6 ms·

Ads team begging for worse search results so that ads team can hit their goals

178 points by vinnyglennon 3y ago

renewiltord 3y ago
The email ends with "Just to be clear, the reason I haven't pushed back on a recall is that I don't want the message to be" and doesn't have the "Redacted" stamp. Bizarre.
- thehours 3y ago
  I assumed he edited his email to move that statement earlier and forgot to delete that piece on the end before sending.
rmellow 3y ago
Wisdom imparted in an accounting class in my undergrad, in the context of "what's the line I can't cross": "If the email with your strategy gets printed in the front page of a newspaper, how would you feel about it?" It's a good rule of thumb for professional ethics in general.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  "It's a good rule of thumb for professional ethics in general." So is it to have your strategy guided by general accepted ethics, or to not speak about your real strategy in open words?
  - xordon 3y ago
    The front page test is a policy I've seen, ie: if this was on the front page of the newspaper (or hacker news) would it be positive or negative?
  - satori99 3y ago
    You can talk about your nefarious strategy openly if it is with a single person at a time.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    Both. If you need to say something that can’t be printed, discuss it in person.
  - godelski 3y ago
    > So is it to have your strategy guided by general accepted ethics This is the generally accepted interpretation of the words. In other words, if you are unsure if something you're doing is ethical or not consider how others would react if they heard about you doing it. It's basically saying to consider group ethics and not just your own.
- conductr 3y ago
  Is this unethical though? Maybe it’s just not clear to me. I feel like we collectively view it negatively, but that’s also built on the premise that we search users consume a free utility that Google provides to us and is now some ethical requirement for them to maintain. They have no ethical obligation to do that. It’s also pretty common for public companies to try to shift volume to higher revenue or margin products when they’re pacing short of consensus. That said, you can always override a bonus plan and pay even when they fall short of their sales plan. It seemed like that was the entire catalyst of this conversation, wanting the ads team to hit their bonus. If y’all think this is unethical, you should hear the conversations I was privy to about how hospitals execs were considering halting patient admissions during the pandemic because nursing labor got expensive and breaking even was deemed unacceptable. The government upped reimbursements and same hospital execs made massive windfall bonuses
  - TT2048 3y ago
    User value and company revenue, in general, form a [pareto frontier](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_front https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_front). The company can pick an "angle" (trade off some user value for more profits and vice-versa) but both extremes are bad in the long term. They need to strike a balance. A company that continuously invests their efforts on maximum revenue subtraction eventually pushes their users out. Similarly, a company that invests too much into research and present user satisfaction, particularly when users don't pay for the product, is set to have some financial and economical problems in the future. I think this is borderline ethical. For sure it's over 9000 in the Maquiavellian scale (I mean the gymnastics behind "please don't say that this is us pushing for worse results, that's a very negative message" are genius and I can see that working really well under certain circumstances in a corporate setup), but that doesn't mean that it's unethical _necessarily_.
oldtownroad 3y ago
The title doesn’t match the content of the email. The email isn’t “begging for worse search results” rather they’re begging for more searches in the context of recent (at the time) Google Chrome changes that had reduced search volume.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
  In one part of the email, Jerry asks “Are there other ranking tweaks we can push out very quickly?” It’s not clear what exactly that means, but search ranking seems more likely than a Chrome UI change.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - delroth 3y ago
    In context it's pretty obvious this is talking about omnibox suggestion rankings (which is also what changed and had the claimed "unwanted" impact), not search rankings.
    - fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
      How do you know? Is there another email that mentions Omnibox?
      - delroth 3y ago
        > How do you know? Because I read more than random out of context tweets as my source of information. > Is there another email that mentions Omnibox? Yes. It's linked in multiple places in this very HN thread. Page 4 in the original justice.gov PDF specifically mentions the experiment that was done as a result of that originally quoted "complaint" email, and says "start experiments to improve search ranking in the omnibox".
        fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
blindriver 3y ago
