It's arguable that queries like [southwest airlines] are even a search. The vast majority of instances are probably URL-illiterate users merely trying to get to Southwest Airlines' web site. (And Google must know rather precisely just how many.) For these users, search is really operating as a natural-language alternative to DNS so such a clickable banner will help them get there.
More than just advertising, this represents an element of curation on such search terms, to get you to the place you're really looking for. It'll help avoid situations like when that one blog post appeared at the top for [facebook login] and suddenly bunches of users couldn't find Facebook.
Like any technological tool, it could be misused for evil, and so will require vigilance in the court of public opinion if not in actual courts.
(Disclaimer: I'm a potential Googler, currently in the interview pipeline, but these views are my own.)
I would say that even URL-literate users use it this way, because the business-to-URL mapping is not always clear, and the naive guess is sometimes the worst possible one (e.g. Dick's Sporting Goods.)
Yes, I thought this was (likely unintentionally) insulting. I rarely use urls unless it's a known site. Especially since I'm Canadian and the TLD isn't always predictable.
And on a phone, it's usually faster to google 'hacker news' or even 'hack new' if I'm lazy, than it is to type 'news.ycombinator.com'. (Yes, I'm horrible. And no, I don't want to bookmark it and make it too easy to come here....)
Good point, yes there are reasons other than URL illiteracy (convenience) to use search as a DNS replacement. So this new behavior of Google helps even you. And without any deceptive downside since if you are URL-literate you're probably pretty well aware of what's advertising and what isn't.
This is where I'm Feeling Lucky search is really useful. l <business name> sends me directly to the correct site very close to 100% of the time, even if I misspell the name of the company.
Chrome (v30.0.1599.101 for future reference) -> new tab -> Google + search bar appears above the recent/most popular sites list. I click on the search bar under the Google logo and start typing.. and magically my text does not appear in the text form but rather in the URL field in the navigation bar.
What once may have been uneducated behavior is a behavior Google is training users to do.
You're right. Of course Google wants users to search for URLs instead of typing them, because it then gets to show them search results (which can be monetized) instead of just loading up a website.
In this case I can understand Southwest may think banner ads help with branding, but what I cannot understand is why so many companies buy the topmost Google text ad even though their websites are already #1 organically?
I've heard apocryphal stories of companies seeing reduced clickthrough on search results when they've tried canceling ads for which they are the top (or only) search result, especially for extremely niche products. The claimed interpretation was that some customers were interpreting the ad as an indicator of legitimacy.
The last thing one of these companies would want is a competitor or some kind of unsavory hanger-on diluting their brand with a different message or viagra ads.
If a competitors ad ever showed above a perfectly relevant organic result, THAT would be pitchfork time. Until then, if advertisers want to throw money at Google at as a show of "legitimacy" for brand development, bully for Google.
> but what I cannot understand is why so many companies buy the topmost Google text ad even though their websites are already #1 organically?
Google's organic search takes lots of things into account, some of them personalization; a company that is usually #1 organically won't always be, and buying an ad makes it more likely that people will see your page first.
Citation need. Google is on fact doing the opposite. If a chrome user types a URL into the omnibox, they do NOT get a search. Whereas typing a URL into a form field IS a search.
It's arguable that queries like [southwest airlines] are even a search. The vast majority of instances are probably URL-illiterate users merely trying to get to Southwest Airlines' web site. (And Google must know rather precisely just how many.) For these users, search is really operating as a natural-language alternative to DNS so such a clickable banner will help them get there.
If Google would only show Southwest Airlines ads when I searched for [southwest airlines], I might agree. But they won't - they'll let Delta, Orbitz, or anyone else buy that spot (if Google's behavior with other flavors of AdWords is any guide).
Its an ad. No need to rationalize it away as actually being a good thing for the user. Its just a (huge) ad, which hopefully (for Google) won't damage the utility of their product enough to drive too many users away.
arguable, sure. I wouldn't call it an airtight argument, especially as it extends to more search terms.
In some cases, it's a 'natural-language alternative to DNS.' In some very similar cases, it's not. If Southwest Airlines crashes today, there will be a lot of people on that results page looking for news or pictures.
In some cases, it just isn't clear what the right page is.If you google the name of a local restaurant, you might find their site at #1 but in a lot of cases, a restaurant's site isn't the best place for info. Maybe their facebook page is. Maybe some aggregator site is. Google (supposedly neutrally) tells you what the best place for this is.
In this particular case, wikipedia is the right answer the the "Southwest Airlines" query a substantial portion of the time.
In some cases, it just isn't clear what the right page is.
