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Google critiqued the practice of displaying ads above search results

333 points by hubraumhugo 5y ago

tester756 5y ago
to be fair nothing in this post is really weird except "Every ad on Google is clearly marked and set apart" I opened Chromium based browser without AdBlock and they actually put "Ad" next to those first result(s). It is marked as an Ad, but the thing is whether it is "clearly". I'd say not really.
phkahler 5y ago
A few weeks ago I was looking for Free Software (as in freedom) so I searched for GPL <category> and the top 4 results were ads for commercial software in the category. I was going to provide a link here to such result with a hahahaha but Google isn't behaving that way now...
chmod775 5y ago
In the same vein: https://i.imgur.com/y0xl11R.jpg https://i.imgur.com/y0xl11R.jpg
- sp332 5y ago
  I can't quite make out the text there. Does the first one say "don't put your name on the internet" and then the second one demands your name?
  - hadrien01 5y ago
    The first one is the YouTube help saying "Never post things like your name" and the second one is the YouTube website saying "Start using your full name on YouTube", prefilled with your Google+ info.
  - openknot 5y ago
    Yes, that's the essence of it. A high-resolution version appears upon clicking the image. Transcript for accessibility (2011): First red box: Safety Center, Protecting Your Privacy Second red box: Never post things like your name Third red box: Prevent privacy trouble before it starts. Once your privacy has been compromised, you might not be able to undo the damage. Fourth red box: Protecting your privacy means that you are taking care not to post personal information that could result in you being harmed over the [internet]. 2013 (no red boxes, but relevant elements are): Start using your full name on YouTube. How you appear now: 1337_megahacker [no profile picture] How you'll appear after: Lewis C. Skolnick From your Google+ profile [profile picture of person]. Two buttons appear at the bottom-right. "I don't want to use my full name" [colored similarly to background, de-emphasized] and "Next [blue background, emphasized].
    - dpark 5y ago
      > A high-resolution version appears upon clicking the image. Not for me. Maybe imgur does something different in mobile than desktop. Thanks for the transcription.
- advisedwang 5y ago
  And thankfully after much community and employee noise, they reversed that: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/16/youtube-trolls-google-real-name-commenter-policy https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/16/youtube-t...
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I do believe their motivation for people using their real name / identity came from a push to prevent abuse - theory being that you'd be more careful of what you post online if it's under your own name. But in practice, it made people indifferent about what they say online.
  - snowwrestler 5y ago
    I think it was actually tied to the integration of YouTube with Google Plus, which was intended to be a “real name” social network like Facebook.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I do believe their motivation for people using their real name / identity came from a push to prevent abuse - theory being that you'd be more careful of what you post online if it's under your own name. But in practice, it made people indifferent about what they say online. And of course, bots and malicious users will just use a fake name. The backlash that Facebook got when trying to force people to use their real identity, and to have their friends tell on them, must have been enormous - and likely lead to lawsuits, not to mention things like violence and death (think people trying to evade stalkers, trans people, etc.) (And before replying to that last statement, think about whether you're about to commit victim blaming)
- syrrim 5y ago
  https://i.imgur.com/y0xl11R_d.webp?maxwidth=2360&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium https://i.imgur.com/y0xl11R_d.webp?maxwidth=2360&shape=thumb...
- tester756 5y ago
  I disagree, its way more complex matter. Internet evolved from "that computer thing where you should avoid stranger and putting your real info" to something that's as important as infrastructure, we spend so much time in it that it is basically part of the world Facebook and similar pushed it
SubiculumCode 5y ago
I mean that was back when 'don't be evil' was credibly the company philosophy. Going public didn't help.
- z3c0 5y ago
  I'm beginning to use "going public" as my indicator to stop using a product. My decade-old reddit account was recently deleted for this reason, as they were showing all the signs before they announced their intention to go public. I'm really hoping DigitalOcean and Gitlab prove my theory wrong. You would think that private companies would be more prone to unethical practices.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    You might be able to use it as an indicator when to stop working there too. Which sucks because public companies tend to pay nearly twice as much.
    - z3c0 5y ago
      I've had a mixed bag of results on this one, but as someone who works in data, the sudden crunch to bring a company's architecture into SOX compliance can certainly be stressful enough to warrant leaving.
- rebelde 5y ago
  Right. They need to show growth every year in search advertising. One way to grow is to put more ads in more places. Of course, even before going public, they still had to grow (so that they could go public), but they had natural growth then.
- thefourthchime 5y ago
  Does anyone else fondly remember the early 2010s. When companies at least pretended to "Make the world a better place". Now it seems they're just racing to see who can be worth the next N trillion dollar company.
caaqil 5y ago
The earliest version [1] of this page is from Dec, 2015, which is (relatively) recent. Not sure if the Archive missed it but I imagined it'd be much older page. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20151213182805/https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151213182805/https://www.googl...
- ec109685 5y ago
  And they had been showing ads above search results on Mobile for a while: https://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-three-mobile-text-ads-showing-on-some-queries-228644 https://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-three-mobile-te... And enabled this on desktop in 2016: https://searchengineland.com/google-no-ads-right-side-of-desktop-search-results-242997 https://searchengineland.com/google-no-ads-right-side-of-des...
- smitop 5y ago
  It's from March 2002: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22109078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22109078
hdesh 5y ago
"What are you looking at? Never seen a hypocrite before?"
dvngnt_ 5y ago
