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Before HN jumps all over this, I worked at Google and other ads and search companies... and this is technically true (in selected cases) ! There are certain ca

by asah 3y ago

Before HN jumps all over this, I worked at Google and other ads and search companies... and this is technically true (in selected cases) ! There are certain categories of websites and search results pages, where ads actually improve user experience, measured by nearly any metric you want to pick, from user perception to CTR/conversion, etc. There's lots of random categories, but the obvious ones are commercial/product searches where you're looking to buy something. And this isn't new: over history, there've been magazines and other media where the ads dominated the content, e.g. trade publications such as _Computer Shopper_ during the 1980's PC revolution. Thanks for listening to my TED talk, let the downvoting begin!

Terretta 3y ago
Ads improve conversion? You don't say.
- asah 3y ago
  don't be snarky - I mean compared with lower quality free/organic content.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - deleted 3y ago
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chinathrow 3y ago
> There are certain categories of websites and search results pages, where ads actually improve user experience, measured by nearly any metric you want to pick, from user perception to CTR/conversion, etc. I'm left for words, is this satire?
jrockway 3y ago
I don't think you deserve any downvotes, but there is also somewhat of a tragedy of the commons effect at play. I hear people Google "Facebook" to find the Facebook login page. No doubt, Facebook has ads for that search so that people click the right link. This ends up being expensive; people should have just clicked their bookmark, but don't really understand URLs, so there is just a tax on big companies to have that link available. I don't think this is particularly evil, but I also don't think it's amazing. At the end of the day, you're providing value for not making people type "www" and "com", but many think that should just be free. (Of course, before search was integrated into the address bar, I feel like typing "example" in there went to www.example.com. That feature mysteriously disappeared when browser vendors realized you could make money by displaying an unrelated webpage with ads instead.) Meanwhile the alternative is mobile apps and an icon on your homescreen, an effect that makes Apple and Google rich for taking a % of the revenue from those apps, and one of the largest job programs ever for software engineers. At the end of the day, I can see why people are uncomfortable with the whole situation, but I also don't see an easy solution. It is fun to railroad rich people in front of Congress, but at the end of the day, what really changes? The rich person has slightly less money, the politicians get a photo op, and some lawyer has a little more cash. Only better technology will end today's quirks. (Remember when Microsoft got sued for anti-trust violations? Did the government end IE's reign on the Internet, or did Chrome?)
- wlesieutre 3y ago
  > Meanwhile the alternative is mobile apps and an icon on your homescreen, an effect that makes Apple and Google rich for taking a % of the revenue from those apps, and one of the largest job programs ever for software engineers. Not to mention that you suffer the same problem in the App Store when you go searching for the Faceboook app. They have to bid for ads against competitors that want to show up when users try to find Facebook in the app store. Though at least it's only the one time and then it's installed, unlike users who don't add .com to their URL bar and search for Facebook every time instead.
  - jrockway 3y ago
    Something I think about a lot is what the world would look like without advertising, i.e., you'd have to make every decision on its merits, and never rely on bought opinions. Like imagine you walk into a grocery store, and every shelf is lined with plain cardboard boxes with the name of the product on it ("chocolate-covered breakfast cereal") and a nutrition label. You walk in and there is nothing other than the merits of the product itself to guide your purchasing decision. Nothing else would influence you. Would that world be better than today's explosion of colors and brands and talking heads and size 100 font "NEW FORMULA!!!"? In today's world, if you're not sure what to buy, you just pick the thing with the most colorful box or whatever you heard about on TV, and you probably end up with something that's fine. (Occasionally, the thing you heard about on TV is actually good, and you wouldn't have thought to buy it otherwise. It's almost a win-win though I am somewhat hesitant to use that term to describe advertising on HN ;) Advertising is that; you don't care what brand of light switch you buy, you just want a light switch, so there is a race to convince someone you trust to recommend their brand to you. They pay someone money, you buy a light switch, it switches your lights, you're happy, they're happy, and this random third party ad company is happy. Multiple people are bidding against each other for this recommendation, and so advertising ends up costing a lot. (You, of course, pay the cost, not the company doing the advertising. But if everyone is doing it, it's not like you can choose.) That's the app store thing; Apple prides itself on how every iPhone app is the greatest thing ever created, and because sometimes that's true, you trust them. Well, what if they just approve everything and let people pay for recommendations? Now you have ads in the app store. Someone looking for a random app gets a random app. They're probably happy with their $0.99 purchase. They never think about it again and move on with their life, and Apple's execs get a cooler yacht, and some random software engineer also got 10 cents or whatever. This all seems a little wrong -- ideas and products should only be popular because of their merit in the global marketplace of ideas -- but is it actually? It's really just making a lot of money from making decisions that aren't worth making. It does sound really dystopian... don't think about anything, just CONSUME what we say to consume... but is researching light switches so that the true best light switch maker gets your money actually better than spending an hour playing with your dog or whatever? I don't know. It's difficult. I should think about it less.