Absolutely. Which is why Google isn't doing this across the board but for carefully selected cases. They'd do it for advertiser clients for whom Google's data demonstrates a vast preponderance of intent to just go to the company's web site by name. I'd bet quite a bit that [southwest airlines] queriers are looking for Southwest's own customer applications (pricing, booking, flight status) far more often than for Wikipedia or news articles. It's to Southwest's benefit if these users more smoothly find southwest.com and Google can pick up a slice of the benefit as the middleman.
Google (presumably) wouldn't do this for a local business with an ambiguous web presence. Nor for a company whose name more likely indicates searching for news items than for customer applications, perhaps [Goldman Sachs].
Google is trialing it for a few carefully selected cases. But even in those cases:
- It's not a 100% bet that searchers are looking for the company website. Some will still want stock prices or wikipedia or travel sites or whatnot. For these cases this is a banner funeling more traffic to the company website with a forceful "more pixels" approach.
- If the company starts to hit the media for something (especially something bad), this helps them do it.
Anyway, I think this 'alternative to DNS' argument is kind of circular. If everyone is looking for the companies' homepage Google's paid & organic "sitelinks" (triggered by exactly these cases) take up most of the screen real estate. The company website already gets most of the traffic. Some people still want a wikipedia link or whatnot. These banners are designed too suck up a few more of the undecided and presumably perform some branding function (especially if only a few big companies are allowed to have these).
BTW, I think it's google's right to sell banners. It's their damn website. There's the same conflict/impartiality issue interest when any info/media business is selling ad space. But I also think this is part of an evolving ethos. The initial ethos was small text ads instead of big flashy screen real estate. Those ads needed to get clicks with an attractive message. They were available to small business just as they were available to meg-corps, pay for what you eat style. These banners are screen real estate auctions available exclusively to big boys. Adwords shooed away the 'internet entrepreneur' types. Over the years natural search has (as part of anti spam campaigns) been burying smaller businesses. Adwords focuses much less on SMEs these days too.
As I said, I'm not calling foul. Their website. Advertising is legal. I'm just calling duck.
One hypothesis: someone who is looking for stock prices would search Google Finance or search for "LUV"; someone who is looking for ticket prices will search "YYZ to SFO", and someone who is looking for wikipedia will search "southwest airlines site:en.wikipedia.org".
I suspect that's exactly what this experiment seeks to test. Is this giant banner result more relevant for users searching "southwest airlines" than the knowledge graph box that contains Wikipedia, Stock Prices, and a Flight Status prompt?
If so, then we'll start to see these "banner ads" become more common. If not, they delete some code and everything goes back to the way it was.
Rather than theory-crafting, Google is measuring their users' behaviour. As I feel they should be.
Look at some point it becomes the user's responsibility to type an extra 5 or 10 characters to disambiguate their intent if they are looking for "news" or "criticism".
Google gets flack for not being an omniscient omnipotent benevolent God, when they are being darn good.
I can't provide a detailed opinion of this case because I can't recreate what the Guardian screenshot shows, but the end result in this particular case is Southwest airline's cost of traffic is vastly inflated.
When this particular user searches "Southwest Airlines", the giant image pushes all of the other results below the fold. The likelihood of the user clicking on an organic listing is very small to zero.
While most major US corporations have been purchasing PPC ads for their own trademarks for many years, and sitelinks have existed in Adwords ads for a few ads allowing more navigation options, this particular screenshot shows much deeper results. What I see in that screenshot matches the organic listings for Southwest Airlines right now on Google, "Check in Online" etc. The "sponsored" label within this element makes me assume that Southwest is paying any of those clicks.
The marketing departments of these large corporations, being dependent on their own internal results to justify further budget increases and bonuses are easily pulled in to this traffic attribution trap. They will be able to say, bookings from Adwords PPC traffic increased X times, when these were bookings that they previously were getting for free.
Figure out may be its not a great idea in two years? Too late. Google will just show something else in your place. (Google's ITA software prohibition expires in 2016, which will effect a lot of travel sites and airlines but that is a different topic.)
Is Google within their rights to do this, in the US? More or less yes. However, these corporations are baking in billions of dollars in extra costs to themselves. If I buy a Facebook ad or a Superbowl ad I get new visibility. Should I have to pay Rand Mcnally for users who walk through the door of my Starbuck's franchise because they used the map to find my location? It doesn't sound so ludicrous if I used a smart phone app to find a local coffee shop.
There is another side to this, the user's side. How happy are users once they know that most of what they are clicking on with Google are paid advertisements? For most of Google's life ads were just supplemental, a little additional content that made the company boatloads of money. No, for certain terms all Google is is ads. Its wildly more profitable. When users have been trained for years to believe Google is offering them objectively ranked content it becomes even better because their brains believe that ad they just clicked on is actually an objectively chosen "best" answer. Is this sustainable in the long run?
