If you use Google+, you could become an ad next month

If a recommendation service prioritizes a recommendation because it was paid more to do so, isn't that akin to bribery? Why have we normalized the morality of this kind of business practice?

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>Disclaimer: Googler

I actually think this is both a strength and a weakness of google. They've gotten their (often very smart) employees to believe the company line.

I mean, don't get me wrong; I think that google ads (at least, before the doubleclick thing) are less bad than most ads online. They are less annoying.

And yes, consumers benefit from some of the things paid for by advertising, so I can understand the argument that google is overall good for consumers, because they use ads that are less annoying than usual for services that are actually worth paying for. In a real sense, google has lowered the "price" consumers pay for services and content that is paid for by advertising.

However, this isn't what you are saying. You are saying that ads in and of themselves are good for consumers. that it's /better/ to find a product through paid advertising than through 'organic' search results, as if an advertiser has an interest in giving the customer the lowest possible price, or the best possible service for a given price.

Most people outside the advertising industry find that position laughable.

Now, on the surface, this looks good for google. Employees buy the company line. And really, it seems like it's probably a useful way for an Engineer who is building an advertising platform to look at the problem. You want your ads to harm the consumer as little as possible, and your employees will feel better about building something to help people instead of building something to trick people. But, I think, if you dig deeper, there are problems. Because the company line is false (and it is in nearly all companies; I'm not singling google out on that part. The difference is that at most companies, nobody buys the company line.) you have employees with a false worldview, which can lead to incorrect decisions.

Because Google employees seem to feel that google has the best interests of the customer at heart, it becomes quite difficult for google employees, then, to predict when the rest of us (who assume that google does not have our best interests at heart) will feel that they've crossed the 'creepy' line.

At a more systemic level, within the space of running a search engine people use to find products and running advertising in the same space you will always have a conflict of interest. The better your organic search results are, the less likely the user is going to click on an ad. Google employees believing that the ad really is the best result will accelerate that process.

(of course, for now, google has such a good reputation that this doesn't matter until someone becomes better than them at search by a noticeable margin. I think it's a long-term problem, while the "don't be creepy" issue is more immediately urgent, but is easier for google to ameliorate that issue in the long term. )

Nope, I said no such thing. Of course some strawman statement, that you hypothesize that I support, would be seen as laughable by a hypothetical population outside the advertising industry. But let's stick to what real people have actually said.

Considering that, and looking at my original statement, perhaps I should have said "can be useful for user and advertisers", like I said "a good ad can benefit everyone". That's a little more clear that there's the potential for this, and hopefully less Kool-Aidy.

I'm pretty sure this has been stated by actually official company representatives at some point, and I think it stands as relatively obvious, depending on what your definition of "good ad" is. If you're optimizing for the short term, and you're an ad marketplace, then a good ad is one that sells for a high commission - that is, one that has relative high CTR and bid price for a large total earn. But if those ads are scammy, then users will eventually either not click those ads, not click any ads, stop using the marketplace or the sites that display the ads, etc. So if you optimize for the long term you want users to be glad that they clicked on an ad, so that they'll continue to do that over the the long term, and that means making them good for the user. This means that a "good ad" has some usefulness to the user: if highlights a product or service they were looking for, it educates, it offers a good price, etc.

Yes, it's idealistic, but not overly so. The premise is just that built right, an ad system can produce good results for everyone. Good free content; relatively useful ads; revenue for content producers, ad marketplace, and advertisers; etc. I think this ends up being the case at least some of the time, and it's important to realize that it's not just by accident, it's by design. And it's not strictly capitalistic or benevolent, but a case where the two can coexist if done right.

Again, no where did I ever say that an ad is better than an organic result. Please don't claim that I did. It's simply not true.