figmert 3y ago
I'm not going to downvote you (I can't even), but you've made plenty of claims but haven't got anything backing up those claims. So I'd love to ask for some citations on these claims. I can get behind "ads keep the internet free" narrative, but it seems rather odd to suggest something that someone who doesn't exactly know you wants you to see is better than relevant result.
- shalmanese 3y ago
  It's funny to see in this thread simultaneously the sentiment that Google's search results have gotten awful over the years due to widespread gaming of the free channel of delivering results to you and also immense skepticism that any other channel could be better than the free channel. In general, I've found any query that's blogspammed to death, the ads are actually surprisingly useful. eg: I turn off my adblocker for any query that is "Alternatives to X (dropbox/xero/notion/figma etc.)". Every organic search result is some generic comparison website that is scraping from the same public data but the ads are generally actual product companies. I figure the companies paying their way to the top of ads have their LTV to CAC figured out and are generally going to be the ones with the highest predicted retention for me. In this case, I have a specific intent to buy and the bid/ask mechanism for ads is much more predictive of my intent than the SEO algorithms of the organic results.
timeon 3y ago
> And this isn't new: over history, there've been magazines and other media where the ads dominated the content Was it better user experience than if it was not dominated by ads?
- asah 3y ago
  Nobody was forced to buy Computer Shopper... people bought it for the ads.
- vidarh 3y ago
  In some cases the ads were one of the product. Some catalog businesses charged you for their catalogs. Some other magazines were also entirely for ads. In both cases there's be no user experience without the ads. But an important caveat was of course that buyers chose this. You got those magazines when you were looking for an ad for a specific product. If Google let you search specifically for their ads, I'm sure some searches would be specifically for ads, but most wouldn't be.
hn8305823 3y ago
> And this isn't new: over history, there've been magazines and other media where the ads dominated the content, e.g. trade publications such as _Computer Shopper_ during the 1980's PC revolution. Wired magazine was heavy on ads but they must have exerted some creative control over them because he entire experience was this unified techno-futurist thing.
valine 3y ago
If you fill the search results with enough SEO garbage eventually ads will look better by comparison. If ads are making your user experience better you have a serious problem.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  Okay, sure, build a better search engine that functions and is better without ads. Easier said than done. The internet is 99.99% scams and trash. It's easier said than done to find the signal in the noise. Some times - willing to pay (and being vetted not to be a scam) is a good indication of signal. Unfortunately, Google could do a little better on vetting their ad partners. Too often these days, ads are scams.
  - Terretta 3y ago
    > build a better search engine that functions and is better without ads https://kagi.com https://kagi.com > The internet is 99.99% scams and trash. It's hard to find the signal in the noise. https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
    - janalsncm 3y ago
      Spot on. However I do wonder if the cost of indexing the internet would be prohibitively expensive for a company looking to bootstrap without ad money.
    - tqi 3y ago
      > We gather new content, published within the last week, from a handpicked list of blogs imo this only only works because it is a niche product? If Google went away, and Kagi became the #1 search engine overnight, I think this approach would immediately become a source of criticism for being too restrictive, gatekeeping newcomers or biased towards a narrow perspective (as Google itself already is).
      - Terretta 3y ago
thdc 3y ago
> (in selected cases) The tweet presents the quote without context so I interpret it to be a sweeping statement and therefore disagree based on that. If someone could provide a transcript of the cross-examination (I couldn't find it easily), then that could help with making a more informed opinion.
roughly 3y ago
The point of Google (or, of search engines, at least) is to surface content relevant to a query. If the content exists, it should be surfaced, and it should not require an advertiser to suggest you surface it to the user. If the content is not surfaced except by ads, that's a failure case for Google (or, for search engines, at least). Saying "Ads improve the user experience of a search engine" could only be true in the case where the search engine is already failing, and one might suggest spending the money and resources one is spending on an ads engine on improving the search engine, if the search engine is actually trying to optimize for delivery of relevant information. There's certainly one metric that'll always be improved by showing ads, though, and I suspect it's that one, and not any of the others, that's driving the decision to put ads on the page.
duped 3y ago