I'm not 30 yet and I feel like an old fart. I don't like the NSA reading my email. I don't like Facebook logins following me around the web. I don't appreciate perpetual history of every thing I do. I never even created a LinkedIn account. I don't like the idea of my Google experience being a boatload of paid ads. And I have my own company with well over a million monthly US users..
Let's follow through on this thought. What searches will result in a banner ad for pets.com? "pets.com"? "pets"? "pet supplies"?
If pets.com is the second result for "pet supplies", are they allowed to buy the banner ad? Or do they have to wage an SEO campaign first to claim the top spot, then buy the ad?
Bonus question: Is Black Car Limo (URL blackcar.com) allowed to buy a banner ad for "black car"?
> (And Google must know rather precisely just how many.)
In the article:
"a system with about 30 advertisers in the US in which it shows banner ads for companies including SouthWest Airlines on pages which include them in web search results"
So google knows by the fact that the name of the client is in the search term.
what about if someone searches for nissan? picture of a car or a picture of the dudes computer repair service at nissan.com? whoever pays the most, which is sad. i'm sure the same thing will happen with apple
Good to know that the company that holds my email, appointments, two-factor-auth, credit card number, and search data has the reliability of a flaky college freshman.
Also good to know that there will literally ALWAYS be people willing to minimize the broken promises of corporations (when they're not insisting that no corporation would ever be so stupid as to break a highly visible promise because the outcry would be tremendous).
Reading this is a breath of fresh air from the traditional "defend Google or other corporations at all costs" type comments. Maybe now we can drop the meme that Google is some altruistic entity and realize that ~97% of their revenue is from advertising. This is why they exist.
It's now just a matter of time before paid inclusion results show up in the organic SERPs like Yahoo used to have.
The best part is in Google's original IPO filing they promised not to ever accept money for inclusion of results:
> "Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating."
> "We do not accept money for search result ranking or inclusion. We do accept fees for advertising, but it does not influence how we generate our search results. The advertising is clearly marked and separated. This is similar to a newspaper, where the articles are independent of the advertising."
> "Some of our competitors charge web sites for inclusion in their indices or for more frequent updating of pages. Inclusion and frequent updating in our index are open to all sites free of charge."
> "We apply these principles to each of our products and services. We believe it is important for users to have access to the best available information and research, not just the information that someone pays for them to see."
Agree about freshman, just wanted to add, that this freshman has managed to do other not so nice things recently, thus increasing cumulative damage to the reputation well beyond sum of each part. I assume that at some point powerusers will start to migrate to different services, when/if competitive enough offer comes
"A benefit corporation or B corporation is a corporate form in the United States designed for for-profit entities that want to consider society and the environment in addition to profit in their decision making process."
"Maximize profit" is not a well-defined single thing. For instance, the suggestion that companies maximize profits without regard for their customers must explain why the customers actually stay with that company; in general that may be a short-term win but a huge long-term loss, and many companies have died that way. If nothing else you've got to consider long-term profit vs. short-term profit, and there are in fact many other "something elses" to consider (what level of risks to take, etc).
Well the company I work for as one and any other company that realises the pursuit of money without regard for other ideals is an exercise in destruction and exploitation.
Often co-operatives will fit well in to this category as the workers in a co-operative are rather less likely to malevolently exploit themselves in a disdainful pursuit of profit before humanity.
A promise made by Marissa Mayer, who, as most of us know, works elsewhere now. Sure, the promise was arguably on behalf of the company, but "under her watch" is also arguably implied.
And... Did you leave her? or just break up as a common agreement? In legalese language, I am pretty sure that a promise is synonym of contract, and contracts might be dissolved if both sides of the contract agreed.
This being an open promise is not a contract but a reaffirmation of a goal, since people change is regrettable but OK to break promises to ourselves sometimes when the interest of the goal had changed.
From Wikipedia article: [1]
"In the law of contract, an exchange of promises is usually held to be legally enforceable, according to the Latin maxim pacta sunt servanda."
Like said, the word "exchange" is critical here, and isn't pedantic - this is a key part of the modern western understanding of contract law.
A contract must be quid pro quo to be valid.
"Bob, I'm going to come fix your fence this weekend" is a promise, but it isn't a legal contract.
"Bob, I'm going to come fix your fence this weekend for $100" is a promise, and because there is a quid pro quo exchange it can qualify as an enforceable contract. Bob can potentially come after you for damages if you renege on your end of it.
One-sided promises (like the one Google made) are generally not considered contractually obligated[1].
"A contract is a legally enforceable promise or undertaking that something will or will not occur. * The word promise can be used as a legal synonym for contract *,[2] although care is required as a promise may not have the full standing of a contract, as when it is an agreement without consideration"
That article is wrong (and the cited source for that claim, if you follow it, leads back to a thesaurus-like entry that is, unlike the other definitions on the page, itself unsourced though the source appears to be itself a tertiary source.) A promise is not a "legal synonym" for a contract. A promise is a necessary but not sufficient element of a contract.