This practice has enabled scams. Many crypto sites now have a fraudulent version showing as a top result in ads which will allow the user to enter their seed phrase and empty their accounts. at this point an adblocker is more useful than an antivirus software
- mountainb 5y ago
  Every time I get a new iPhone and forget to install an ad blocker, Safari crashes due to an ad problem and then I remember to install the ad blocker.
  - 3np 5y ago
    Which ad-blocker(s) would you recommend for iOS?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - rukshn 5y ago
      I use AdGuard. There free version is more than enough to block ads including YouTube ads. For Safari on my Mac I use the Ka-boom extension
    - theturtletalks 5y ago
      Hyperweb is very nice. They even redirect Reddit links to Teddit so you can avoid their dark patterns.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Firefox Focus is free, but I use Wipr on both iOS and macOS.
    - taftster 5y ago
      I use Firefox Focus, which includes an ad blocker that can be enabled for Safari integration. It works pretty well for me, but then, I don't generally surf on my phone and only use Safari when I have clicked a link from messages or something. I'm interested in other possible options on iOS as well, though. Hoping to see more replies.
justin_oaks 5y ago
dekhn 5y ago
When sundar took over he changed some policies within google to reduce previous commitments to a high quality internet, with the goal of increased growth. This includes a mixing of ads and search results in a way that maximizes revenue as well as many other dark patterns. I believe that Google concluded that it was going to lose relevance and market share if they didn't do this. Note also that the vast majority of google revenue in ads comes from mobile video ads, not search results these days.
- colordrops 5y ago
  They will lose relevance and eventually market share for doing these things. It almost seems inevitable that companies eventually degrade in quality and die or become shadows of their former selves due to compromises brought about by the endless growth expected by investors.
- cm2012 5y ago
  The bit about mobile video revenue is not true. "Today, Google parent Alphabet Inc. reported a record $65.1 billion in revenue during the third quarter of 2021, with the company’s advertising business increasing 43.2% to $53.1 billion. Quarterly search advertising made up the bulk of revenue with $37.9 billion in the third quarter, rising from $26.3 billion during the same period in 2020. YouTube ads accounted for another $7.2 billion—up from $5 billion in Q3 2020—and Google’s ad network revenue brought in $7.9 billion."
  - dekhn 5y ago
    I used to work there and I think my statement is technically correct, regardless of what the breakdown in the earnings say. Oh, sorry- I should have said "profit", not "revenue".
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  > Note also that the vast majority of google revenue in ads comes from mobile video ads, not search results these days. So theoretically in a few years Google might decide to kill their search product and nobody will really come in and make another one because after all the years of bad search results from Google everyone will naturally conclude that search on the internet just doesn't work. That's right, I'm so paranoid I think that song is about me.
jsnell 5y ago
The screenshot text does not say at all what the author of the tweet claims it does (and what's in the HN title). Nowhere in the text does it actually talk about "above" and "sidebar", that is just an interpretation that the author made up about what "buying a better position in the search results" would mean. Given the context of the times, it was clearly not a statement about layout but about actually reordering the "organic" search results based on payments and without marking those boosted results as ads.
- josefresco 5y ago
  > Given the context of the times, it was clearly not a statement about layout but about actually reordering the "organic" search results based on payments and without marking those boosted results as ads. It's actually worse. Google didn't just say "our competitors put ads on top of results". They're suggesting/hinting that those competitors accept payment for placement when in fact that wasn't happening, their competitors like Bing (MSN then) were doing what Google is doing now - merely placing ads above the results, not selling placement. The end result is that they're all now selling placement. The visual difference between ads and organic results is almost non-existent.
  - glenstein 5y ago
    >It's actually worse. Well hold on. We can go ahead and talk about how different this Google statement is from their ethos in the present day. But the framing of this being about ad placement was incorrect, and that has nothing to do with anything. >They're suggesting/hinting that those competitors accept payment for placement when in fact that wasn't happening It wasn't? This strikes me as yet another completely out of left field reaction. I mean, is there a consensus that that's obviously false? A source? Where is this "in fact that wasn't happening" coming from? Was there a big media cycle where there was a deep dive investigation into this that settled the question, that everyone remembers except me? There's a whole field of actors who at one time were relevant: Jeeves, Lycos, Altavista, Infoseek, Dogpile, Hotbot, Webcrawler, etc. And they went through any number of permutations of design, ownership, were sold and reacquired and it stands to reason that at some point some versions of these did things that Google is suggesting. At a minimum it seems prima facie plausible that competitors entertained this.
colmvp 5y ago
I can't imagine navigating the web without an ad-blocker.
monkeybutton 5y ago
There's some interesting images of the evolution of what ads looked like in Google's search results over time. Starting with distinct background colours and slowly fading to looking more and more identical to organic results with just a little icon.
- wldcordeiro 5y ago
  It's always felt like something that should be regulated away. Ads should be very distinct not a single tiny text label saying "sponsored" but 100% distinct from any non-ad content.
thefingerer 5y ago
I may the only greybeard arund here who remembers (and has the screenshots to prove it), used to be from 2005--2008 when you would open a message in Gmail, all of the sponsored ads would show up over on the right-hand-side of your email message, and would all be related to keywords from the inside of the email. Making it grotesquely blatant, how very much the Google computers were reading all your email. At least now they conceal it a little better, by storing your keyword/interests in a giant permanent database, then bringing the advertisements up on other, non-Google pages!
- dpark 5y ago
  Didn’t they announce that they stopped scanning email for ad purposes? (Presumably because it wasn’t actually very lucrative.)