> There's lots of random categories, but the obvious ones are commercial/product searches where you're looking to buy something. I believe that you believe this while also believing that your metrics must be so horribly biased towards indicating that "ads are good" that you miss the forest for the trees. I have entirely stopped using google to search for products because of ads. It is impossible to research products when the vast majority of what you see are ads for competing products. It has made the signal to noise ratio so bad that I can't actually trust Google to collect information and make it useful to me. Google is the absolute worst way to discover information about products you want to buy, because it is so front loaded with bullshit ads for things that others want me to buy.
- meiraleal 3y ago
  I google for one app and google store shows a paid app with similar name and colors as the first result, leading me to install other apps by mistake and deleting just after while google still gets the money from the installation. I'd call this a scam to both the customers buying ads and the customers of the play store.
- stcroixx 3y ago
  It's this failure to engage with reality that will be their downfall. Hubris is at the root of it really, reinforced by the way they hire.
  - azemetre 3y ago
    I always wondered if the rise of ds&a/leetcode style interviews often hurt these companies more than helped? You are definitely screening for a certain type of engineer when hiring this way, especially when you want to hire 10,000 of them. You're basically filtering people who care more about optimizing their career than wanting to make a good product (nothing wrong with putting your career first, but you can't have the entire company made up of these people), but then again all the incentives at these companies reward short term thinking so it's probably beyond the interview level. Either way there needs to be way more competition in the entire tech space in all sectors. Competition would solve a lot of these issues if Google was forced to break up Chrome, Search, Ads, Android, and YouTube; same for the other big tech co's too. This amount of consolidation is bad for everyone.
meiraleal 3y ago
> Before HN jumps all over this, I worked at Google and other ads and search companies... and this is technically true Only a very small percentage of bad people acknowledge it. Most evil people create mental models where they are actually working for the greater good. Your defense of the google exec quote is one of the ugliest attempts of turning bad into good that I have seen and knowing that this is the normal at Google I'm hoping for a good outcome of the antitrust trial (for society).
jsbisviewtiful 3y ago
I'm sure ads bring something to be experience, but ultimately when I have to scroll past 5 somewhat relevant ads before even seeing my results and once I finally see that my results are not very good because of SEO abusing blog spam... I'm going to use another service. I was not on the "google sucks" train until very recently. It sucks now.
janalsncm 3y ago
Another second-order benefit is the fact that innovation in ad tech has bled over into other kinds of content recommendation. If you can figure out which ads I would likely click on, you can also probably figure out what news stories I’m interested in. That being said, while ads may improve certain kinds of content, it is strictly negative for other kinds. For example, pretty much every kind of ad online which is intrusive. It’s intrusive because it’s not wanted. I don’t want a full screen Dior ad in the middle of an article about the auto worker strike. So sometimes the interests of advertisers and users are aligned, but many times they are not. And ad tech companies know which kinds of content are improved with ads and which damage the user experience. They could measure this if they wanted. But because they are trying to maximize ad revenue rather than user experience, so the ads win.
preommr 3y ago
Downvoted for not only having a bad point but also trying to lampshade it as just an unpopular opinion by pre-empting downvotes. Ads can be good depending on some metrics (e.g. conversions) or usability if a person is looking for a certain product - I check flyers for deals near me for when I want to eat out sometimes. But to claim "by nearlly any metric you want to pick", is hyperbole.
gorbachev 3y ago
Yes, but Google puts ads on every search result, even the ones for which the context makes it pretty clear ads would be detrimental to the user.
throwaway14356 3y ago
> Thanks for listening to my TED talk, let the downvoting begin! that you didn't eat some of the babies doesn't make it okay? my favorite shops have such tiny margins they couldn't afford buying ad slots. If they organically took the top of the search it wouldn't be very interesting to advertise the same only more expensieve along side of it?
WWLink 3y ago
I disagree. Not once has "sponsored result" ever helped me in my shopping process. If anything, algorithm steering and "sponsored results" hurt because I'm searching for product X while you're pushing (sometimes quite hard) for me to buy something else. Fuck that noise. If I were on the board of directors I'd push for a vote of no confidence in the CEO over saying something this idiotic.
phendrenad2 3y ago
You haven't proven that it's true in any case, not even "selected cases". You conflated CTR with user experience quality (rookie mistake) and then tried to say that the existence of ads throughout history somehow proves your point (lol?) The fact that you knew your point was ridiculous, and had to say "let the downvotes begin!" is just icing on the cake.
musicale 3y ago
I like magazine ads, such as ads for computers/software/accessories in computer magazines, ads for games in game magazines, or ads for guitars/amps/effects/etc. in guitar magazines. But I hate web ads - for some reason they are universally terrible. And the only thing worse than youtube ads is drugs ads on cable TV.
raxxorraxor 3y ago
> measured by nearly any metric you want to pick Which in conclusion should question the quality and meaningfulness of such metrics. Of course conversion rates are only meaningful if you indeed have any ads. That doesn't lead to any indication of positive "user experience", which admittedly is another soft term. Sure, if I go shopping, I mind ads far less. Although I find them to be mostly devoid of information.