Well, along with the proper definitions from other (cited) legal dictionaries on that page, there's also an unsourced, thesaurus-like entry that does seem to suggest what the page is cited for, though the other definitions on the page make clear that that entry is only accurate in terms of loosely associated concepts and not proper synonyms.
Ok.. I know the discussion is going way off-topic and getting pedantic connotations. To illustrate the point in my original comment, I would like to make a last cite from Britannica.
@dragonwriter: For some reason I can't reply your comments, I guess HN is delaying replies after a while precisely to avoid long off-topic threads (although they are fun :)
The fact that one of the words is a subset of another depending on the context doesn't invalidate the fact that the words are still synonyms when they are used in a specific topic.
Moreover, by what you said before:
> "Exchange" is the critical word. A single promise is extraordinarily different...
I would conclude that you are actually agreed on how I used it in my original comment:
> "and contracts might be dissolved if both sides of the contract agreed. This being an open promise is not a contract but a reaffirmation of a goal"
This is exactly the problem people are having with Google. We/they have this ideal of what they thought Google was/should-be and Google isn't/haven't-been-completely living up to it.
One could argue that the advertising situation has changed. Back in 2005, the types of banner ads that they opposed were heavy, often Flash driven punch-the-monkey junk.
Now, they are putting non-animated (from the samples that I have seen) banners that are completely relevant to your search.
Does that argument hold up? I don't really think it does. But maybe that is their angle?
This isn't a banner ad. This is essentially a branded search. It's not like Google is targeting users with Flash-based crud here. To call it a banner ad is kind of silly.
It walks like a duck but it doesn't quack like a duck. It shows up upon your specific input of the company name. I'm not sure what to call it, but 'advertisement' seems ill-fitting.
Now if it showed up when you typed a generic term like 'airline' I would agree it was an ad. But does it?
It's a prediction. Google's trend has been to get further and further away from their original design and core principles and push harder and harder on the boundaries of ethics and good taste. The end-game for that trend is to end up looking like a 1990's-style portal (which they already pretty much do, except at the moment all the content is still mostly Google properties). I could be wrong. I hope I am. But I'd give you long odds against.
To grow revenue when your product is selling for less you need to sell more of it, so ads will start appearing everywhere. It's just common sense. What else are they going to do... fire people and start a mass exodus?
If I search for MLK, I see his picture on the side. I don't see how getting a picture of Southwest Airlines when I search for "Southwest Airlines" is that big of a deal.
Now, if I were to search for "airlines" and saw that huge banner up there, I'd call that an ad and I'd be right there, handing out pitchforks. This? This is just returning searching results in a (arguably) prettier way.
It's a big deal because this is a false equivalence. A corporation with a marketing budget and a brand is not the same as an historical figure. I think that explains a lot of the leeriness around this move.
That said, I'm leaning towards your interpretation ("search results in a prettier way"). But the money involved makes me nervous.
You're saying that whether or not it's advertising depends on the context of where the paid ad appears, which is an arbitrary and baseless distinction.
If a company rents a billboard that's right outside their office, isn't that advertising? Sure, you could have looked at the front of the building to see their logo, but that doesn't change the fact that the billboard is advertising.
I disagree with your analogy. In your case, I would say the banner represents the giant logo over the door, just before you walk into the building.
In most ad-based marketing, you're typically not just randomly throwing your brand out there. Obviously, the expected ROI goes up when you can target the right demographic (saturday morning cartoons versus world news with Tom Brokaw). This is not that. This isn't a demographic-driven ad, based on search criteria like "airline travel" or "buy tickets from DEN to DTW". The person knew exactly what they were searching for. Hell, depending on your browser, typing that exact string in your address bar will take you directly to Southwest Airlines. Google just managed to convince companies to pay them for this, while at the same time presenting a prettier and more useful direct links within that box.
As an afterthought, the most-searched for term in our company web portal is "google". I would be extremely surprised if Google, themselves, don't have a ton of searches where they could simply append a ".com" to the search query and send them directly to where they wanted. I doubt my parents would even notice.
The difference is that Google does not charge MLK to have his info show up in knowledge graph results. As I understand it, they are charging Southwest Airlines for this big banner.
If it was just a larger knowledge graph box I doubt anyone would care.
How about just a banner. It reflects the content of the search. It would be an Ad if it was say, American Airlines pictured for a Southwest Airlines search. It's like seeing the official results being curated for the searcher.
I think this is exactly point I was getting at. Google is giving companies the ability to curate their own results, which is something Facebook (through pages) and Twitter (through featured tweets on high-profile social accounts) already allow.
