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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 abou

by 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.
- ddalex 5y ago
  > suggesting/hinting that those competitors accept payment for placement when in fact that wasn't happening https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yahoo-adopting-paid-inclusion-for-search/324/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yahoo-adopting-paid-incl...
  - josefresco 5y ago
    It was a fee to be included in the directly, not placement. I bought that "directory listing" aka hire PR paid link for many clients.
glenstein 5y ago
Exactly. And, remarkably, so far this is not registering for anybody else in this thread. It is about not placing ads within search results, and making clear that ads, wherever they are, are different from search. On a very vague, thematic level, this kind of grandstanding in Google's statement does seem to be in some sort of conflict with Google's approach to ad placement in 2022, because ads do very much seem similar to search results, but it has nothing to do with "ads above search results" or ads in the sidebar.
yojo 5y ago
Not sure I agree. I worked in AdWords support when the decision was made to move the top 1-3 ads above the search results. There was a lot of internal chatter about whether this was compromising the integrity of the results. The decision was made to make the ad unit super obviously distinct from organic content, and to make a high quality threshold for getting promoted to that position - many pages would still be served with ads on the right of results but not above. Even still we were very worried about the perception that the organic results were for sale. I would definitely believe that at one point in time the company was prepared to draw a line in the sand around “no ads above organic results.” Edit: at launch the top ads looked like this: http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3892/2343/1600/google_adwords_page_layout.gif http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3892/2343/1600/google_adw...
- edge17 5y ago
  I don't find it super obvious at all. I have to actively spend brain energy scrolling to find the first real result
  - Jensson 5y ago
    The appearance of the ads has gotten closer and closer to search results. The first time the ads moved above the results they did look different.
  - iso1631 5y ago
    I don't use google, so I had a look for "new car" and didn't see any adverts. Then realised I had to turn off my blocker. Looks like $('#tads').remove() will remove the adverts?
    - zo1 5y ago
      No amount of adblocking will help with the fact that I got a top-hit to a car selling website when I searched for "new car".
      - deleted 5y ago
gleb 5y ago
Exactly. This was called “paid inclusion“ and was offered by Yahoo, for example.
- fellowniusmonk 5y ago
  Yeah, if memory serves the overture ad network (which powered yahoo ad results before yahoo bought them) had better roi for a short time period for that very reason.
jancsika 5y ago
What an apologia! I just typed "new car" in Google. Literally the only results I can see are ads. Ads where the presentation and content is identical to the organic search results, save for the tiny word "Ad" in the title. Ads where the link reliably navigates to the page that has the content summarized by Google in their search result ad. Moreover, the UI for me clicking a foo.com link from a Google ad is identical to me clicking an organic foo.com link. Finally, the UX is improved if I click an ad because I don't have to scroll. So it's not even a "above" vs. "sidebar" situation. The ads are the only results that show up without scrolling. Arguing that this isn't "buying a better position in the search results" is the extreme-skiing of pedantry.
- glenstein 5y ago
  Like many other comments here, I think this is continuing to miss the point. Google certainly does sell ads above search today. And it certainly is irritating and it definitely is reflective of Google's following their financial interests at the cost of user experience. Google's expressed ethos in the statement certainly does seem at variance with their design choices and ad placement in the present day. We can talk all day about their pivot away from don't be evil. But tweet, the title, the framing, and the thing everybody are talking about, ads placed above search, has nothing to do with anything. The statement doesn't mention that, and these gotcha charges premised on something that was never said. Google is in many important respects a bad actor that needs to be criticized, but that truth shouldn't be a blank check to misinterpret them and dismiss corrections as pedantry.
  - Macha 5y ago
    Others disagree that an ad presented among the search listings, with visual presentation only distinguisable from a search result if you know the very small indicator to look for, as the first few entries is a meaningful distinction from just selling search listing results directly, rather than euphemistically.
    - glenstein 5y ago
      I agree, I think the line between ads and searches are blurred, but I think that point can be made without misrepresenting the statement from Google as an explicit critique of ads placed above search results.
fellowniusmonk 5y ago
Google Serps definitely tested not having inline ads at different stages, I don't remember if is was ever solely sidebar ads, I think it was keyword dependent going back pretty far. I've got three wayback machine links below and the nostradomous one eschewed inline ads in 2002 so I think the experience was somewhat dependent on what keywords you were searching. But going back to 2000 (when scraping DMOZ was still how everyone seeded quality), you can see that "inline ads" above organic results were a relatively early thing. https://web.archive.org/web/20021002224152/http://www.google.com/search?q=nostradamus https://web.archive.org/web/20021002224152/http://www.google... https://web.archive.org/web/20001205201000/http://www.google.com/search?q=real+estate https://web.archive.org/web/20001205201000/http://www.google... https://web.archive.org/web/20021105030346/http://www.google.com/search?q=Harry+Potter https://web.archive.org/web/20021105030346/http://www.google... Looked through old posts from the google dance days on webmasterworld, I couldn't see any discussion of ads repositioned from the sidebar to inline, so yeah, I think inline placement was around a long time, certainly by the time this google blog post was first published.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Glad to see this up in the comments. This is why I hate so many internet discussions, in that they are deliberately made in bad faith, even when the general topic under discussion is valid. It's quite clear to anyone who has used Google over the past decade that: 1. When you search for anything remotely commercial, your first page is essentially all ads, especially on mobile. It used to be possible that, if you were a site but had the top spot in Google for a commercial term, you had a great opportunity. That is no longer the case now, in that you are forced to pay "the Google tax", because there will be 4-5 ads above your primary search position if you don't pay for an ad. 2. Over time Google has made the distinction between organic results and ads much less clear. All you get now is teeny bolded "Ad" text in the upper left corner, everything else looks the same. These are valid criticisms. Saying "Google critiqued the practice of displaying ads above search results" is simply not true based on the poster's own linked screenshot.
JeremyNT 5y ago
You may be correct, but I don't think the "letter of the law" is a particularly useful standard to judge Google by. So you can't pay to have your site ranked higher? Who even cares now? At this point you can pay Google to deploy dark patterns that trick people into clicking on ads thinking that they're actually organic results. In a sense that is even better than a higher page rating...
brimble 5y ago
I just looked at it and your post doesn't seem related at all. The post is pointing out that Google says they don't sell search result positioning, which is equivocation because if you watch any normal person use Google or just look at their search results page they absofuckinglutely do. "Oh but it's not 'in the search area'" yeah OK, so they're both tricking people and are disingenuous about it, like that apparently-Google-employee (Danny Sullivan) who shames themselves by pathetically defending it in the Twitter thread. That's not better.