  - passivate 5y ago
    Is there any user data that passes through Google owned servers that DOESN'T get data mined?
    - dpark 5y ago
      That’s literally not possible for me to answer. They did say they aren’t scanning email for advertising purposes anymore though. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/26/534451513/google-says-it-will-no-longer-read-users-emails-to-sell-targeted-ads https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/26/534451513...
  - rurp 5y ago
    Eh, sort of. They released a statement to give that impression but the wording was fairly weasely. They likely stopped using email content for directly targeting ads in Gmail, but there's almost no chance email content isn't being used to target people in other contexts.
    - dpark 5y ago
bmitc 5y ago
Just like I've been actively moving away from Amazon, I've been actively moving away from Google. These companies are leeches on society.
- dpark 5y ago
  You can certainly hate Google and not support them. I don’t know how you can classify them as “leeches on society”, though. I remember the days before Google, when web search was utter garbage, free email providers gave you 10mb of storage and stuck ads on the bottom of every email you sent, map apps were limited to about 400x300 for some inexplicable reason, and Android didn’t even exist. Google very much seems like a net positive historically.
  - macilacilove 5y ago
    I am dpark from 2032. I have absolutely no human rights, and I never need to think about what to buy/watch/read, because Google consolidated all markets. I don't vote anymore because every aspect of life is controlled by G anyway. I have access to a shiny new tech that you don't yet have a name for! Google is still a net positive "historically". everything you think you know about "history" is misinformation. In 2032 Google AI-generates colorful VR videos of the Real Past and boy, I am telling you, we are much better off now! Keep Googling, dpark, 2032
  - bmitc 5y ago
    They were useful once upon a time I think, but those days are long and gone in my opinion. And they are leeches. They are the prime example of making money off of people's data (which is at least one instance of their being parasitic). Maybe back in the day this was acceptable because their search and Gmail benefitted users, but I don't see that anymore. For Gmail, I currently use Gmail because it just happened to be the best e-mail 18 years ago, and it's hard to switch. There's very little about it today that makes it the best. Over the past six years, they've made $755 billion and not a cent paid to people for the use and sell of their data. And all because they provide services like ads above searches and link to shopping websites and Wikipedia, meanwhile selling people's data to whoever? Honestly, it's so hard to use Google as an actual search engine it feels like Google is more like a directory these days. Like, when I have to input a search as: "yes" "i" "really" "want" "to" "search" "these" "terms" something is broken. The only other product of Google that I really use besides their search and Gmail is YouTube, and that's only because it's entrenched. It's pretty adversarial towards, well, everyone except copyright holders.
ndiddy 5y ago
This enables rent-seeking from Google. If you sell a product and don’t buy an ad for it, your competitor can pay Google to put their product on top of the results for anyone searching for your product.
- silentguy 5y ago
  The cost of ad placement depends on the SEO match of the website. It will cost competitor more for the same ad. It's not as blatant. The ethics of ad is murky. How do you think a search company should make money? Subscription?
zriha 5y ago
I would say, this is misleading, as often do Google Ads campaigns, and I follow Google, well, from first day of Google Ads advertising, the position of Google was always the sam regarding ads - there is no way you can buy a position in the search results. Yeah, there are SEO tactics, but they don't grant you fixed position. And Google Ad, well Search Ad is always different (from day one) than the organic search result. And even so, Google Ad can't be misleading, because it directly affects the search result for the user, so you have some parameters like Quality score of the ad and the keyword, and yeah, if you try to mislead, they will disapprove your ad.
coding123 5y ago
Actual ordering by Google: - Ads results - Sites that display Google Ads - Google's original algorithmic results
iJohnDoe 5y ago
Many companies have to spend big dollars on their trademarked terms or company name to get it listed as the top result only via a paid ad. Google artificially pushes down those company results to keep forcing them to pay big bucks for the top result only via advertising. Pretty slimy business Google is in these days. Like paying the local thugs to protect your grocery store.
billyhoffman 5y ago
The full version of Brin and Page's classic paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" [1], which describes the early architect of Google and is an interested read in its own right, literally has "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives." Highlights include: -"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. " - "We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." - "A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. 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." To be clear: the "we" in these quotes are the founders of Google. [1] https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/334.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-... As an aside, I've been reading a bunch of academic papers about early web crawlers and search engines. It's a fun and interesting subject. Mercator [2] (which became Alta Vista) is another early search engine and one of the few that discusses its architecture in detail. [2] https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-173.pdf https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-173.pdf
- hubraumhugo 5y ago
  Another interesting paragraph talks about search engine bias: "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 [Marchiori 97]. 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."
freediver 5y ago
"Canceling" someone for what they said/claimed in the past is a double-edged sword.
- ninkendo 5y ago
  Nobody brought up “canceling” anything, I’m not sure why your comment is relevant.
frabjoused 5y ago
It's frustrating that there's no date associated with this, at least without digging. Time is very important in evaluating something like this and the tweet doesn't bother to state it.
ShaneMcGowan 5y ago
This headline is misleading, the image in this tweet says you can't buy better search placement. Ads shown at Google are labelled as ads, the person is not buying a better search result placement. I do say this ignoring the fact that Google's labelling of ads has been getting more and more subtle over time but that is a separate unrelated issue. This seems to be another attempt of generating hype around "google bad"