by asah 3y ago

Terretta 3y ago

Ads improve conversion? You don't say.

asah 3y ago
don't be snarky - I mean compared with lower quality free/organic content.
- deleted 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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chinathrow 3y ago

> There are certain categories of websites and search results pages, where ads actually improve user experience, measured by nearly any metric you want to pick, from user perception to CTR/conversion, etc. I'm left for words, is this satire?

jrockway 3y ago

I don't think you deserve any downvotes, but there is also somewhat of a tragedy of the commons effect at play. I hear people Google "Facebook" to find the Facebook login page. No doubt, Facebook has ads for that search so that people click the right link. This ends up being expensive; people should have just clicked their bookmark, but don't really understand URLs, so there is just a tax on big companies to have that link available. I don't think this is particularly evil, but I also don't think it's amazing. At the end of the day, you're providing value for not making people type "www" and "com", but many think that should just be free. (Of course, before search was integrated into the address bar, I feel like typing "example" in there went to www.example.com. That feature mysteriously disappeared when browser vendors realized you could make money by displaying an unrelated webpage with ads instead.) Meanwhile the alternative is mobile apps and an icon on your homescreen, an effect that makes Apple and Google rich for taking a % of the revenue from those apps, and one of the largest job programs ever for software engineers. At the end of the day, I can see why people are uncomfortable with the whole situation, but I also don't see an easy solution. It is fun to railroad rich people in front of Congress, but at the end of the day, what really changes? The rich person has slightly less money, the politicians get a photo op, and some lawyer has a little more cash. Only better technology will end today's quirks. (Remember when Microsoft got sued for anti-trust violations? Did the government end IE's reign on the Internet, or did Chrome?)

