8 ms·

Google Is Not a Search Engine – It's an Advertising Platform (2019)

84 points by koyanisqatsi 4y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
Look at all the "tech business model" defenders. Google is their hero. No one is willing to pay for Google. The website user is the product. All the analogies to actual products in the real world that have actual monetary value are wrong. None of us pay anything to Google and we never will. We pay ISPs for internet connections. https://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf https://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf What the "tech" supporters and their hopeless arguments conveniently ignore is that it's possible to have a search engine that does not locate and present ads along with the search results. In fact, that was the original Google. The plan was to avoid the influence of advertising. Why. Because it sucks. An entire Appendix was devoted to this issue. No amount of "tech" hype can change that fact. Computers and computer networks did not and still do not not require advertising to work.
PlotCitizen 4y ago
Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1361/ https://xkcd.com/1361/
galacticaactual 4y ago
In other news the sun is yellow.
- barbazoo 4y ago
  THAT would be news indeed.
  - alpple 4y ago
    Are all the visible wavelengths present in equal magnitude? It looks yellow to me.
    - barbazoo 4y ago
      According to [1] actually > it emits most of its energy around 500 nm, which is close to blue-green light then further down > Here on Earth, the atmosphere plays a role in the color of the sun. Since shorter wavelength blue light is scattered more efficiently than longer wavelength red light, we lose some of the blue tint of the sun as sunlight passes through the atmosphere. In addition, all wavelengths of visible light passing through our atmosphere are attenuated so that the light that reaches our eyes does not immediately saturate the cone receptors. This allows the brain to perceive color from the image with a little less blue – yellow [1] https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/what-color-sun https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/what-color-sun
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
jjslocum3 4y ago
> there are numerous other search engines available to any user with web access — Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex being the most popular, outside of more country-specific platforms like China’s Baidu. Yandex is a country-specific platform. For ten years it's been referred to as "the Russian google."
rco8786 4y ago
These things do not need to be mutually exclusive. Google has an advertising platform on top of a search engine.
- soperj 4y ago
  When the majority of the results you get on the first page are paid for, then it's an advertising platform masquerading as a search engine.
  - mrkramer 4y ago
    Google claims that majority of search queries do not return ads but the most common and the most popular search queries return a lot of ads as we can witness.
  - GeekyBear 4y ago
    Which is something Google used to make fun of it's competitors for doing, back when they were the underdog.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      Then they introduced one ad per search, which was a big deal people talked about. Now we don't talk about it enough.
  - rco8786 4y ago
    That's an arbitrary rule that we've made up. The search engine still exists. The advertising platform would not exist without it. The % of ads on the first page of the search results is a detail of how the two co-exist, not evidence that there is only one and not the other.
    - soperj 4y ago
      > The advertising platform would not exist without it. Considering how many people even get past those ads... tough to make that argument.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
Is it 2010 again? Already?
bell-cot 4y ago
Wow. Almost like listening to sophomore physics students arguing over whether electrons are waves or particles.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
DerekBickerton 4y ago
For me, Google Search was always nothing more than a 'hook' device that feeds into their AD business. Is it useful? Yes. Has it gained enormous traction and even sneaked into the Oxford dictionary?[0] Yes. But it's clear the main ulterior motive was to feed into their ADs business. And the main search engine is not the only data-point. Google is so entangled with the web that they have countless other data-points to gather data. They're even in your web-font libraries and monitoring you with Google Analytics, not to mention YouTube, and all the other endpoints they can use to feed their ADs business. They're a parasite of the web. [0] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/google https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  It's an interesting case study in how much power financial incentives have. Google didn't start as an ad platform, at least not that I ever heard. It started as a legimate attempt at building better search. Do you remember how bad web search was before Google? However once it had some success and advertising revenue started coming in, that changed the entire focus and culture of the company. Now everything is about ads. Search is just a means to serve ads. Google phones and Android? Ads. Chrome browser? Ads. Gmail? Ads.
  - spfzero 4y ago
    To me, when it arrived Google was attractive because it had a simple, clean home page. Big search field, the work "Google" and not much else. At the time the other search engines plastered the home page with ads. Also at the time, I didn't perceive Google's search as vastly superior, though it may have been. The clean interface and lack of home page clutter was good enough to win me over. It's interesting that for all of these years they have kept the home page relatively clear (Or so I imagine, been DDG exclusively for about 8 years now).
    - mrkramer 4y ago
      Others were Web Portals that had search, Google was only search engine but ironically enough as they grew larger and more ambitious they became Web Portal(the concept that they once feared). But I admit Google's UI is still nice and clean.
y42 4y ago
Lawyers from a "famous" german yellow press publication once, like years ago, said: "Journalism is only a vehicle to deliver ads to the reader." (free translation)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- permo-w 4y ago
  I really think there’s a case to be made for banning advertising as a whole, besides a few designated places like shop windows and classified sections
  - y42 4y ago
    That would be a dream, though I'm sure that this will never happen. The web is cursed, advertising is an immanent feature of the web.
    - permo-w 4y ago