Difference is that it's a search, not a dedicated page. I know there are a lot of cynics here, but that's not the same as a banner ad.
It's not an ad because it's an organic search result, which is directly relevant to what I'm searching. It's essentially the same as Google Image search result, only better suited for this particular page and request.
Care to elaborate on how its better suited? Why return what you are calling image results on a page that historically has been text only, especially when there exists a perfectly functional Image Search already?
Plus, why insert an image at all if not to convert people that would otherwise miss (or not be looking for) the text result?
> Google said that it won't be charging more for the banner ads - which take up large parts of the screen: "they are part of AdWords" [from the linked article]
"they are part of AdWords" -> Google considers them to be an an ad.
Ads doesn't, per definition, need to be irrelevant.
I actually have to agree somewhat, though (and I don't work in marketing). If you search for Southwest Airlines, why should Southwest Airlines not be the top result? Google has been showing pictures and information about people, products, and companies for quite a while now (https://www.google.com/#q=paul+graham), and shows commonly visited links off the main page of a website (as shown in that search for Paul Graham, they sub-link to his essays and other commonly visited pages).
It's very clear the intent of searching for Southwest Airlines; to get information about Southwest Airlines. The only difference between this result and any other result is that Southwest told Google what to put as their picture and sub-links, and Google made them pay for it. Searching for American Airlines shows almost exactly the same thing, except it's automatically populated by Google's engine, rather than being paid for.
it shows banner ads for companies including SouthWest
Airlines on pages which include them in web search results.
It's not just 'If you search for Southwest Airlines'. It's if in the list of results for the thing you searched for there's a Southwest Airlines page. It could be coincidental but suddenly you have a large advertisement at the top of your page.
It wouldn't be outside the bounds of possibility for this to encourage Google to rank Southwest Airlines pages more highly so that they can show the banner, thereby generating more revenue.
I only see the ad when I search directly for "Southwest Airlines". For example, search for "Southwest check in". Southwest Airlines is the number one result, but there's no ad on the page: https://www.google.com/#q=southwest+check+in
>If you search for Southwest Airlines, why should Southwest Airlines not be the top result?
Why? Because the homepage of a corporation should not automatically be the top result. If they implemented it that way, they could throw away the entire ranking algos!
What if SW Airlines fucks up one day and masses of reporting about this springs up? Yeah, better to have the big ass advert as top result when people searching for southwest.
Also, I am fairly certain this is just the start. Next step, widen the results. Search just for "Airlines" and get the big ass ad for Southwest on the top. Other airlines see this and also buy ad space. And pretty soon when you search for "best airline" you will be presented with a page that makes you wonder if you did an image search by accident.
While it may not be a banner ad, it's a foot-in-the-door technique. Display these branded search for a few years, so when they're ready to implement real banner ads, users won't be shocked.
Just imagine the press release.
"This isn't something new we're doing. We've been experimenting with showing users highly targeted banner image when querying for specific terms. We're only expanding that target to help users find what they need faster."
If that's a banner ad, it's the most relevant, pleasant, and appropriate banner ad I've ever seen. It's directly related to the search term and is not obnoxious in the least.
If all ads were such high quality I'd have no problems with this (but would still probably use adblock!).
Corporate promises aren't worth a dime as history has shown repeatedly. In fact, corporations (especially large ones) can't ever be trusted for pretty much anything and anything they say or do you should always react sceptically by default. They just don't care, and this lack of caring is an inevitability for growing corporations.
Granted some might consider this to be a minor breach of a promise, some might not. The point still stands.
You can absolutely trust them if they are say "we are doing this to maximize profits for our share holders / owners".
Then, what is this expectation that one should be able to trust them to do anything else at all? Surely the mere existence of consumer law should tell us something.
If you take the full quote, this isn't an open and shut case as it certainly isn't a 'banner ad' in terms of what everyone understood to be banner ads in 2005. The full quote is:
"There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever."
That Southwest Airlines screenshot doesn't look like a banner ad as described by Marissa Mayer. It doesn't seem to be flashing or flying around or popping up.
And, arguably, Google has been doing things that flash and fly around with the Google Doodles on the homepage for years. And no one freaked out about that.
>in terms of what everyone understood to be banner ads in 2005.
Everybody understood banner ads then in exactly the same as they understand them now. Ads in a banner. Banner ads never had to be "crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping," and you never needed a banner ad to do any of that.
Mayer isn't actually saying the two things are the same either, because she uses two different, complete sentences.
Isn't a banner ad an ad embedded in a page full of content? This is the actual content for a specific search, so I'm not sure how it constitutes a banner ad.
What 10 links would a hypothetically perfect search engine return for that query?
Edit: Judging from the replies, many of you seem to think my question was "how many ads would a perfect search engine show?" Please note that this is not what I asked.