wlesieutre 3y ago
> Meanwhile the alternative is mobile apps and an icon on your homescreen, an effect that makes Apple and Google rich for taking a % of the revenue from those apps, and one of the largest job programs ever for software engineers. Not to mention that you suffer the same problem in the App Store when you go searching for the Faceboook app. They have to bid for ads against competitors that want to show up when users try to find Facebook in the app store. Though at least it's only the one time and then it's installed, unlike users who don't add .com to their URL bar and search for Facebook every time instead.
- jrockway 3y ago
  Something I think about a lot is what the world would look like without advertising, i.e., you'd have to make every decision on its merits, and never rely on bought opinions. Like imagine you walk into a grocery store, and every shelf is lined with plain cardboard boxes with the name of the product on it ("chocolate-covered breakfast cereal") and a nutrition label. You walk in and there is nothing other than the merits of the product itself to guide your purchasing decision. Nothing else would influence you. Would that world be better than today's explosion of colors and brands and talking heads and size 100 font "NEW FORMULA!!!"? In today's world, if you're not sure what to buy, you just pick the thing with the most colorful box or whatever you heard about on TV, and you probably end up with something that's fine. (Occasionally, the thing you heard about on TV is actually good, and you wouldn't have thought to buy it otherwise. It's almost a win-win though I am somewhat hesitant to use that term to describe advertising on HN ;) Advertising is that; you don't care what brand of light switch you buy, you just want a light switch, so there is a race to convince someone you trust to recommend their brand to you. They pay someone money, you buy a light switch, it switches your lights, you're happy, they're happy, and this random third party ad company is happy. Multiple people are bidding against each other for this recommendation, and so advertising ends up costing a lot. (You, of course, pay the cost, not the company doing the advertising. But if everyone is doing it, it's not like you can choose.) That's the app store thing; Apple prides itself on how every iPhone app is the greatest thing ever created, and because sometimes that's true, you trust them. Well, what if they just approve everything and let people pay for recommendations? Now you have ads in the app store. Someone looking for a random app gets a random app. They're probably happy with their $0.99 purchase. They never think about it again and move on with their life, and Apple's execs get a cooler yacht, and some random software engineer also got 10 cents or whatever. This all seems a little wrong -- ideas and products should only be popular because of their merit in the global marketplace of ideas -- but is it actually? It's really just making a lot of money from making decisions that aren't worth making. It does sound really dystopian... don't think about anything, just CONSUME what we say to consume... but is researching light switches so that the true best light switch maker gets your money actually better than spending an hour playing with your dog or whatever? I don't know. It's difficult. I should think about it less.

figmert 3y ago

I'm not going to downvote you (I can't even), but you've made plenty of claims but haven't got anything backing up those claims. So I'd love to ask for some citations on these claims. I can get behind "ads keep the internet free" narrative, but it seems rather odd to suggest something that someone who doesn't exactly know you wants you to see is better than relevant result.

shalmanese 3y ago
It's funny to see in this thread simultaneously the sentiment that Google's search results have gotten awful over the years due to widespread gaming of the free channel of delivering results to you and also immense skepticism that any other channel could be better than the free channel. In general, I've found any query that's blogspammed to death, the ads are actually surprisingly useful. eg: I turn off my adblocker for any query that is "Alternatives to X (dropbox/xero/notion/figma etc.)". Every organic search result is some generic comparison website that is scraping from the same public data but the ads are generally actual product companies. I figure the companies paying their way to the top of ads have their LTV to CAC figured out and are generally going to be the ones with the highest predicted retention for me. In this case, I have a specific intent to buy and the bid/ask mechanism for ads is much more predictive of my intent than the SEO algorithms of the organic results.

timeon 3y ago

> And this isn't new: over history, there've been magazines and other media where the ads dominated the content Was it better user experience than if it was not dominated by ads?

