4 ms·

Is It Time To Break Up Google?

7 points by robg 18y ago

mdasen 18y ago
Ideally, it's time for some competitors. If Google had, say, 10% of the search ad market, their power would (mostly) be in check. However, at 70% Google has market power that should run afoul of anti-trust regulations. I don't like the idea of the government breaking up companies, but I also don't like companies creating barriers to entry and winner-take-all markets.
Goronmon 18y ago
Unfortunately this article uses a terrible example to "expose" Google's practices. The site http://www.sourcetool.com/ http://www.sourcetool.com/ is trash. The whole point is to force you to click through as many pages before getting a decent list of results, and of course every page has a nice block of ads. For instance, I picked a category at random. Eventually I got to a page to choose between two sub-categories. One was "Brominated retardants"...so I clicked it. The next page just had a single sub-category "brominated retardant". There are plenty of examples like that including one where clicking a sub-category just took you to the same page over and over. The whole site seems to purposefully bury information in as many pages as possible to force you to view as many ads as possible. I'm not saying that people should give Google a free pass, but honestly, I'm glad to see they are giving that site a hard time.
- josefresco 18y ago
  Your analysis is flawed, ST doesn't make money when you 'view' ads, but rather when you click them. The many layers of pages are probably meant to inflate the sites overall size/page count. If ST was interested in making the most money from ads they wouldn't force the user to keep clicking but would instead trick them into click ads that looked like 'categories'. I've seen much worse out there, example; business.com which is a Google partner, check out how many 'sponsored ads' appear above the 'real' results, it's waaaay worse than what ST does. But agreed, ST is not a perfect example of Google's bad behavior.
  - Goronmon 18y ago
    check out how many 'sponsored ads' appear above the 'real' results, it's waaaay worse than what ST does. Actually, ST does the same thing. Once you finally click through a dozen sub-categories, there is a nice block of ad-words right above the results positioned in the same place the sub-category lists were. And I wasn't really making the argument that such a site design is effective. I was just pointing out that from the way the site is designed, it seems they are going for as many ad-views as possible by making as many redundant sub-category pages as possible.
scott_s 18y ago
The examples in the comments and the example in the article have something in common: they almost completely depend on Google's AdWords to drive traffic. What I derive from that is their service isn't good enough to get traffic on its own merits. And if that's the case, then perhaps they deserve a low landing score. (The metric used to determine how much they are charged for ad placement.)
- Goronmon 18y ago
  Yeah, and given the huge share of the market that Google has with ads, I'm not surprised to see complaints. I mean, the way the internet reacts to "slights" in the type of manner that Google is accused is usually met with vitriol orders of magnitudes greater than necessary. The fact that stories about this seem rather subdued is interesting. They just have so many customers that it's pretty much a given that there are a decent group of people pissed off about how things are handled.
hugh 18y ago
Is it time to break up the New York Times?

7 points by robg 18y ago

Ideally, it's time for some competitors. If Google had, say, 10% of the search ad market, their power would (mostly) be in check. However, at 70% Google has market power that should run afoul of anti-trust regulations. I don't like the idea of the government breaking up companies, but I also don't like companies creating barriers to entry and winner-take-all markets.

Goronmon 18y ago

Unfortunately this article uses a terrible example to "expose" Google's practices. The site http://www.sourcetool.com/ http://www.sourcetool.com/ is trash. The whole point is to force you to click through as many pages before getting a decent list of results, and of course every page has a nice block of ads. For instance, I picked a category at random. Eventually I got to a page to choose between two sub-categories. One was "Brominated retardants"...so I clicked it. The next page just had a single sub-category "brominated retardant". There are plenty of examples like that including one where clicking a sub-category just took you to the same page over and over. The whole site seems to purposefully bury information in as many pages as possible to force you to view as many ads as possible. I'm not saying that people should give Google a free pass, but honestly, I'm glad to see they are giving that site a hard time.

josefresco 18y ago
Your analysis is flawed, ST doesn't make money when you 'view' ads, but rather when you click them. The many layers of pages are probably meant to inflate the sites overall size/page count. If ST was interested in making the most money from ads they wouldn't force the user to keep clicking but would instead trick them into click ads that looked like 'categories'. I've seen much worse out there, example; business.com which is a Google partner, check out how many 'sponsored ads' appear above the 'real' results, it's waaaay worse than what ST does. But agreed, ST is not a perfect example of Google's bad behavior.
- Goronmon 18y ago
  check out how many 'sponsored ads' appear above the 'real' results, it's waaaay worse than what ST does. Actually, ST does the same thing. Once you finally click through a dozen sub-categories, there is a nice block of ad-words right above the results positioned in the same place the sub-category lists were. And I wasn't really making the argument that such a site design is effective. I was just pointing out that from the way the site is designed, it seems they are going for as many ad-views as possible by making as many redundant sub-category pages as possible.

scott_s 18y ago

The examples in the comments and the example in the article have something in common: they almost completely depend on Google's AdWords to drive traffic. What I derive from that is their service isn't good enough to get traffic on its own merits. And if that's the case, then perhaps they deserve a low landing score. (The metric used to determine how much they are charged for ad placement.)

Goronmon 18y ago
Yeah, and given the huge share of the market that Google has with ads, I'm not surprised to see complaints. I mean, the way the internet reacts to "slights" in the type of manner that Google is accused is usually met with vitriol orders of magnitudes greater than necessary. The fact that stories about this seem rather subdued is interesting. They just have so many customers that it's pretty much a given that there are a decent group of people pissed off about how things are handled.

hugh 18y ago

Is it time to break up the New York Times?