      there would of course be unintended consequences. you would probably be making advertising “cool”, which would probably make the adverts that do succeed in filtering through all the more successful. you can imagine it being a treat for people to go to a country that still has advertising. a bit like visiting the US from Europe is now and if you don’t ensure robust public funding for journalism and the arts while doing it, you’d be locking away certain forms of content from poorer people. the BBC shows that it can be done and done well, it would just have to be secured in a way that takes it out of the political arena, as you can be damn sure the first thing a free-market party would do would be to kill that funding so that further down the line they can point and say “look at the failing arts, we need corporate funding back to support this industry” but yeah, the web, with its tendency towards “free” content, has an innate problem that I don’t see going anywhere. there are occasional pushbacks against advertising. the TV industry went that way for a while, but now even Netflix is introducing an ad-supported tier
izzydata 4y ago
Are there any browser addons that can remove all paid for ad results and re-sort them to their non-paid for location?
- elashri 4y ago
  ublock origin can do this.
  - aqfamnzc 4y ago
    > to their non-paid for location AKA not shown at all. I agree!
tantalor 4y ago
semantics
politelemon 4y ago
> If something is free, you are the product. We really need to stop repeating this, it's a clever soundbite that we repeat to each other to be dismissive. It is not true, by which I mean it's not even false in some cases, it's just generally not true. Free products exist, in abundance, for which you are not a product. Paid users are often still products.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Especially ironic given that it's often proponents of free software (free as in both) that repeat this soundbite.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    If you show up at a social event often enough, someone is going to ask you to bring something.
- KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
  It's largely true though, how is it not? Free is either a loss leader for something else that's paid, like a demo, or you're the product. However I agree that paid users are still often a product. Paying apple doesn't stop them from selling ads on your phone, same with samsung smart tvs etc.
  - hey2022 4y ago
    Free software where the user is not the product is not an exception. The number of free dev libraries, Linux software, specialized software like audio plugins (Eg VCVRack, Max4Live, Reaktor, etc) is huge. Maybe in easily commercialized areas like iOS apps the vast majority of free apps monetize users, but outside of that this phrase has far less relevancy.
    - invalidname 4y ago
      That isn't accurate. Let's look at Linux. Yes you can download it and compile it yourself but typically you would download from a website that tracks you. You would get a distro that typically has a business model. Yes, there's debian (and others) but even they have sponsors that pay the salaries of people working on the software. The free portion are things that are already written. Services are the thing that costs money and they include features, hosting, adapting, etc. Those aren't free. Maybe I'm cynical but I see things that are technically free all residing within environments that aren't. I don't have a problem with that, I'm OK with commercial interests. They pay my salary. But we need to be realistic about the scope of free and how financially viable would it be to be "free".
DisjointedHunt 4y ago
"The Large Hadron Collider is not a physics experiment, it's a Government lobbying entity" Hate it or love it, the advertising supported business model of the Internet has transformed the lives of a large chunk of humanity beyond any belief. I come from a very poor background in a country many would consider backward and yet, i had access to the wonders of human knowledge at the tips of my fingers while growing up. The generation before me were not so lucky and its incredibly sad to contrast these fortunes.
- elashri 4y ago
  Except it is more of an international entity to be considered a governmental. Also you probably mean CERN (the organization). I don't understand the analogy, I'm sure that CERN carries some lobbying activities but that is probably for funding purposes to carry out the scientific activities. That is different from what we are talking about here
  - DisjointedHunt 4y ago
    The analogy is that one is a monetization model and the other is the composition of the core business. In the former, the business is solving software engineering problems that very few dare to take on and the monetization model is online advertising. Also, CERN in this analogy would be Alphabet.
    - elashri 4y ago
      > The analogy is that one is a monetization model and the other is the composition of the core business. I still cannot get the analogy. > Also, CERN in this analogy would be Alphabet. LHC is an experiment (Almost dozen to be accurate) [1] and could be an analogy for the Google search engine as a product (or Gmail or other google products). CERN is still the organization which organize and have several other divisions like computing and engineering that serve LHC and a couple of smaller experiments. I don't think there is Alphabet analogy for LHC (maybe EU in this case but also US and a couple of other countries) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Large_Hadron_Collider_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Large_Hadron_Collider_...
pm2222 4y ago
Google Is a Search Engine, and an Advertising Platform.
alpple 4y ago
The results seem so clinical or academic now. I want to read what freaks write. I often add the word reddit to my search or other platforms tags to get more opinionated and personal content.
r0m4n0 4y ago
Just because a product makes money a certain way doesn’t make that product equal to the way it makes money. I don't say, "time to turn on the local ad network" when I watch the evening news. They provide some crappy news segments, the weather, I'm slightly more informed, they in turn make money from showing ads to me. I say I "watched the news" which accurately describes what I consumed. I think we can still call Google a search engine? I mean, people still use it to search for things no? The conclusion of the article was a little bit different than it started so I can't say there was strong argument being made for anything really here. I'll just say, I'll never get the 15 minutes back from reading this article that I learned nothing from.
- blamestross 4y ago
  > I don't say, "time to turn on the local ad network" when I watch the evening news. I do and I really hope more people realize what's going on there. I really can't stand more than a few moments of modern TV. Heck with cable you pay for the chance to get advertised to and the ads are just getting louder and more garish with time. Increasingly at least my peers and I are just refusing add supported services. QoL is horrible and manipulating you is the only purpose they have. Boomers will take "modern" news networks with them when they die off.
  - puffoflogic 4y ago
    My parents don't understand why I have never owned a TV, let alone cable. A few times a year I'll watch TV at their house. They proudly proclaim how they're not paying for cable, they only pay for Youtube TV or some such. It has ads; far more ads than content. I ask why they are paying to be served ads. They don't even understand the question. It's really messed up.
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  Likewise, everytime I buy something I don't call it the "money taker item".
elecush 4y ago
porque no los dos = it can be both, why not both?