jb1991 5y ago
It was a different time. Google's motto was also, "don't be evil" which they retracted years later. It's a different era now.
AtNightWeCode 5y ago
This is fake, or the person is very not aware of how Google search was intended to work in the first place. The whole USP of Google search was to index ads in the same way as other content and display it in the search results. It has always been more about target practice where the “ads” are placed.
dannysullivan 5y ago
What was tweeted isn't what the page says. I work for Google Search. That's about our Honest Results policy, which means we don't allow people to buy better rankings in non-paid Search results: https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/ https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/ Like many newspapers separate ads and editorial, Google has a strict separation between our Ads departments and our Search departments -- and our results. Buying ads will not gain you any better ability to rank in the non-paid Search results. Nor will it get you any special support. That's what the page explains. It never says we don't have ads that show at the top of the page and, in fact, acknowledges that we do: "While advertisers can pay more to be displayed higher in the advertising area." Nor is it true that at the time, we only had ads that appeared on the right-side of the page. Google's first ads appeared at the top of the page way back in 1999. In addition, we continue to keep ads separated from Search and labeled so they can be identified. I totally get that some people would like to see fewer ads. I don't work on the Ad side of Google, but I know that feedback has been heard.
- NelsonMinar 5y ago
  Thank you for correcting this Danny.
- tofuahdude 5y ago
  Google has a long history of making their ad placements look more like their search placements. The ads used to be a clearly yellow block. Then it became more and more faded yellow-to-white. Today, the ads have literally the exact same CSS, except that they do say "Ad" at the start, the legally mandated minimum disclosure. How do you reconcile this? To me, "honest" is already dishonest, in that Google deliberately tries to make ads vs search results visually ambiguous and thus the ads at the top are barely different from paid search placement.
  - sullivandanny 5y ago
    The Honest Results policy is that we're not going to allow advertisers or partners or any one with a relationship to Google to have an advantage in our unpaid search results. As for ad labeling, I don't work on the ad side. I work on the Search side. My understanding from those on the ad side is that the labels are visible and do work. And ads are always labeled.
nemacol 5y ago
I wonder if there is something like “The Peter Principle” for businesses. > everyone is promoted to their level of incompetence Where the business sees some success and grows until they lose the thing that everyone liked about them to begin with Business outgrows their market or something. Blizzard stops producing highly polished experiences for money. Googles search results are degraded and littered with ads for money. Microsoft shifts from software to consumer data collection and now my servers all have Xbox services and a touch UI for some stupid reason (sorry, for money).
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  "Either you die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." It applies to politicians and businesses alike.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
While I'm glad to see the comments pointing out that, no, the tweet's linked screenshot did NOT say anything about displaying ads "above search results", I do think this highlights the need for better regulation around having more visual distinction between ads and organic results. And this doesn't just go for Google, should also go for things like Amazon and Instagram influencer paid posts. From a response tweet: > To be fair, the approach taken by Google (and most search engines) abides by the rules as set down by folks like the Advertising Standards Authority which let "Ad" work as a get out of jail free card regardless of context or visuals. At the very least I think there should be a requirement of a different color background, along what Google used to have in their "Sponsored Links" section at the top of results.
GeekyBear 5y ago
Am I the only person who remembers Google criticizing their competitors for mixing search results and ads in the same list at all? This was back when Google still placed text only ads off to the side of the results page in a blue box to make them even more distinctly separated from the search results.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  At the time, Google's competitor Yahoo!/Overture were 100% pay-for-placement. There was no such thing as organic results.
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    The company I remember them criticizing was Alta Vista, which did include organic search results intermixed with ads at the time. >Google may be big with the cyber-cognescenti, but AltaVista is still reaching a lot more users. While AltaVista reaches 17.7% of Web users, Google gets just 7%, according to the latest Media Metrix numbers. https://www.forbes.com/2000/10/20/1020alta.html?sh=68521b3e79f3 https://www.forbes.com/2000/10/20/1020alta.html?sh=68521b3e7... They weren't bought by Overture until 2003.
ChildOfChaos 5y ago
This is standard practice though in pretty much everything. A new upstart criticises the way it is being done, comes in and changes things, then takes over and then slowly becomes the big guy they were fighting against in the first place. There is are reason to criticise what is being done because it's not the best for the consumer, but there is a reason it's done that way because it's good for business. So the upstart takes over by building a better product but soon corporate needs become a bigger priority once the company reaches scale, so it's prioties change.
bagacrap 5y ago
title (and Twitter post) highly editorialized. Google said nothing about layout of ads on page, but about being "clearly marked" and "set apart" from search results. It's subjective what is "clear" but I don't see why the only way for something to be clear is delta X.
pokoleo 5y ago
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -Sinclair
julienchastang 5y ago
Now I am seeing some Google search results that are nothing but ads on the first page. I recently switched to DuckDuckGo and so far I have been entirely happy with it. I recommend everyone give it a try.
bitwize 5y ago
Yes, and EA was once ideologically opposed to copy protection; today they are the DRM kings. Welcome to capitalism. The pursuit of profit ruins everything.
scotty79 5y ago
DuckDuckGo has a nice browser fir android that uses their search engine as default one.

