To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo • Hacker News Board

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#131

Post by grawprog » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:38 PM UTC

>We use the term ‘User Preference for Google Search’ and never the term market share, >Instead of “market,” employees may say “industry,” “space,” “area,” or simply cite the region, according to the presentation.

Sometimes I feel like people take language far too literally and forget that the point of.language is communication and intent, changing the language really doesn't change the meaning behind anything, but because we live in a world where every word is being taken increasingly literally without any search for intent or meaning, we end up with utter nonsense like this.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#132

Post by spanhandler » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #128

spanhandler wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a suspicion a significant amount of their income comes from exactly that kind of extortion, and (very much relatedly) from tricking people who aren't Good at Computers into clicking ads that they think are search results, not from any machine-learning magic. At least as far as search ads are concerned.

I am very, very confident that this is true. I do not think people who actually know how the ad revenue is generated would like the public to know what percentage of Google's revenue is built on exploiting senior citizens' tendency to click on scammy ads, and trademark squatting such as this. I spoke to a Googler a few days ago here about how a scam ad was being constantly perpetrated against seniors on Google's ad p…

I distinctly remember their experiments with inlining ads "ethically", and all the discussion about that by outsiders, and how the "ethically" part quietly went away and they settled on "clearly trying to trick people". I have no inside knowledge but can only speculate that those early experiments shot the profitability arrow so hard upward, and that every tweak making the results more deceptive did so even more, that they just couldn't resist becoming... well, what they became after that. And nearly all the difference between their numbers before and after those tweaks are, plainly, due to deception.

[EDIT] also and again directly related to their inlining of ads with search results, I've noticed a trend even among the reasonably tech-savvy to click an ad that is what they wanted... even when the natural result is just a couple entries under it. That's not sending people to the wrong place but it is gaining Google money from something that is exactly and entirely rent-seeking, as in it could go in an encyclopedia as a perfect and unequivocal real-world example.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#133

Post by acituan » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:43 PM UTC

Afforess wrote: post #8

Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup. Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully. Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, et…

> Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, etc. (for example: Google Reader could not be spun off

This is a not a likely speculation. Did reader really require anything special that doesn’t already exist as a Google Cloud API? Or majority of their killed products honestly?

Or to look another way, do you think anyone who has a cloud services platform (Microsoft, Amazon, Google) can really afford having a separate, divergent infrastructure internally? Haven’t these services started for utilizing excess capacity and economies of scale of existing infrastructure?

Also you are idealizing code reuse, especially at scale. When you take a dependency the arrow goes both ways and now there is a cost for depended breaking things too. Each integration potentially creates non-trivial friction points, if not we would have open source code of the world converge towards a single codebase organically already.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#134

Post by monkeydust » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:43 PM UTC

monkeydust wrote: post #16

This is common, any big size tech company with a good antitrust lawyer would do something like this. Nothing shocking about this at all.

In fact suprised they have only just done this!

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#135

Post by kube-system » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #130

derefr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who pays for search in a world where the government has stepped in and divested ads and search from each other? Since most of the revenue from Google's ads are from ads on search , presumably the broken-up ads company would be buying the ad space on the broken-up search company's SERPs. All the search company's revenue would still come from the ads company.

Is most of Google's ad revenue from ads on search? They have a huge display ads business also.

It's clearly enough revenue to support the existence of search today.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#136

Post by buss » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

This same guidance is at every very large company. What a nothingburger

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#137

Post by kube-system » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:50 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #113

FrojoS wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The search engine alone is a money printing machine even without sophisticated ads. As an example, if I search for 'nike' right now, the first result is an ad payed by Nike leading to nike.com, the second is an ad for an independent webshop selling Nike products and the third is the first actual search result (almost not on the screen anymore), again leading to nike.com So, effectively Nike is paying Google (a lot) t…

I am shocked this isn't illegal yet. Basically what Google is doing in your example is selling Nike it's own trademark, with the subtle threat that if they don't, Google will use Nike's trademark to direct to a competitor instead. The idea that Google can charge Nike to be the top result on a search for Nike is a form of subtle extortion, and I'd have to imagine trademark infringement. It's definitely a form of rent-…

Trademarks are specific to context. Someone searching 'nike' could be looking for greek mythology. It's only trademark infringement when you use a word while engaging in the trade for which the trademark was registered

The same word can be (and frequently is) trademarked by multiple companies in different industries at the same time.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#138

Post by dylan604 » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #118

Nasrudith wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how stupid the regulators are - the one with the google name will win. Seriously people - domain names and awareness matter ans you can't just partition websites to regions with an international web.

We already know how incapable the regulators are. 20 years after they went after MS for their dominance in personal computer operating systems, productivity software and browsers, MS is still dominant in two and the third doesn’t matter to anyone except for Google. MS had the highest market cap in the US in 2000. As of today it is #3. The government had a monopoly suit against IBM in 1969 and finally withdrew it in 1…

>People in tech have been wanting the government to go after Big Tech for years. Four of the CEOs show up for Congressional hearings and then the government goes after...TikTok and WeChat instead.

The Big4 are US based companies. WeChat & TikTok are foreign owned companies, and that country is currently a safe play to bash. The gov't can go after the low hanging fruit so they can have something point at to say they are doing something about evil tech.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#139

Post by cromwellian » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

The real gist is you should assume all internal communication will one day be cited (even out of context) in front of a Congressional committee, so even what you think is harmless speculation, a joke, a casual opinion, or even sarcasm, could have you testifying under oath.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#140

Post by jefftk » Fri, Aug 07, 2020, 5:54 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #130

derefr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who pays for search in a world where the government has stepped in and divested ads and search from each other? Since most of the revenue from Google's ads are from ads on search , presumably the broken-up ads company would be buying the ad space on the broken-up search company's SERPs. All the search company's revenue would still come from the ads company.

Is most of Google's ad revenue from ads on search? They have a huge display ads business also.

https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2020Q2_alphabet_earnings... breaks advertising into: "Google Search & other", "YouTube ads", and "Google Network Members' properties". My understanding is the latter is the display ads business, and you can see that it is pretty small, relatively.

(Disclosure: I work in Google's display ads business)