app, the top results on Apple's app store are apps for competing banks, which are pretty explicitly not what I want.
• zaphirplane 5y ago
  Is the premise here I search for “ford electric car” get 3 ad for other makers, and ford in the top 1-2 search results So I click on the Toyota ad cause it’s on top, and buy a Toyota? Which is taking business from Ford ? What is the answer, no ads hmm that’s not happening on a free search engine. Mark the ad as an ad hmm done Don’t show other results for any brand related keyword search, when all keywords are blocked probably nothing left to show What should the ideal free search engine show when I search for “intel vs AMD”, should intel complain the first result is for a tech site. I do genuinely wonder if the conclusion that the brand company lost money is valid, I do wonder if those searches are like ppl putting cnn in a search bar or generic searches imagine you are driving to a specific restaurant see a billboard ad for another restaurant so change directions and go there, would you dislike the bus/building with the sign