84 points by koyanisqatsi 4y ago

Look at all the "tech business model" defenders. Google is their hero. No one is willing to pay for Google. The website user is the product. All the analogies to actual products in the real world that have actual monetary value are wrong. None of us pay anything to Google and we never will. We pay ISPs for internet connections. https://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf https://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf What the "tech" supporters and their hopeless arguments conveniently ignore is that it's possible to have a search engine that does not locate and present ads along with the search results. In fact, that was the original Google. The plan was to avoid the influence of advertising. Why. Because it sucks. An entire Appendix was devoted to this issue. No amount of "tech" hype can change that fact. Computers and computer networks did not and still do not not require advertising to work.

PlotCitizen 4y ago

Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1361/ https://xkcd.com/1361/

galacticaactual 4y ago

In other news the sun is yellow.

barbazoo 4y ago
THAT would be news indeed.
- alpple 4y ago
  Are all the visible wavelengths present in equal magnitude? It looks yellow to me.
  - barbazoo 4y ago
    According to [1] actually > it emits most of its energy around 500 nm, which is close to blue-green light then further down > Here on Earth, the atmosphere plays a role in the color of the sun. Since shorter wavelength blue light is scattered more efficiently than longer wavelength red light, we lose some of the blue tint of the sun as sunlight passes through the atmosphere. In addition, all wavelengths of visible light passing through our atmosphere are attenuated so that the light that reaches our eyes does not immediately saturate the cone receptors. This allows the brain to perceive color from the image with a little less blue – yellow [1] https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/what-color-sun https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/what-color-sun
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]

jjslocum3 4y ago

> there are numerous other search engines available to any user with web access — Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex being the most popular, outside of more country-specific platforms like China’s Baidu. Yandex is a country-specific platform. For ten years it's been referred to as "the Russian google."

rco8786 4y ago

These things do not need to be mutually exclusive. Google has an advertising platform on top of a search engine.

