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Hijacking the current top comment, because I want to highlight something. >I really worry about the meta effects that Search is having on the internet. Google

Hijacking the current top comment, because I want to highlight something. >I really worry about the meta effects that Search is having on the internet. Google has slowly degraded as the internet has morphed into being almost entirely an SEO driven contraption. Do people at Google know and acknowledge this? I mean that in a non-Upton Sinclair kind of way. "Search" for me doesn't really take place on google anymore, but myself and anyone else here who is in the same boat is an outlier. So has the idea at Google become that "search" has just evolved to giving "the masses" (i.e. the non-technical people) SEO garbage?

not1ofU 4y ago
Short answer is yes, found somewhere within this video [0]. Originally google didnt want to do ads in search at all for this very reason (supposedly) [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLxpAZzy0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLxpAZzy0s
- lioeters 4y ago
  > Originally google didnt want to do ads in search Sergey Brin and Larry Page on how advertising-supported business models negatively impact the quality of search results in commercial search engines, presented while students at Stanford University in conjunction with their Google prototype of a large-scale search engine: > Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. > 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. 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. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. 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. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But 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. From: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page - Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives - http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
ben_w 4y ago
> Do people at Google know and acknowledge this? I mean that in a non-Upton Sinclair kind of way. Almost certainly, though I don't know what you mean by "non-Upton Sinclair kind of way". SEO (and editing wikipedia to your advantage) has been a back-and-fourth struggle even before I finished university in 2006. I think the current problem the eyeball-as-a-service sites (Facebook, Youtube, Google, Twitter etc.) have is their models of their audiences; certainly when I see how they classify me, they're way off — sports I don't care for, languages I can't speak, the politics of countries I don't live in.
- barrkel 4y ago
  I actually prefer irrelevant ads; they're easier to ignore. To the degree that ads work, they're a distraction from my current task, whatever it is. Irrelevant ads are less of a distraction.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Likewise, but from the ad agencies' perspective it's a problem. I think, not certain, that solving this would be the real end to the current market leaders.

not1ofU 4y ago

Short answer is yes, found somewhere within this video [0]. Originally google didnt want to do ads in search at all for this very reason (supposedly) [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLxpAZzy0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLxpAZzy0s

lioeters 4y ago
> Originally google didnt want to do ads in search Sergey Brin and Larry Page on how advertising-supported business models negatively impact the quality of search results in commercial search engines, presented while students at Stanford University in conjunction with their Google prototype of a large-scale search engine: > Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. > 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. 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. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. 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. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But 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. From: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page - Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives - http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

ben_w 4y ago

> Do people at Google know and acknowledge this? I mean that in a non-Upton Sinclair kind of way. Almost certainly, though I don't know what you mean by "non-Upton Sinclair kind of way". SEO (and editing wikipedia to your advantage) has been a back-and-fourth struggle even before I finished university in 2006. I think the current problem the eyeball-as-a-service sites (Facebook, Youtube, Google, Twitter etc.) have is their models of their audiences; certainly when I see how they classify me, they're way off — sports I don't care for, languages I can't speak, the politics of countries I don't live in.

barrkel 4y ago
I actually prefer irrelevant ads; they're easier to ignore. To the degree that ads work, they're a distraction from my current task, whatever it is. Irrelevant ads are less of a distraction.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Likewise, but from the ad agencies' perspective it's a problem. I think, not certain, that solving this would be the real end to the current market leaders.