Edit: Judging by your edit, you seem to be confusing "what should they show" with the original question, which is something like "Why is the right 50% plus the top block of the left column ads?"
The answer to your question is "whatever links match the search terms based on their wonderful, wonderful indexing algorithm."
The difference is that one is what Google think will be the most useful results for users, and the other is what Google think will make them the most money regardless of usefulness.
The "hypothetically perfect search" has absolutely zero ads and only shows results based on merit, not how much somebody was willing to pay. Why is that so hard to understand for Google employees? Your founders wrote a bit about this back in the day you know:
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 [Page, 98]. 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 [Bagdikian 83], 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 [Marchiori 97]. 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.
Language is the biggest influencing factor, at least for me.
I get zero ads if I search for “trash can” but an ridiculous amount of ads if I search for “Mülltonne” (German for “trash can”), all because I’m searching on http://google.de/.
Also, it depends on what country Google have geo-located you as being in and not on what country's Google page you're searching from; non-Americans get completely different search results on Google.com from Americans.
What ads you see will vary a lot by location. For example here in the UK 'trash can' returns no ads at all for me. On the other hand 'rubbish bin' results in a page with 8 visible ads and only 3 visible organic search results: http://i.imgur.com/7frlR2J.png
That promise was made when Schmidt was running things. We all know by now that Page is much more aggressive at monetizing existing products and killing off non-essential ones. We can expect more of these things in the future.
> Based on your search query, we think you are trying to find a specific brand. This box provides information about that brand. The brand owner is sponsoring this collection of content, some of which would appear even without this sponsorship. The brand owner is compensating Google and providing images and other content relevant to the brand.
This is replacing Southwest's search result. It's noteworthy to me that only "some" of this content would appear without sponsership. So not only are they showing "banner ads" in search results (that's a little bit of a stretch), but it's a bit like them allowing compensated reordering of search results.
I love how people continue to attach emotional investment to an arbitrary thing like a corporation. Apologists, fanboys, and people with a child-like innocence. Do you really expect a for-profit company will stick to a promise like it means something?
The entire point behind a capitalist corporation is to make more profit, year after year. That is the entire idea behind the stock market. To think that they'd evade eventually exploring every avenue available to avoid making more money is mad.
But there are plenty of companies that make a lot of money specifically because they 'stick to a promise'.
Whole Foods, Chipotle, REI, Patagonia all spring to mind as companies that I will happily pay a premium to shop at because of things they do that fall outside of the ruthless race to the bottom to cut costs. They make a profit off of me specifically because they stick to promises like "don't put antibiotics in chicken feed" or "don't use sweatshop labor".
I don't care about a banner ad the way I care about antibiotic use in agriculture, so this doesn't matter to me, but maybe someone out there does and will stop being a profitable google customer because of this action.
Companies which have a niche market do depend on their customers continuing to invest in that niche market, but this is like any other company that sells a product. If people no longer want that product, they go out of business.
In the companies you cite, the product you're buying (primarily) is peace of mind. You feel better when you buy their products, vs others. If you stopped feeling good about it, you'd buy somewhere else, and they'd go out of business.
Here's another case of customer intent: CBS Fantasy Sports. For years they've been charging people to use their fantasy sports websites, while Yahoo, ESPN, and others gave theirs away for free. Year after year, people paid money for the CBS product, and they actually got more customers than the free providers. Why? Superior niche product. If the product wasn't as good as the free providers (and if they provided all the same features) people would have left in droves.
A "promise" is not a business model. A product is. Google's product is not banner-ad-free search, it's just search. If in the future there's an equally-good search product that uses no ads at all, Google will have an inferior product, and people will leave - eventually.
This is in turn naive, as if corporations operate within a mathematical model, not the real world. Corporations rely very heavily on the trust of their customers, whether those are consumers, or other businesses. Google's entire business model rests on the willingness of its consumers to hand over their data, the value of their word is fundamental to future profitability. Although admittedly this particular issue is not directly important in that sense.
Google's business model rests on the advertisement and marketing industries. It does not work based on trust. It convinces people to use its product. The only "trust" it has is in its ability to do so.
No one is complaining about profit or exploring ideas. People are complaining about this specific idea.
Profits only show up if customers like the decisions that corporations make. NBC picks its shows to make maximum profit, just like CBS does. But CBS has made more popular decisions.
Complaining about a corporate decision doesn't mean people are naive. It means they just don't like that decision. That is a data point for Google to consider as they think about whether to roll this out broadly.
When Orkut was all the rage, Google claimed that Orkut would never be merged with the Google core and would remain separate to Google.
The same seems tobe happening with YouTube. Sure, they still allow users to keep their YT & Google identities separate but IDK how long that will last.
