121–130 of 284 posts
> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is bill…
> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is bill…
But that's precisely what makes Google "good at ads." They built the firehose. Own a destination where billions of people go everyday, find a way to measure their intent, serve my information to them. That = fantastic at ads.
I'm surprised more companies don't take this in house. 20 years ago little small town newspapers and radio stations had their own in house ad sales. Seems like a no-brainier for web news to sell targeted ads to their customers.
I think it's not impossible to dethrone Google from its dominant Search position if it continues a trend of serving up less relevant paid results, provided a competitor is able to step up. It's what happened with Google initially. I remember the late 90's search engine landscape. Result were hit or miss, but one of a few search engines would usually give what you needed, so you had to try a few: Yahoo, Alta Vista, MS…
Dogpile? Looks like they are still around, but a quick test shows it to be even more full of ads than Google nowadays.
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Some of that skew might be their algorithm noticing that the great unwashed masses are looking for ecommerce. I should give DDG another try, it was not that great last time I tried (few years ago?)
I bounce between DDG and Qwant. I usually can find what I am looking for from one of those two options. https://www.qwant.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/
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Some of that skew might be their algorithm noticing that the great unwashed masses are looking for ecommerce. I don't believe that it's the masses looking for e-commerce sites. I think it's that Google wants people to click on e-commerce sites because it makes money off of those ads. And even if someone doesn't click on a sponsored link to an e-commerce site, that click still reinforces in their mind that Google is t…
I've seen people type "example" into the address bar, hit enter, then click the Google link to example.com, without realizing that they could just add ".com" to the end of their initial query and go directly to their destination.
> Recode’s Peter Kafka recently interviewed Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and Peretti said something really insightful: what if Google’s ads really aren’t that good? What if Google is just taking credit for clicks on ads just because people would have been searching for that stuff anyway? I’ve been thinking about it all day: what if Google ads actually aren’t that effective and the only reason they make so much is bill…
This generates revenue for Google with virtually no added value.
In my case this leaching appeared to Google as if /we/ were trying to game the system with link farms (we were not). Google penalized us in 2011 and we've yet to recover.
The point: when you use Google search you're often served sub-standard results, as over time generations of ranking penalties has lead to lower quality sites ranking higher.
I've actually moved to other search engines because the quality of the results have gone down dramatically. It seems like google will fixate on one or two keywords in my search (usually the most generic ones) and ignore the rest. In addition, the old google tricks like using quotes for literal values no longer seems to work. It is like google is guessing what I want, rather than trying to find what I have entered as…
To get the old behaviour for literal search using quotes enable the "Verbatim mode" (Tools > All results > Verbatim) It's a must if you're a developer searching for some obscure error message, yet still most people don't know about it.
I just noticed that with "Verbatim mode" enabled, Google doesn't even try to estimate the number of results available. I find that curious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's precisely what makes Google "good at ads." They built the firehose. Own a destination where billions of people go everyday, find a way to measure their intent, serve my information to them. That = fantastic at ads.
Which ads? The ads on the google search engine, or the ads that random website is getting from google. Are the google ads at me.com any good? I'm surprised more companies don't take this in house. 20 years ago little small town newspapers and radio stations had their own in house ad sales. Seems like a no-brainier for web news to sell targeted ads to their customers.