by jsnell 5y ago

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.
ddalex 5y ago
> suggesting/hinting that those competitors accept payment for placement when in fact that wasn't happening https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yahoo-adopting-paid-inclusion-for-search/324/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/yahoo-adopting-paid-incl...
- josefresco 5y ago
  It was a fee to be included in the directly, not placement. I bought that "directory listing" aka hire PR paid link for many clients.

glenstein 5y ago

Exactly. And, remarkably, so far this is not registering for anybody else in this thread. It is about not placing ads within search results, and making clear that ads, wherever they are, are different from search. On a very vague, thematic level, this kind of grandstanding in Google's statement does seem to be in some sort of conflict with Google's approach to ad placement in 2022, because ads do very much seem similar to search results, but it has nothing to do with "ads above search results" or ads in the sidebar.

yojo 5y ago

Not sure I agree. I worked in AdWords support when the decision was made to move the top 1-3 ads above the search results. There was a lot of internal chatter about whether this was compromising the integrity of the results. The decision was made to make the ad unit super obviously distinct from organic content, and to make a high quality threshold for getting promoted to that position - many pages would still be served with ads on the right of results but not above. Even still we were very worried about the perception that the organic results were for sale. I would definitely believe that at one point in time the company was prepared to draw a line in the sand around “no ads above organic results.” Edit: at launch the top ads looked like this: http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3892/2343/1600/google_adwords_page_layout.gif http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3892/2343/1600/google_adw...

edge17 5y ago
I don't find it super obvious at all. I have to actively spend brain energy scrolling to find the first real result
- Jensson 5y ago
  The appearance of the ads has gotten closer and closer to search results. The first time the ads moved above the results they did look different.
- iso1631 5y ago
  I don't use google, so I had a look for "new car" and didn't see any adverts. Then realised I had to turn off my blocker. Looks like $('#tads').remove() will remove the adverts?
  - zo1 5y ago
    No amount of adblocking will help with the fact that I got a top-hit to a car selling website when I searched for "new car".
    - deleted 5y ago

gleb 5y ago

Exactly. This was called “paid inclusion“ and was offered by Yahoo, for example.