Remember when they claimed their motto was 'Don't be evil'?
(NB: Before you come screaming at me for making vague accusations, please take that previous sentence with a pinch of '/s'. Thank you.)
Umm they forced me(as in I wasn't able to use youtube otherwise) to connect my Google account to my Youtube so...that is pretty much combining the accounts in my book.
I think, they just needed that to collect my aggregate search+video watching behavior for ad targeting, which they got.
This is not wholly unexpected, after all their earnings have shown that CPC is down and while you can make that up in volume for a while, eventually you exhaust that path too.
And that then is what I think the real "problem" is. You reach a point where your biggest money maker, search advertising, by at least one and possibly two decimal orders of magnitude, is no longer growing. And all of the things you've ever done which were never as successful as search advertising are supposed to give you the growth that your stockholders are looking for. Interesting place to be for a company like Google I expect.
This is just another example of how that it process is coming along. It will be interesting to see what happens if it starts damaging their brand.
Right. Soon they will run out of surface area. And then they will squeeze out more money by cutting costs. Such is the life cycle of the corporation. They aren't able to monetize their other novelty projects yet, they are almost wholly reliant on advertising. I'm surprised their stock is priced as a growth company.
Are we putting that much significance from a quote in 2005 by a Google executive who has since left Google?
While some see it as a social utility, Google is a $350B public company that generates its revenues from advertisements. 8 years ago, the world of advertising (and the world in general), was a different place. Holding Google accountable for something so far in the past by someone who is no longer there is a seemingly unfair standard.
Perhaps people invested in Google precisely because they believed in googles vision for a better web. Google has been fairly clear in telling investors, hey there's a line we won't cross. They can't complain. If there's something to complain about, it's sitting on $50 billion in cash and not paying a dividend.
What a sensationalist headline. The guardian really seems to have learned the need to go sensationalist from the Snowden affair.
"Google breaks promise" followed by "Google is testing banner ads" in the first paragraph. So umm, "breaks" is the wrong verb, more like "thinking of breaking"
The reality is, Google runs hundreds, perhaps thousands of experiments all the time and only a few make it.
This is addressed directly in the article. "We're currently running a very limited, US-only test, in which advertisers can include an image as part of the search ads that show in response to certain branded queries."
I think "certain branded queries" are the key words here; if that style of banner is displayed for more generic searches (simply 'Airlines', for example) I think people would quickly become frustrated with the experience and move on.
When searching for a particular airline, being confronted with a photograph of one of their aeroplanes isn't the end of the world.
Well.. it is a banner and the company is paying for it so it is an ad. In my opinion the cleanness of the banner should not interfere with the description of being an ad.
1 Big ass ad
3 "News" items
5 genuine "Search Results" (with no heading or any way to know when the ads and nonsense stops. One of the 5 is a link to the Southwest Airlines Android App
3 "In-Depth Articles" I don't know what this is, i guess long blog posts?
This honestly looks more to me like a domain squatting BS ad page that we hate on ISPs for than a research tool (which is what I used to think of google search as).
I used to dislike ads in general, until Google came along and made ads actually useful. There have been many times when I needed to search for reliable vendors in my area, and being able to perform a query for a product and receive an ad for a vendor that sells said product proved to be very useful and a huge time-saver. I no longer had to dig through search results, the ads were my search results. Same thing goes for the great set of Youtube video ads that have been improving lately: some of them actually are useful. Gmail ads are also very interesting. They sometimes inform me of new technologies, or other things that are related to what I'm reading in my inbox: that can be valuable. I really hope the trend continues with these banner ads. Being able to add a touch of graphic to an otherwise dull search result page can be useful if done right, and Google does seem to care about their ad business. Anyway, those are just my personal thoughts on the subject.
I guess they are relatively "classy", as other people have pointed out, but I still don't want them in my search results. Regardless, it's just a test, so discouraging them from moving forward with it is good, but "breaks 2005 promise" is dumb because they haven't actually done it. "Poised to break 2005 promise"? Still overly dramatic, but less wrong.
Also, I first saw this over on search engine land yesterday[1]. It's possible the Guardian author remembered that Marissa Mayer quote (and blog post) on their own, but it seems unlikely. It's pretty shitty to take a story and not even cite where you got the idea.
Google (and possibly many human's) principle over time..
Don't be Evil (2005) >>
Don't be Evil over short period of time (2013) >>
Oh screw it, now we are Evil enough. Let us plunder the hell (2021).
Now they will show ads for the key word, South West Airlines. Next it will be a whole flashy ad when you search flight, then it will when you start to think about flying or your girlfriend sends an email about flying for someone's funeral. But these profits too will dwindle after a point. Then they will start selling your profiles, what you read, what you think.