When I worked at a large well-known internet company, one of the teams rolled back a feature because it made the site easier to use, which resulted in less accidental ad clicks. And it was common to stuff more ads on pages if revenue was looking short for the quarter. This is going back almost 20 years ago now. Also, this sounds like an email from a sales person, although I don't know whether it is or not. Some of the sale people that I've known were more than willing to cross into the greyest of grey areas to make their quota, regardless of the legality. I'm curious what the response to this email was.
thisisthenewme 3y ago
So much missing context here, at least for me. What is the rollback they are talking about? Is it in terms of something new in google chrome? From what I can tell, they are looking for certain amount of ads 'injection' to come from chrome. What does that really mean? Does chrome really control the ads injected into the search results from google? I had assumed that was directly from google. Or maybe something happened in the recent chrome update that reduced the number of direct queries heading to google? Also what's with the suggestion to increase the search box vertical space to increase in a search tab to make search prominent? That sounds pretty interesting to me.
- jsnell 3y ago
  The context is missing because the link is to somebody posting a screenshot of one page of a pdf of a scan of a printed email thread on Twitter. The full email thread was discussed extensively yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467
belval 3y ago
If you are going to be that brazen about it, perhaps having a quick meeting instead of just laying everything out in an email like that is the better approach. Best approach would be to not do it at all but I guess that's too much to ask.
- choppaface 3y ago
  Exactly. Google even coaches their employees against leaving a paper trail like this. That’s why the email is pretty remarkable: if this one leaked imagine how brazen the behind-closed-doors stuff is.
- Enginerrrd 3y ago
  Sorry but there is something really appalling about what you are saying. You are basically saying "if you're going to do something you think is illegal, make sure not to leave a paper trail so it can be proved in court." You're basically advising people not to get caught rather than to not do the bad thing. What is wrong with your world view that leads you to jump to that sentiment?
  - belval 3y ago
    Did you miss the "Best approach would be not to do it at all"? The first sentence is basically only a variation of "don't write it in an email if you wouldn't want to read it in the news". If the article was about a body being discovered in a murderers backyard and I had written "ideally don't bury bodies in your backyard" you would have questioned how sick and twisted I am that I didn't write "don't kill people"? The prior is inherent to the statement.
    - trealira 3y ago
      It's more like if you'd written "if you're going to be that brazen about killing someone, at least go to the effort of hiding the body, but ideally don't kill someone at all." It would be a bit questionable to have even said something like "at least try hiding the body "
totetsu 3y ago
This was discussed here the other day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467
tomlockwood 3y ago
Tooting my own horn but: "The truth is that Google and Facebook and the other large marketing data companies probably have some very sophisticated models of purchase intent. These companies likely know exactly when someone is making the choice, and could show people the relevant ad at the precise moment when they are most susceptible to it. But, the entire business model of these companies is to increase spend on their products. Why would they tell anyone something that would reduce ad spend?" https://lockwood.dev/advertising/2019/06/07/adtech-sucks.html https://lockwood.dev/advertising/2019/06/07/adtech-sucks.htm...
johnea 3y ago
He said... in the twitverse...
asperous 3y ago
Just to add another perspective, isn't sales like this at any large company? Sales is pushed hard on quotas/targets and so look for any way possible to hit those. In other words were these requests taken seriously by the product managers and leadership?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
wilg 3y ago
What a difficult to parse email!
ahmedfromtunis 3y ago
Can someone please show me where in the email "worse search results" are referenced? I read it 3 times and still unable to get where they were mentioned!
dools 3y ago
@pdrmnvd quote tweets his own 2023 tweet about Google "filtering b2b emails", saying he "nailed it", with a screenshot of an email about increasing search volume in 2019 ... How is this on the front page of HN? Flagged.
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  Isn't ads well-known for mucking search and affinity lists? Did the tweeter just say he fucking nailed predicting the sun would rise?
dang 3y ago
This was discussed in another thread within the last week. I can't find it now. Anyone? Edit: here it is – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467. Thanks to the user who emailed!
justinclift 3y ago
Ugh. That Twitter page is only the first page of the much longer thread: https://web.archive.org/web/20230919185431/https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-09/416421.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20230919185431/https://www.justi... The Chrome team does seem to be screwing with things to increase the number of searches needed by a user to find what they want though, thereby increasing the number of ads shown and potentially clicked upon.