asah 3y ago
Nobody was forced to buy Computer Shopper... people bought it for the ads.
vidarh 3y ago
In some cases the ads were one of the product. Some catalog businesses charged you for their catalogs. Some other magazines were also entirely for ads. In both cases there's be no user experience without the ads. But an important caveat was of course that buyers chose this. You got those magazines when you were looking for an ad for a specific product. If Google let you search specifically for their ads, I'm sure some searches would be specifically for ads, but most wouldn't be.

hn8305823 3y ago

> And this isn't new: over history, there've been magazines and other media where the ads dominated the content, e.g. trade publications such as _Computer Shopper_ during the 1980's PC revolution. Wired magazine was heavy on ads but they must have exerted some creative control over them because he entire experience was this unified techno-futurist thing.

valine 3y ago

If you fill the search results with enough SEO garbage eventually ads will look better by comparison. If ads are making your user experience better you have a serious problem.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
Okay, sure, build a better search engine that functions and is better without ads. Easier said than done. The internet is 99.99% scams and trash. It's easier said than done to find the signal in the noise. Some times - willing to pay (and being vetted not to be a scam) is a good indication of signal. Unfortunately, Google could do a little better on vetting their ad partners. Too often these days, ads are scams.
- Terretta 3y ago
  > build a better search engine that functions and is better without ads https://kagi.com https://kagi.com > The internet is 99.99% scams and trash. It's hard to find the signal in the noise. https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    Spot on. However I do wonder if the cost of indexing the internet would be prohibitively expensive for a company looking to bootstrap without ad money.
  - tqi 3y ago
    > We gather new content, published within the last week, from a handpicked list of blogs imo this only only works because it is a niche product? If Google went away, and Kagi became the #1 search engine overnight, I think this approach would immediately become a source of criticism for being too restrictive, gatekeeping newcomers or biased towards a narrow perspective (as Google itself already is).
    - Terretta 3y ago

thdc 3y ago

> (in selected cases) The tweet presents the quote without context so I interpret it to be a sweeping statement and therefore disagree based on that. If someone could provide a transcript of the cross-examination (I couldn't find it easily), then that could help with making a more informed opinion.

roughly 3y ago

The point of Google (or, of search engines, at least) is to surface content relevant to a query. If the content exists, it should be surfaced, and it should not require an advertiser to suggest you surface it to the user. If the content is not surfaced except by ads, that's a failure case for Google (or, for search engines, at least). Saying "Ads improve the user experience of a search engine" could only be true in the case where the search engine is already failing, and one might suggest spending the money and resources one is spending on an ads engine on improving the search engine, if the search engine is actually trying to optimize for delivery of relevant information. There's certainly one metric that'll always be improved by showing ads, though, and I suspect it's that one, and not any of the others, that's driving the decision to put ads on the page.

duped 3y ago

> There's lots of random categories, but the obvious ones are commercial/product searches where you're looking to buy something. I believe that you believe this while also believing that your metrics must be so horribly biased towards indicating that "ads are good" that you miss the forest for the trees. I have entirely stopped using google to search for products because of ads. It is impossible to research products when the vast majority of what you see are ads for competing products. It has made the signal to noise ratio so bad that I can't actually trust Google to collect information and make it useful to me. Google is the absolute worst way to discover information about products you want to buy, because it is so front loaded with bullshit ads for things that others want me to buy.

meiraleal 3y ago
I google for one app and google store shows a paid app with similar name and colors as the first result, leading me to install other apps by mistake and deleting just after while google still gets the money from the installation. I'd call this a scam to both the customers buying ads and the customers of the play store.
stcroixx 3y ago
It's this failure to engage with reality that will be their downfall. Hubris is at the root of it really, reinforced by the way they hire.
- azemetre 3y ago
  I always wondered if the rise of ds&a/leetcode style interviews often hurt these companies more than helped? You are definitely screening for a certain type of engineer when hiring this way, especially when you want to hire 10,000 of them. You're basically filtering people who care more about optimizing their career than wanting to make a good product (nothing wrong with putting your career first, but you can't have the entire company made up of these people), but then again all the incentives at these companies reward short term thinking so it's probably beyond the interview level. Either way there needs to be way more competition in the entire tech space in all sectors. Competition would solve a lot of these issues if Google was forced to break up Chrome, Search, Ads, Android, and YouTube; same for the other big tech co's too. This amount of consolidation is bad for everyone.