For a corporation privacy and trust, or any other values are only as important as the profit it can bring. Its only a matter of time before you will erode your own values, when profits are what we are maximizing. This is all the more likely when you are ambitious.
And then you repent it, and the cycle is complete.
Interesting how this submission went from being #1 20 minutes ago, to #5 15 minutes ago and now is sitting at #9, despite the fact that the number of upvotes increased.
Google workers mass flagging this submission? Don't be evil.
As was talked about with the recent controversy of Nokia and Microsoft news being penalized while Apple news was on the front page, HN has some pretty intrusive algorithms that play with the positioning of the article on the page, algorithms that aren't always clear to the users or necessarily productive to the discussion.
I don't really care as long as the ads are relevant and interesting. We all know what we signed-up for (I hope) when we joined Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc...for "free."
So how much of the reluctance to use banner ads can be attributed to Mayer, or, the subsequent reneging to her leaving? The screenshot follows kind of the same look of Google+'s banner (er Facebook's), so since + is supposed to be the new thing, and it has space for gaudy banners, why not throw it on search too?
Still, seems like a slightly regressive strategy...I thought the traditional Google Homepage was becoming less of a revenue driver compared to all the other way results are traffic driver?
Google has gotten much more aggressive amount monetizing their existing inventory. They have been rapidly iterating Adsense unit designs that were fixed for 6+ years.
Search engine optimizers (of which I'm not one) have been terrified as they've watched ads creep over the search results and new elements push organic listings lower and lower.
At least banner ads are obviously adverts. It can be quite difficult to differentiate between ads and searches in certain situations (like tilted screens).
If it is relevant to my search and the image gives better impression of the product, I am okay with that. Though people forget about their promises. But I am against having multiple banners. I am okay with say "search Amazon" and return amazon's latest banner on thanksgiving sale deal. Just one, a good one, reasonable size, and that's it.
"There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever." -Marissa Mayer
That "banner" is not a "crazy, flashy, graphical doodad". That is pretty much the company's logo.
If I say "I won't hurt you. I won't sneak in in the night and smack you with a fish. Ever" and then I punch you in the face I've broken my promise. If I'd snuck in at night and hit you with a fish then I'd have broken two promises.
> The company gained attention when it started in 1998 because its opening search page, and following results page, was uncluttered by adverts and other elements
Google isn't what it was, and Google wants many more users than they can get from keeping just the early adopters.
People use Google like a portal. This is just Google giving in.
the reality is , is that in general people like pleasant associated images. Its only mirroring the way that Facebook has a cover photo on profiles and made a difference in the way that profiles are viewed. Why not extract money when a corporation is searched for and show a profile for them. Similar to facebook and searching for a user. I think it will become an issues when corporation decide they want to use the image, like a banner ad vs a nice associated image.
The advertisement rows in GMail are really annoying too. I wish they would at least put an x button on the side so I can close them and do email in peace for a while.
In the moment when Southwest airlines paid for it is an advertising piece indeed. And to remove any shadow of doubt if you can't see a similar image when you search for American Airlines or Jetblue then it is clear that Google is favouring results against other companies in the same industry.
My point is if I search for jetblue and I dont get the southwest image that's not a banner ad, at least not in the traditional sense. If fact if you search for southwest without being in this test group you'll see a southwest image on the right side. Is that a banner ad, if so these images are old news.
Now if I were to search for plane tickets and get the southwest image, that's a banner ad.
Under that razor... if you search for southwest airlines and between the results you get a Adwords of Southwest, then that won't be an ad because is in the result page of the same thing I was searching?
As a user, sure why not? Why does it matter whether the link you want is within the ad words box or under it? If you're searching for southwest airlines you obviously want the southwest homepage. Now southwest probably sees it different since they're paying for ad words but that's a different conversation
Whether or not they are relevant to the search is immaterial to whether or not they are ads - lots of ads are relevant to the search terms. They are paid for with the intent of driving more traffic.
It's great that Google is under so much scrutiny due to its do no evil slogan. But making such a fuss about Google changing its UI to make more money is somewhat a bit off the target in my opinion. Google changing UX to make more money is going to be tested and corrected by the market. The real serious threat to the society for Google being evil is the possibility of Google using the massive amount of information it collects to manipulate the society at an enormous scale.
Just imagine the possibility of Google start trading. It could be all based on the public information Google gathered but Google's ability to collect it is no match by any other entities (alright, maybe NSA)
More than just advertising, this represents an element of curation on such search terms, to get you to the place you're really looking for. It'll help avoid situations like when that one blog post appeared at the top for [facebook login] and suddenly bunches of users couldn't find Facebook.
Like any technological tool, it could be misused for evil, and so will require vigilance in the court of public opinion if not in actual courts.
(Disclaimer: I'm a potential Googler, currently in the interview pipeline, but these views are my own.)