178 points by vinnyglennon 3y ago

The email ends with "Just to be clear, the reason I haven't pushed back on a recall is that I don't want the message to be" and doesn't have the "Redacted" stamp. Bizarre.

thehours 3y ago
I assumed he edited his email to move that statement earlier and forgot to delete that piece on the end before sending.

rmellow 3y ago

Wisdom imparted in an accounting class in my undergrad, in the context of "what's the line I can't cross": "If the email with your strategy gets printed in the front page of a newspaper, how would you feel about it?" It's a good rule of thumb for professional ethics in general.

hutzlibu 3y ago
"It's a good rule of thumb for professional ethics in general." So is it to have your strategy guided by general accepted ethics, or to not speak about your real strategy in open words?
- xordon 3y ago
  The front page test is a policy I've seen, ie: if this was on the front page of the newspaper (or hacker news) would it be positive or negative?
- satori99 3y ago
  You can talk about your nefarious strategy openly if it is with a single person at a time.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  Both. If you need to say something that can’t be printed, discuss it in person.
- godelski 3y ago
  > So is it to have your strategy guided by general accepted ethics This is the generally accepted interpretation of the words. In other words, if you are unsure if something you're doing is ethical or not consider how others would react if they heard about you doing it. It's basically saying to consider group ethics and not just your own.
conductr 3y ago
Is this unethical though? Maybe it’s just not clear to me. I feel like we collectively view it negatively, but that’s also built on the premise that we search users consume a free utility that Google provides to us and is now some ethical requirement for them to maintain. They have no ethical obligation to do that. It’s also pretty common for public companies to try to shift volume to higher revenue or margin products when they’re pacing short of consensus. That said, you can always override a bonus plan and pay even when they fall short of their sales plan. It seemed like that was the entire catalyst of this conversation, wanting the ads team to hit their bonus. If y’all think this is unethical, you should hear the conversations I was privy to about how hospitals execs were considering halting patient admissions during the pandemic because nursing labor got expensive and breaking even was deemed unacceptable. The government upped reimbursements and same hospital execs made massive windfall bonuses
- TT2048 3y ago
  User value and company revenue, in general, form a [pareto frontier](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_front https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_front). The company can pick an "angle" (trade off some user value for more profits and vice-versa) but both extremes are bad in the long term. They need to strike a balance. A company that continuously invests their efforts on maximum revenue subtraction eventually pushes their users out. Similarly, a company that invests too much into research and present user satisfaction, particularly when users don't pay for the product, is set to have some financial and economical problems in the future. I think this is borderline ethical. For sure it's over 9000 in the Maquiavellian scale (I mean the gymnastics behind "please don't say that this is us pushing for worse results, that's a very negative message" are genius and I can see that working really well under certain circumstances in a corporate setup), but that doesn't mean that it's unethical _necessarily_.

oldtownroad 3y ago

The title doesn’t match the content of the email. The email isn’t “begging for worse search results” rather they’re begging for more searches in the context of recent (at the time) Google Chrome changes that had reduced search volume.

fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
In one part of the email, Jerry asks “Are there other ranking tweaks we can push out very quickly?” It’s not clear what exactly that means, but search ranking seems more likely than a Chrome UI change.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- delroth 3y ago
  In context it's pretty obvious this is talking about omnibox suggestion rankings (which is also what changed and had the claimed "unwanted" impact), not search rankings.
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
    How do you know? Is there another email that mentions Omnibox?
    - delroth 3y ago
      > How do you know? Because I read more than random out of context tweets as my source of information. > Is there another email that mentions Omnibox? Yes. It's linked in multiple places in this very HN thread. Page 4 in the original justice.gov PDF specifically mentions the experiment that was done as a result of that originally quoted "complaint" email, and says "start experiments to improve search ranking in the omnibox".
      - fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago

blindriver 3y ago

When I worked at a large well-known internet company, one of the teams rolled back a feature because it made the site easier to use, which resulted in less accidental ad clicks. And it was common to stuff more ads on pages if revenue was looking short for the quarter. This is going back almost 20 years ago now. Also, this sounds like an email from a sales person, although I don't know whether it is or not. Some of the sale people that I've known were more than willing to cross into the greyest of grey areas to make their quota, regardless of the legality. I'm curious what the response to this email was.