333 points by hubraumhugo 5y ago

to be fair nothing in this post is really weird except "Every ad on Google is clearly marked and set apart" I opened Chromium based browser without AdBlock and they actually put "Ad" next to those first result(s). It is marked as an Ad, but the thing is whether it is "clearly". I'd say not really.

phkahler 5y ago

A few weeks ago I was looking for Free Software (as in freedom) so I searched for GPL <category> and the top 4 results were ads for commercial software in the category. I was going to provide a link here to such result with a hahahaha but Google isn't behaving that way now...

chmod775 5y ago

In the same vein: https://i.imgur.com/y0xl11R.jpg https://i.imgur.com/y0xl11R.jpg

sp332 5y ago
I can't quite make out the text there. Does the first one say "don't put your name on the internet" and then the second one demands your name?
- hadrien01 5y ago
  The first one is the YouTube help saying "Never post things like your name" and the second one is the YouTube website saying "Start using your full name on YouTube", prefilled with your Google+ info.
- openknot 5y ago
  Yes, that's the essence of it. A high-resolution version appears upon clicking the image. Transcript for accessibility (2011): First red box: Safety Center, Protecting Your Privacy Second red box: Never post things like your name Third red box: Prevent privacy trouble before it starts. Once your privacy has been compromised, you might not be able to undo the damage. Fourth red box: Protecting your privacy means that you are taking care not to post personal information that could result in you being harmed over the [internet]. 2013 (no red boxes, but relevant elements are): Start using your full name on YouTube. How you appear now: 1337_megahacker [no profile picture] How you'll appear after: Lewis C. Skolnick From your Google+ profile [profile picture of person]. Two buttons appear at the bottom-right. "I don't want to use my full name" [colored similarly to background, de-emphasized] and "Next [blue background, emphasized].
  - dpark 5y ago
    > A high-resolution version appears upon clicking the image. Not for me. Maybe imgur does something different in mobile than desktop. Thanks for the transcription.
advisedwang 5y ago
And thankfully after much community and employee noise, they reversed that: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/16/youtube-trolls-google-real-name-commenter-policy https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/16/youtube-t...
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I do believe their motivation for people using their real name / identity came from a push to prevent abuse - theory being that you'd be more careful of what you post online if it's under your own name. But in practice, it made people indifferent about what they say online.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  I think it was actually tied to the integration of YouTube with Google Plus, which was intended to be a “real name” social network like Facebook.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I do believe their motivation for people using their real name / identity came from a push to prevent abuse - theory being that you'd be more careful of what you post online if it's under your own name. But in practice, it made people indifferent about what they say online. And of course, bots and malicious users will just use a fake name. The backlash that Facebook got when trying to force people to use their real identity, and to have their friends tell on them, must have been enormous - and likely lead to lawsuits, not to mention things like violence and death (think people trying to evade stalkers, trans people, etc.) (And before replying to that last statement, think about whether you're about to commit victim blaming)
syrrim 5y ago
https://i.imgur.com/y0xl11R_d.webp?maxwidth=2360&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium https://i.imgur.com/y0xl11R_d.webp?maxwidth=2360&shape=thumb...
tester756 5y ago
I disagree, its way more complex matter. Internet evolved from "that computer thing where you should avoid stranger and putting your real info" to something that's as important as infrastructure, we spend so much time in it that it is basically part of the world Facebook and similar pushed it

SubiculumCode 5y ago

I mean that was back when 'don't be evil' was credibly the company philosophy. Going public didn't help.

z3c0 5y ago
I'm beginning to use "going public" as my indicator to stop using a product. My decade-old reddit account was recently deleted for this reason, as they were showing all the signs before they announced their intention to go public. I'm really hoping DigitalOcean and Gitlab prove my theory wrong. You would think that private companies would be more prone to unethical practices.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  You might be able to use it as an indicator when to stop working there too. Which sucks because public companies tend to pay nearly twice as much.
  - z3c0 5y ago
    I've had a mixed bag of results on this one, but as someone who works in data, the sudden crunch to bring a company's architecture into SOX compliance can certainly be stressful enough to warrant leaving.
rebelde 5y ago
Right. They need to show growth every year in search advertising. One way to grow is to put more ads in more places. Of course, even before going public, they still had to grow (so that they could go public), but they had natural growth then.
thefourthchime 5y ago
Does anyone else fondly remember the early 2010s. When companies at least pretended to "Make the world a better place". Now it seems they're just racing to see who can be worth the next N trillion dollar company.

caaqil 5y ago

The earliest version [1] of this page is from Dec, 2015, which is (relatively) recent. Not sure if the Archive missed it but I imagined it'd be much older page. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20151213182805/https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151213182805/https://www.googl...

ec109685 5y ago
And they had been showing ads above search results on Mobile for a while: https://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-three-mobile-text-ads-showing-on-some-queries-228644 https://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-three-mobile-te... And enabled this on desktop in 2016: https://searchengineland.com/google-no-ads-right-side-of-desktop-search-results-242997 https://searchengineland.com/google-no-ads-right-side-of-des...
smitop 5y ago
It's from March 2002: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22109078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22109078

hdesh 5y ago

"What are you looking at? Never seen a hypocrite before?"