soperj 4y ago
When the majority of the results you get on the first page are paid for, then it's an advertising platform masquerading as a search engine.
- mrkramer 4y ago
  Google claims that majority of search queries do not return ads but the most common and the most popular search queries return a lot of ads as we can witness.
- GeekyBear 4y ago
  Which is something Google used to make fun of it's competitors for doing, back when they were the underdog.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Then they introduced one ad per search, which was a big deal people talked about. Now we don't talk about it enough.
- rco8786 4y ago
  That's an arbitrary rule that we've made up. The search engine still exists. The advertising platform would not exist without it. The % of ads on the first page of the search results is a detail of how the two co-exist, not evidence that there is only one and not the other.
  - soperj 4y ago
    > The advertising platform would not exist without it. Considering how many people even get past those ads... tough to make that argument.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

Is it 2010 again? Already?

bell-cot 4y ago

Wow. Almost like listening to sophomore physics students arguing over whether electrons are waves or particles.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

DerekBickerton 4y ago

For me, Google Search was always nothing more than a 'hook' device that feeds into their AD business. Is it useful? Yes. Has it gained enormous traction and even sneaked into the Oxford dictionary?[0] Yes. But it's clear the main ulterior motive was to feed into their ADs business. And the main search engine is not the only data-point. Google is so entangled with the web that they have countless other data-points to gather data. They're even in your web-font libraries and monitoring you with Google Analytics, not to mention YouTube, and all the other endpoints they can use to feed their ADs business. They're a parasite of the web. [0] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/google https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...

SoftTalker 4y ago
It's an interesting case study in how much power financial incentives have. Google didn't start as an ad platform, at least not that I ever heard. It started as a legimate attempt at building better search. Do you remember how bad web search was before Google? However once it had some success and advertising revenue started coming in, that changed the entire focus and culture of the company. Now everything is about ads. Search is just a means to serve ads. Google phones and Android? Ads. Chrome browser? Ads. Gmail? Ads.
- spfzero 4y ago
  To me, when it arrived Google was attractive because it had a simple, clean home page. Big search field, the work "Google" and not much else. At the time the other search engines plastered the home page with ads. Also at the time, I didn't perceive Google's search as vastly superior, though it may have been. The clean interface and lack of home page clutter was good enough to win me over. It's interesting that for all of these years they have kept the home page relatively clear (Or so I imagine, been DDG exclusively for about 8 years now).
  - mrkramer 4y ago
    Others were Web Portals that had search, Google was only search engine but ironically enough as they grew larger and more ambitious they became Web Portal(the concept that they once feared). But I admit Google's UI is still nice and clean.

y42 4y ago

Lawyers from a "famous" german yellow press publication once, like years ago, said: "Journalism is only a vehicle to deliver ads to the reader." (free translation)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
permo-w 4y ago
I really think there’s a case to be made for banning advertising as a whole, besides a few designated places like shop windows and classified sections
- y42 4y ago
  That would be a dream, though I'm sure that this will never happen. The web is cursed, advertising is an immanent feature of the web.
  - permo-w 4y ago
    there would of course be unintended consequences. you would probably be making advertising “cool”, which would probably make the adverts that do succeed in filtering through all the more successful. you can imagine it being a treat for people to go to a country that still has advertising. a bit like visiting the US from Europe is now and if you don’t ensure robust public funding for journalism and the arts while doing it, you’d be locking away certain forms of content from poorer people. the BBC shows that it can be done and done well, it would just have to be secured in a way that takes it out of the political arena, as you can be damn sure the first thing a free-market party would do would be to kill that funding so that further down the line they can point and say “look at the failing arts, we need corporate funding back to support this industry” but yeah, the web, with its tendency towards “free” content, has an innate problem that I don’t see going anywhere. there are occasional pushbacks against advertising. the TV industry went that way for a while, but now even Netflix is introducing an ad-supported tier

izzydata 4y ago

Are there any browser addons that can remove all paid for ad results and re-sort them to their non-paid for location?

elashri 4y ago
ublock origin can do this.
- aqfamnzc 4y ago
  > to their non-paid for location AKA not shown at all. I agree!

tantalor 4y ago

semantics

politelemon 4y ago

> If something is free, you are the product. We really need to stop repeating this, it's a clever soundbite that we repeat to each other to be dismissive. It is not true, by which I mean it's not even false in some cases, it's just generally not true. Free products exist, in abundance, for which you are not a product. Paid users are often still products.