thisisthenewme 3y ago

So much missing context here, at least for me. What is the rollback they are talking about? Is it in terms of something new in google chrome? From what I can tell, they are looking for certain amount of ads 'injection' to come from chrome. What does that really mean? Does chrome really control the ads injected into the search results from google? I had assumed that was directly from google. Or maybe something happened in the recent chrome update that reduced the number of direct queries heading to google? Also what's with the suggestion to increase the search box vertical space to increase in a search tab to make search prominent? That sounds pretty interesting to me.

jsnell 3y ago
The context is missing because the link is to somebody posting a screenshot of one page of a pdf of a scan of a printed email thread on Twitter. The full email thread was discussed extensively yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467

belval 3y ago

If you are going to be that brazen about it, perhaps having a quick meeting instead of just laying everything out in an email like that is the better approach. Best approach would be to not do it at all but I guess that's too much to ask.

choppaface 3y ago
Exactly. Google even coaches their employees against leaving a paper trail like this. That’s why the email is pretty remarkable: if this one leaked imagine how brazen the behind-closed-doors stuff is.
Enginerrrd 3y ago
Sorry but there is something really appalling about what you are saying. You are basically saying "if you're going to do something you think is illegal, make sure not to leave a paper trail so it can be proved in court." You're basically advising people not to get caught rather than to not do the bad thing. What is wrong with your world view that leads you to jump to that sentiment?
- belval 3y ago
  Did you miss the "Best approach would be not to do it at all"? The first sentence is basically only a variation of "don't write it in an email if you wouldn't want to read it in the news". If the article was about a body being discovered in a murderers backyard and I had written "ideally don't bury bodies in your backyard" you would have questioned how sick and twisted I am that I didn't write "don't kill people"? The prior is inherent to the statement.
  - trealira 3y ago
    It's more like if you'd written "if you're going to be that brazen about killing someone, at least go to the effort of hiding the body, but ideally don't kill someone at all." It would be a bit questionable to have even said something like "at least try hiding the body "

totetsu 3y ago

This was discussed here the other day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467

tomlockwood 3y ago

Tooting my own horn but: "The truth is that Google and Facebook and the other large marketing data companies probably have some very sophisticated models of purchase intent. These companies likely know exactly when someone is making the choice, and could show people the relevant ad at the precise moment when they are most susceptible to it. But, the entire business model of these companies is to increase spend on their products. Why would they tell anyone something that would reduce ad spend?" https://lockwood.dev/advertising/2019/06/07/adtech-sucks.html https://lockwood.dev/advertising/2019/06/07/adtech-sucks.htm...

johnea 3y ago

He said... in the twitverse...

asperous 3y ago

Just to add another perspective, isn't sales like this at any large company? Sales is pushed hard on quotas/targets and so look for any way possible to hit those. In other words were these requests taken seriously by the product managers and leadership?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

wilg 3y ago

What a difficult to parse email!

ahmedfromtunis 3y ago

Can someone please show me where in the email "worse search results" are referenced? I read it 3 times and still unable to get where they were mentioned!

dools 3y ago

@pdrmnvd quote tweets his own 2023 tweet about Google "filtering b2b emails", saying he "nailed it", with a screenshot of an email about increasing search volume in 2019 ... How is this on the front page of HN? Flagged.

readthenotes1 3y ago
Isn't ads well-known for mucking search and affinity lists? Did the tweeter just say he fucking nailed predicting the sun would rise?

dang 3y ago

This was discussed in another thread within the last week. I can't find it now. Anyone? Edit: here it is – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37675467. Thanks to the user who emailed!

justinclift 3y ago

Ugh. That Twitter page is only the first page of the much longer thread: https://web.archive.org/web/20230919185431/https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-09/416421.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20230919185431/https://www.justi... The Chrome team does seem to be screwing with things to increase the number of searches needed by a user to find what they want though, thereby increasing the number of ads shown and potentially clicked upon.