dvngnt_ 5y ago

This practice has enabled scams. Many crypto sites now have a fraudulent version showing as a top result in ads which will allow the user to enter their seed phrase and empty their accounts. at this point an adblocker is more useful than an antivirus software

mountainb 5y ago
Every time I get a new iPhone and forget to install an ad blocker, Safari crashes due to an ad problem and then I remember to install the ad blocker.
- 3np 5y ago
  Which ad-blocker(s) would you recommend for iOS?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - rukshn 5y ago
    I use AdGuard. There free version is more than enough to block ads including YouTube ads. For Safari on my Mac I use the Ka-boom extension
  - theturtletalks 5y ago
    Hyperweb is very nice. They even redirect Reddit links to Teddit so you can avoid their dark patterns.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Firefox Focus is free, but I use Wipr on both iOS and macOS.
  - taftster 5y ago
    I use Firefox Focus, which includes an ad blocker that can be enabled for Safari integration. It works pretty well for me, but then, I don't generally surf on my phone and only use Safari when I have clicked a link from messages or something. I'm interested in other possible options on iOS as well, though. Hoping to see more replies.

justin_oaks 5y ago

dekhn 5y ago

When sundar took over he changed some policies within google to reduce previous commitments to a high quality internet, with the goal of increased growth. This includes a mixing of ads and search results in a way that maximizes revenue as well as many other dark patterns. I believe that Google concluded that it was going to lose relevance and market share if they didn't do this. Note also that the vast majority of google revenue in ads comes from mobile video ads, not search results these days.

colordrops 5y ago
They will lose relevance and eventually market share for doing these things. It almost seems inevitable that companies eventually degrade in quality and die or become shadows of their former selves due to compromises brought about by the endless growth expected by investors.
cm2012 5y ago
The bit about mobile video revenue is not true. "Today, Google parent Alphabet Inc. reported a record $65.1 billion in revenue during the third quarter of 2021, with the company’s advertising business increasing 43.2% to $53.1 billion. Quarterly search advertising made up the bulk of revenue with $37.9 billion in the third quarter, rising from $26.3 billion during the same period in 2020. YouTube ads accounted for another $7.2 billion—up from $5 billion in Q3 2020—and Google’s ad network revenue brought in $7.9 billion."
- dekhn 5y ago
  I used to work there and I think my statement is technically correct, regardless of what the breakdown in the earnings say. Oh, sorry- I should have said "profit", not "revenue".
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
> Note also that the vast majority of google revenue in ads comes from mobile video ads, not search results these days. So theoretically in a few years Google might decide to kill their search product and nobody will really come in and make another one because after all the years of bad search results from Google everyone will naturally conclude that search on the internet just doesn't work. That's right, I'm so paranoid I think that song is about me.

jsnell 5y ago

The screenshot text does not say at all what the author of the tweet claims it does (and what's in the HN title). Nowhere in the text does it actually talk about "above" and "sidebar", that is just an interpretation that the author made up about what "buying a better position in the search results" would mean. Given the context of the times, it was clearly not a statement about layout but about actually reordering the "organic" search results based on payments and without marking those boosted results as ads.

josefresco 5y ago
> Given the context of the times, it was clearly not a statement about layout but about actually reordering the "organic" search results based on payments and without marking those boosted results as ads. It's actually worse. Google didn't just say "our competitors put ads on top of results". They're suggesting/hinting that those competitors accept payment for placement when in fact that wasn't happening, their competitors like Bing (MSN then) were doing what Google is doing now - merely placing ads above the results, not selling placement. The end result is that they're all now selling placement. The visual difference between ads and organic results is almost non-existent.
- glenstein 5y ago
  >It's actually worse. Well hold on. We can go ahead and talk about how different this Google statement is from their ethos in the present day. But the framing of this being about ad placement was incorrect, and that has nothing to do with anything. >They're suggesting/hinting that those competitors accept payment for placement when in fact that wasn't happening It wasn't? This strikes me as yet another completely out of left field reaction. I mean, is there a consensus that that's obviously false? A source? Where is this "in fact that wasn't happening" coming from? Was there a big media cycle where there was a deep dive investigation into this that settled the question, that everyone remembers except me? There's a whole field of actors who at one time were relevant: Jeeves, Lycos, Altavista, Infoseek, Dogpile, Hotbot, Webcrawler, etc. And they went through any number of permutations of design, ownership, were sold and reacquired and it stands to reason that at some point some versions of these did things that Google is suggesting. At a minimum it seems prima facie plausible that competitors entertained this.

colmvp 5y ago

I can't imagine navigating the web without an ad-blocker.

monkeybutton 5y ago

There's some interesting images of the evolution of what ads looked like in Google's search results over time. Starting with distinct background colours and slowly fading to looking more and more identical to organic results with just a little icon.

wldcordeiro 5y ago
It's always felt like something that should be regulated away. Ads should be very distinct not a single tiny text label saying "sponsored" but 100% distinct from any non-ad content.

thefingerer 5y ago

I may the only greybeard arund here who remembers (and has the screenshots to prove it), used to be from 2005--2008 when you would open a message in Gmail, all of the sponsored ads would show up over on the right-hand-side of your email message, and would all be related to keywords from the inside of the email. Making it grotesquely blatant, how very much the Google computers were reading all your email. At least now they conceal it a little better, by storing your keyword/interests in a giant permanent database, then bringing the advertisements up on other, non-Google pages!