scrollaway 4y ago
Especially ironic given that it's often proponents of free software (free as in both) that repeat this soundbite.
- hinkley 4y ago
  If you show up at a social event often enough, someone is going to ask you to bring something.
KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
It's largely true though, how is it not? Free is either a loss leader for something else that's paid, like a demo, or you're the product. However I agree that paid users are still often a product. Paying apple doesn't stop them from selling ads on your phone, same with samsung smart tvs etc.
- hey2022 4y ago
  Free software where the user is not the product is not an exception. The number of free dev libraries, Linux software, specialized software like audio plugins (Eg VCVRack, Max4Live, Reaktor, etc) is huge. Maybe in easily commercialized areas like iOS apps the vast majority of free apps monetize users, but outside of that this phrase has far less relevancy.
  - invalidname 4y ago
    That isn't accurate. Let's look at Linux. Yes you can download it and compile it yourself but typically you would download from a website that tracks you. You would get a distro that typically has a business model. Yes, there's debian (and others) but even they have sponsors that pay the salaries of people working on the software. The free portion are things that are already written. Services are the thing that costs money and they include features, hosting, adapting, etc. Those aren't free. Maybe I'm cynical but I see things that are technically free all residing within environments that aren't. I don't have a problem with that, I'm OK with commercial interests. They pay my salary. But we need to be realistic about the scope of free and how financially viable would it be to be "free".

DisjointedHunt 4y ago

"The Large Hadron Collider is not a physics experiment, it's a Government lobbying entity" Hate it or love it, the advertising supported business model of the Internet has transformed the lives of a large chunk of humanity beyond any belief. I come from a very poor background in a country many would consider backward and yet, i had access to the wonders of human knowledge at the tips of my fingers while growing up. The generation before me were not so lucky and its incredibly sad to contrast these fortunes.

elashri 4y ago
Except it is more of an international entity to be considered a governmental. Also you probably mean CERN (the organization). I don't understand the analogy, I'm sure that CERN carries some lobbying activities but that is probably for funding purposes to carry out the scientific activities. That is different from what we are talking about here
- DisjointedHunt 4y ago
  The analogy is that one is a monetization model and the other is the composition of the core business. In the former, the business is solving software engineering problems that very few dare to take on and the monetization model is online advertising. Also, CERN in this analogy would be Alphabet.
  - elashri 4y ago
    > The analogy is that one is a monetization model and the other is the composition of the core business. I still cannot get the analogy. > Also, CERN in this analogy would be Alphabet. LHC is an experiment (Almost dozen to be accurate) [1] and could be an analogy for the Google search engine as a product (or Gmail or other google products). CERN is still the organization which organize and have several other divisions like computing and engineering that serve LHC and a couple of smaller experiments. I don't think there is Alphabet analogy for LHC (maybe EU in this case but also US and a couple of other countries) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Large_Hadron_Collider_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Large_Hadron_Collider_...

pm2222 4y ago

Google Is a Search Engine, and an Advertising Platform.

alpple 4y ago

The results seem so clinical or academic now. I want to read what freaks write. I often add the word reddit to my search or other platforms tags to get more opinionated and personal content.

r0m4n0 4y ago

Just because a product makes money a certain way doesn’t make that product equal to the way it makes money. I don't say, "time to turn on the local ad network" when I watch the evening news. They provide some crappy news segments, the weather, I'm slightly more informed, they in turn make money from showing ads to me. I say I "watched the news" which accurately describes what I consumed. I think we can still call Google a search engine? I mean, people still use it to search for things no? The conclusion of the article was a little bit different than it started so I can't say there was strong argument being made for anything really here. I'll just say, I'll never get the 15 minutes back from reading this article that I learned nothing from.

blamestross 4y ago
> I don't say, "time to turn on the local ad network" when I watch the evening news. I do and I really hope more people realize what's going on there. I really can't stand more than a few moments of modern TV. Heck with cable you pay for the chance to get advertised to and the ads are just getting louder and more garish with time. Increasingly at least my peers and I are just refusing add supported services. QoL is horrible and manipulating you is the only purpose they have. Boomers will take "modern" news networks with them when they die off.
- puffoflogic 4y ago
  My parents don't understand why I have never owned a TV, let alone cable. A few times a year I'll watch TV at their house. They proudly proclaim how they're not paying for cable, they only pay for Youtube TV or some such. It has ads; far more ads than content. I ask why they are paying to be served ads. They don't even understand the question. It's really messed up.
xboxnolifes 4y ago
Likewise, everytime I buy something I don't call it the "money taker item".

elecush 4y ago

porque no los dos = it can be both, why not both?