meiraleal 3y ago

> Before HN jumps all over this, I worked at Google and other ads and search companies... and this is technically true Only a very small percentage of bad people acknowledge it. Most evil people create mental models where they are actually working for the greater good. Your defense of the google exec quote is one of the ugliest attempts of turning bad into good that I have seen and knowing that this is the normal at Google I'm hoping for a good outcome of the antitrust trial (for society).

jsbisviewtiful 3y ago

I'm sure ads bring something to be experience, but ultimately when I have to scroll past 5 somewhat relevant ads before even seeing my results and once I finally see that my results are not very good because of SEO abusing blog spam... I'm going to use another service. I was not on the "google sucks" train until very recently. It sucks now.

janalsncm 3y ago

Another second-order benefit is the fact that innovation in ad tech has bled over into other kinds of content recommendation. If you can figure out which ads I would likely click on, you can also probably figure out what news stories I’m interested in. That being said, while ads may improve certain kinds of content, it is strictly negative for other kinds. For example, pretty much every kind of ad online which is intrusive. It’s intrusive because it’s not wanted. I don’t want a full screen Dior ad in the middle of an article about the auto worker strike. So sometimes the interests of advertisers and users are aligned, but many times they are not. And ad tech companies know which kinds of content are improved with ads and which damage the user experience. They could measure this if they wanted. But because they are trying to maximize ad revenue rather than user experience, so the ads win.

preommr 3y ago

Downvoted for not only having a bad point but also trying to lampshade it as just an unpopular opinion by pre-empting downvotes. Ads can be good depending on some metrics (e.g. conversions) or usability if a person is looking for a certain product - I check flyers for deals near me for when I want to eat out sometimes. But to claim "by nearlly any metric you want to pick", is hyperbole.

gorbachev 3y ago

Yes, but Google puts ads on every search result, even the ones for which the context makes it pretty clear ads would be detrimental to the user.

throwaway14356 3y ago

> Thanks for listening to my TED talk, let the downvoting begin! that you didn't eat some of the babies doesn't make it okay? my favorite shops have such tiny margins they couldn't afford buying ad slots. If they organically took the top of the search it wouldn't be very interesting to advertise the same only more expensieve along side of it?

WWLink 3y ago

I disagree. Not once has "sponsored result" ever helped me in my shopping process. If anything, algorithm steering and "sponsored results" hurt because I'm searching for product X while you're pushing (sometimes quite hard) for me to buy something else. Fuck that noise. If I were on the board of directors I'd push for a vote of no confidence in the CEO over saying something this idiotic.

phendrenad2 3y ago

You haven't proven that it's true in any case, not even "selected cases". You conflated CTR with user experience quality (rookie mistake) and then tried to say that the existence of ads throughout history somehow proves your point (lol?) The fact that you knew your point was ridiculous, and had to say "let the downvotes begin!" is just icing on the cake.

musicale 3y ago

I like magazine ads, such as ads for computers/software/accessories in computer magazines, ads for games in game magazines, or ads for guitars/amps/effects/etc. in guitar magazines. But I hate web ads - for some reason they are universally terrible. And the only thing worse than youtube ads is drugs ads on cable TV.

raxxorraxor 3y ago

> measured by nearly any metric you want to pick Which in conclusion should question the quality and meaningfulness of such metrics. Of course conversion rates are only meaningful if you indeed have any ads. That doesn't lead to any indication of positive "user experience", which admittedly is another soft term. Sure, if I go shopping, I mind ads far less. Although I find them to be mostly devoid of information.