dpark 5y ago
Didn’t they announce that they stopped scanning email for ad purposes? (Presumably because it wasn’t actually very lucrative.)
- passivate 5y ago
  Is there any user data that passes through Google owned servers that DOESN'T get data mined?
  - dpark 5y ago
    That’s literally not possible for me to answer. They did say they aren’t scanning email for advertising purposes anymore though. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/26/534451513/google-says-it-will-no-longer-read-users-emails-to-sell-targeted-ads https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/26/534451513...
- rurp 5y ago
  Eh, sort of. They released a statement to give that impression but the wording was fairly weasely. They likely stopped using email content for directly targeting ads in Gmail, but there's almost no chance email content isn't being used to target people in other contexts.
  - dpark 5y ago

bmitc 5y ago

Just like I've been actively moving away from Amazon, I've been actively moving away from Google. These companies are leeches on society.

dpark 5y ago
You can certainly hate Google and not support them. I don’t know how you can classify them as “leeches on society”, though. I remember the days before Google, when web search was utter garbage, free email providers gave you 10mb of storage and stuck ads on the bottom of every email you sent, map apps were limited to about 400x300 for some inexplicable reason, and Android didn’t even exist. Google very much seems like a net positive historically.
- macilacilove 5y ago
  I am dpark from 2032. I have absolutely no human rights, and I never need to think about what to buy/watch/read, because Google consolidated all markets. I don't vote anymore because every aspect of life is controlled by G anyway. I have access to a shiny new tech that you don't yet have a name for! Google is still a net positive "historically". everything you think you know about "history" is misinformation. In 2032 Google AI-generates colorful VR videos of the Real Past and boy, I am telling you, we are much better off now! Keep Googling, dpark, 2032
- bmitc 5y ago
  They were useful once upon a time I think, but those days are long and gone in my opinion. And they are leeches. They are the prime example of making money off of people's data (which is at least one instance of their being parasitic). Maybe back in the day this was acceptable because their search and Gmail benefitted users, but I don't see that anymore. For Gmail, I currently use Gmail because it just happened to be the best e-mail 18 years ago, and it's hard to switch. There's very little about it today that makes it the best. Over the past six years, they've made $755 billion and not a cent paid to people for the use and sell of their data. And all because they provide services like ads above searches and link to shopping websites and Wikipedia, meanwhile selling people's data to whoever? Honestly, it's so hard to use Google as an actual search engine it feels like Google is more like a directory these days. Like, when I have to input a search as: "yes" "i" "really" "want" "to" "search" "these" "terms" something is broken. The only other product of Google that I really use besides their search and Gmail is YouTube, and that's only because it's entrenched. It's pretty adversarial towards, well, everyone except copyright holders.

ndiddy 5y ago

This enables rent-seeking from Google. If you sell a product and don’t buy an ad for it, your competitor can pay Google to put their product on top of the results for anyone searching for your product.

silentguy 5y ago
The cost of ad placement depends on the SEO match of the website. It will cost competitor more for the same ad. It's not as blatant. The ethics of ad is murky. How do you think a search company should make money? Subscription?

zriha 5y ago

I would say, this is misleading, as often do Google Ads campaigns, and I follow Google, well, from first day of Google Ads advertising, the position of Google was always the sam regarding ads - there is no way you can buy a position in the search results. Yeah, there are SEO tactics, but they don't grant you fixed position. And Google Ad, well Search Ad is always different (from day one) than the organic search result. And even so, Google Ad can't be misleading, because it directly affects the search result for the user, so you have some parameters like Quality score of the ad and the keyword, and yeah, if you try to mislead, they will disapprove your ad.

coding123 5y ago

Actual ordering by Google: - Ads results - Sites that display Google Ads - Google's original algorithmic results

iJohnDoe 5y ago

Many companies have to spend big dollars on their trademarked terms or company name to get it listed as the top result only via a paid ad. Google artificially pushes down those company results to keep forcing them to pay big bucks for the top result only via advertising. Pretty slimy business Google is in these days. Like paying the local thugs to protect your grocery store.

billyhoffman 5y ago

The full version of Brin and Page's classic paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" [1], which describes the early architect of Google and is an interested read in its own right, literally has "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives." Highlights include: -"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. " - "We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." - "A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. 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." To be clear: the "we" in these quotes are the founders of Google. [1] https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/334.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-... As an aside, I've been reading a bunch of academic papers about early web crawlers and search engines. It's a fun and interesting subject. Mercator [2] (which became Alta Vista) is another early search engine and one of the few that discusses its architecture in detail. [2] https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-173.pdf https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-RR-173.pdf

hubraumhugo 5y ago
Another interesting paragraph talks about search engine bias: "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 [Marchiori 97]. 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."

freediver 5y ago

"Canceling" someone for what they said/claimed in the past is a double-edged sword.

ninkendo 5y ago
Nobody brought up “canceling” anything, I’m not sure why your comment is relevant.

frabjoused 5y ago

It's frustrating that there's no date associated with this, at least without digging. Time is very important in evaluating something like this and the tweet doesn't bother to state it.