fellowniusmonk 5y ago
Yeah, if memory serves the overture ad network (which powered yahoo ad results before yahoo bought them) had better roi for a short time period for that very reason.

jancsika 5y ago

What an apologia! I just typed "new car" in Google. Literally the only results I can see are ads. Ads where the presentation and content is identical to the organic search results, save for the tiny word "Ad" in the title. Ads where the link reliably navigates to the page that has the content summarized by Google in their search result ad. Moreover, the UI for me clicking a foo.com link from a Google ad is identical to me clicking an organic foo.com link. Finally, the UX is improved if I click an ad because I don't have to scroll. So it's not even a "above" vs. "sidebar" situation. The ads are the only results that show up without scrolling. Arguing that this isn't "buying a better position in the search results" is the extreme-skiing of pedantry.

glenstein 5y ago
Like many other comments here, I think this is continuing to miss the point. Google certainly does sell ads above search today. And it certainly is irritating and it definitely is reflective of Google's following their financial interests at the cost of user experience. Google's expressed ethos in the statement certainly does seem at variance with their design choices and ad placement in the present day. We can talk all day about their pivot away from don't be evil. But tweet, the title, the framing, and the thing everybody are talking about, ads placed above search, has nothing to do with anything. The statement doesn't mention that, and these gotcha charges premised on something that was never said. Google is in many important respects a bad actor that needs to be criticized, but that truth shouldn't be a blank check to misinterpret them and dismiss corrections as pedantry.
- Macha 5y ago
  Others disagree that an ad presented among the search listings, with visual presentation only distinguisable from a search result if you know the very small indicator to look for, as the first few entries is a meaningful distinction from just selling search listing results directly, rather than euphemistically.
  - glenstein 5y ago
    I agree, I think the line between ads and searches are blurred, but I think that point can be made without misrepresenting the statement from Google as an explicit critique of ads placed above search results.

fellowniusmonk 5y ago

Google Serps definitely tested not having inline ads at different stages, I don't remember if is was ever solely sidebar ads, I think it was keyword dependent going back pretty far. I've got three wayback machine links below and the nostradomous one eschewed inline ads in 2002 so I think the experience was somewhat dependent on what keywords you were searching. But going back to 2000 (when scraping DMOZ was still how everyone seeded quality), you can see that "inline ads" above organic results were a relatively early thing. https://web.archive.org/web/20021002224152/http://www.google.com/search?q=nostradamus https://web.archive.org/web/20021002224152/http://www.google... https://web.archive.org/web/20001205201000/http://www.google.com/search?q=real+estate https://web.archive.org/web/20001205201000/http://www.google... https://web.archive.org/web/20021105030346/http://www.google.com/search?q=Harry+Potter https://web.archive.org/web/20021105030346/http://www.google... Looked through old posts from the google dance days on webmasterworld, I couldn't see any discussion of ads repositioned from the sidebar to inline, so yeah, I think inline placement was around a long time, certainly by the time this google blog post was first published.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

Glad to see this up in the comments. This is why I hate so many internet discussions, in that they are deliberately made in bad faith, even when the general topic under discussion is valid. It's quite clear to anyone who has used Google over the past decade that: 1. When you search for anything remotely commercial, your first page is essentially all ads, especially on mobile. It used to be possible that, if you were a site but had the top spot in Google for a commercial term, you had a great opportunity. That is no longer the case now, in that you are forced to pay "the Google tax", because there will be 4-5 ads above your primary search position if you don't pay for an ad. 2. Over time Google has made the distinction between organic results and ads much less clear. All you get now is teeny bolded "Ad" text in the upper left corner, everything else looks the same. These are valid criticisms. Saying "Google critiqued the practice of displaying ads above search results" is simply not true based on the poster's own linked screenshot.

JeremyNT 5y ago

You may be correct, but I don't think the "letter of the law" is a particularly useful standard to judge Google by. So you can't pay to have your site ranked higher? Who even cares now? At this point you can pay Google to deploy dark patterns that trick people into clicking on ads thinking that they're actually organic results. In a sense that is even better than a higher page rating...

brimble 5y ago

I just looked at it and your post doesn't seem related at all. The post is pointing out that Google says they don't sell search result positioning, which is equivocation because if you watch any normal person use Google or just look at their search results page they absofuckinglutely do. "Oh but it's not 'in the search area'" yeah OK, so they're both tricking people and are disingenuous about it, like that apparently-Google-employee (Danny Sullivan) who shames themselves by pathetically defending it in the Twitter thread. That's not better.