ShaneMcGowan 5y ago

This headline is misleading, the image in this tweet says you can't buy better search placement. Ads shown at Google are labelled as ads, the person is not buying a better search result placement. I do say this ignoring the fact that Google's labelling of ads has been getting more and more subtle over time but that is a separate unrelated issue. This seems to be another attempt of generating hype around "google bad"

jb1991 5y ago

It was a different time. Google's motto was also, "don't be evil" which they retracted years later. It's a different era now.

AtNightWeCode 5y ago

This is fake, or the person is very not aware of how Google search was intended to work in the first place. The whole USP of Google search was to index ads in the same way as other content and display it in the search results. It has always been more about target practice where the “ads” are placed.

dannysullivan 5y ago

What was tweeted isn't what the page says. I work for Google Search. That's about our Honest Results policy, which means we don't allow people to buy better rankings in non-paid Search results: https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/ https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/ Like many newspapers separate ads and editorial, Google has a strict separation between our Ads departments and our Search departments -- and our results. Buying ads will not gain you any better ability to rank in the non-paid Search results. Nor will it get you any special support. That's what the page explains. It never says we don't have ads that show at the top of the page and, in fact, acknowledges that we do: "While advertisers can pay more to be displayed higher in the advertising area." Nor is it true that at the time, we only had ads that appeared on the right-side of the page. Google's first ads appeared at the top of the page way back in 1999. In addition, we continue to keep ads separated from Search and labeled so they can be identified. I totally get that some people would like to see fewer ads. I don't work on the Ad side of Google, but I know that feedback has been heard.

NelsonMinar 5y ago
Thank you for correcting this Danny.
tofuahdude 5y ago
Google has a long history of making their ad placements look more like their search placements. The ads used to be a clearly yellow block. Then it became more and more faded yellow-to-white. Today, the ads have literally the exact same CSS, except that they do say "Ad" at the start, the legally mandated minimum disclosure. How do you reconcile this? To me, "honest" is already dishonest, in that Google deliberately tries to make ads vs search results visually ambiguous and thus the ads at the top are barely different from paid search placement.
- sullivandanny 5y ago
  The Honest Results policy is that we're not going to allow advertisers or partners or any one with a relationship to Google to have an advantage in our unpaid search results. As for ad labeling, I don't work on the ad side. I work on the Search side. My understanding from those on the ad side is that the labels are visible and do work. And ads are always labeled.

nemacol 5y ago

I wonder if there is something like “The Peter Principle” for businesses. > everyone is promoted to their level of incompetence Where the business sees some success and grows until they lose the thing that everyone liked about them to begin with Business outgrows their market or something. Blizzard stops producing highly polished experiences for money. Googles search results are degraded and littered with ads for money. Microsoft shifts from software to consumer data collection and now my servers all have Xbox services and a touch UI for some stupid reason (sorry, for money).

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
"Either you die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." It applies to politicians and businesses alike.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

While I'm glad to see the comments pointing out that, no, the tweet's linked screenshot did NOT say anything about displaying ads "above search results", I do think this highlights the need for better regulation around having more visual distinction between ads and organic results. And this doesn't just go for Google, should also go for things like Amazon and Instagram influencer paid posts. From a response tweet: > To be fair, the approach taken by Google (and most search engines) abides by the rules as set down by folks like the Advertising Standards Authority which let "Ad" work as a get out of jail free card regardless of context or visuals. At the very least I think there should be a requirement of a different color background, along what Google used to have in their "Sponsored Links" section at the top of results.

GeekyBear 5y ago

Am I the only person who remembers Google criticizing their competitors for mixing search results and ads in the same list at all? This was back when Google still placed text only ads off to the side of the results page in a blue box to make them even more distinctly separated from the search results.

jeffbee 5y ago
At the time, Google's competitor Yahoo!/Overture were 100% pay-for-placement. There was no such thing as organic results.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  The company I remember them criticizing was Alta Vista, which did include organic search results intermixed with ads at the time. >Google may be big with the cyber-cognescenti, but AltaVista is still reaching a lot more users. While AltaVista reaches 17.7% of Web users, Google gets just 7%, according to the latest Media Metrix numbers. https://www.forbes.com/2000/10/20/1020alta.html?sh=68521b3e79f3 https://www.forbes.com/2000/10/20/1020alta.html?sh=68521b3e7... They weren't bought by Overture until 2003.

ChildOfChaos 5y ago

This is standard practice though in pretty much everything. A new upstart criticises the way it is being done, comes in and changes things, then takes over and then slowly becomes the big guy they were fighting against in the first place. There is are reason to criticise what is being done because it's not the best for the consumer, but there is a reason it's done that way because it's good for business. So the upstart takes over by building a better product but soon corporate needs become a bigger priority once the company reaches scale, so it's prioties change.

bagacrap 5y ago

title (and Twitter post) highly editorialized. Google said nothing about layout of ads on page, but about being "clearly marked" and "set apart" from search results. It's subjective what is "clear" but I don't see why the only way for something to be clear is delta X.

pokoleo 5y ago

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -Sinclair

julienchastang 5y ago

Now I am seeing some Google search results that are nothing but ads on the first page. I recently switched to DuckDuckGo and so far I have been entirely happy with it. I recommend everyone give it a try.

bitwize 5y ago

Yes, and EA was once ideologically opposed to copy protection; today they are the DRM kings. Welcome to capitalism. The pursuit of profit ruins everything.

scotty79 5y ago

DuckDuckGo has a nice browser fir android that uses their search engine as default one.