How Google is Killing Organic Search • Hacker News Board

Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search

#201

Post by leephillips » Tue, Jul 02, 2013, 3:07 PM UTC

corresation wrote: post #197

tomkarlo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you provided initial payment using the credit card account, but you signed up for the service until you cancel it, not until your method of payment expires. Even if you cancelled the card outright, you're generally technically (and legally) still on the hook for a subscription if you don't go and cancel. Read the ToS for just about any recurring subscription. It's your obligation to cancel, not their obligation t…

It's your obligation to cancel, not their obligation to guess when you want to cancel. You have a remarkably apologetic attitude towards a scumbag industry. Just to be clear, here's the modus operendi for the retention industry- 1) Trick or outright scam people into recurring subscriptions. I never told Consumer Reports I wanted my subscription to recur, and it provides absolutely zero value to me that they did so. I…

"only option was a limited hours telephone number that required lengthy wait times."

You don't need to play their game. Send them a letter cancelling and revoking the authorization to charge your credit card. When they charge you anyway, send a letter to your bank informing them of the unauthorized charge. You'll get the chargeback. Send another letter to the AG of your state, too, complaining about the credit card fraud.

Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search

#202

Post by leephillips » Tue, Jul 02, 2013, 3:20 PM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #151

nowarninglabel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your hypothesis is quite far off. Can you give an example of an auto insurance company that is a non-profit? I couldn't find any. Perhaps you mean a mutual insurance company? Furthermore, when I bought car insurance last month, Geico gave me the most coverage for the least amount of money (after quite a bit of research), so I also don't agree with your assertation that Google is no help in that regard. While…

> Can you give an example of an auto insurance company that is a non-profit? I couldn't find any. Perhaps you mean a mutual insurance company? Aren't mutual's non-profit? They aren't trying to extract a profit for investors or other owners, but just need to charge enough to pay business expenses (including salaries, as well as the main expense of an insurance company, paying out claims and funding reserves to pay out…

"Aren't mutual's non-profit?"

No, they distribute the profit to policyholders, who are effectively shareholders of the corporation. I belong to one, for auto and home. I get a dividend each year of 20 - 25% of the yearly premium, which is competitive even without considering the dividend. It's not open to the public.

Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search

#203

Post by ChuckMcM » Tue, Jul 02, 2013, 3:22 PM UTC

crockstar wrote: post #187

ChuckMcM wrote: post #68

This is true of course, Google doesn't make any money on organic search, nobody does, so it gets the short shrift. At Blekko we built a search engine (crawler, extractor, ranker, fetcher, the whole stack) and let people know exactly how we rank things, for users who created an account and logged in they could turn off everything except organic results. We have been moderately successful (we were the first to use a 'm…

Hi Chuck, I'm glad that folks like Blekko are trying to improve the search landscape but do you have any figures to back up the declining revenue per click? I feel as though Google are becoming more and more focussed on profits (evidenced by their (not provided) data hypocrisy, role out of "enhanced campaigns, etc.) but their profits seem to grow[1] and they seem to focus on margins over advertiser or user experience…

Read Google's financial releases if you want to see evidence of their declining revenue per click, of follow the news [1][2][3]. Its a combination of factors, the market is maturing, there aren't too many people left who don't advertise on the Internet, and other sources are getting more market share (Bing, Facebook, Etc.)

  > I'm glad that folks like yourselves are in the 
  > market as I say but until someone develops better
  > algos and better results (for the majority of 
  > queries) it's unlikely that folks will get 
  > angry enough to move or see a viable alternative.

Actually one of the things Blekko has taught me is that search market share is no longer about search quality. At Blekko we demonstrated that we could provide better results in important queries and that how we did that would scale as we got larger. But we didn't get a lot of traction. Microsoft however (who we talked to) were so impressed that they essentially ripped off everything we were doing and put Bing on that path.

Now on the one hand I should be outraged Microsoft ripped us off [4], but I'm not. Its been interesting to see how much time and money they have spent making our strategy into a 'full size' search engine, and realizing that we were not going to be able to raise close to a billion dollars (which is what they will have easily spent by now) to take it to market against Google. The Bing challenge, the editors picks, the whole thing taken right from our playbook. And while I believe they are having the best success they ever have against Google to date (its a good strategy), there is another 3 years for it to run before consumers think that they are equal services. And there is a whole lot of dirty politics between here and there.

As for market share, its a curious thing. You can earn it or you can force it. Look for more and more "search defense" going on, for example non-Google searches getting harder on Android, or in Chrome. Conversely non-Microsoft searches in Windows products. With people like Firefox getting played in the middle (try to search on Google on Firefox on the standard Linux Mint distribution for example :-) Gone are the days where simply having a better product will let you win that prize. Way too much money involved.

[1] http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/weak-ad-revenue-pulls...

[2] http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/07/24/1553214/the-decline-...

[3] http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/04/18/google-tops...

[4] It would have been polite of them to have at least offered to buy us out :-)

Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search

#204

Post by tomkarlo » Tue, Jul 02, 2013, 3:54 PM UTC

corresation wrote: post #197

tomkarlo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you provided initial payment using the credit card account, but you signed up for the service until you cancel it, not until your method of payment expires. Even if you cancelled the card outright, you're generally technically (and legally) still on the hook for a subscription if you don't go and cancel. Read the ToS for just about any recurring subscription. It's your obligation to cancel, not their obligation t…

It's your obligation to cancel, not their obligation to guess when you want to cancel. You have a remarkably apologetic attitude towards a scumbag industry. Just to be clear, here's the modus operendi for the retention industry- 1) Trick or outright scam people into recurring subscriptions. I never told Consumer Reports I wanted my subscription to recur, and it provides absolutely zero value to me that they did so. I…

What you're describing is the MO for dishonest subscription services. But there's lots of subscription services that aren't dishonest and have very happy customers.

To your points:

1. While there are dishonest sites, I'm sure you also have numerous recurring subscriptions with a whole bunch of services where that's exactly what you agreed to, and what you want. Your internet provider, your mobile phone provider, your cable company, etc. I realize you may have had an issue with one company, but that doesn't mean the subscription model can't be used in an honest, customer-focused way. I have subscriptions with utilities, online content services (Spotify), and even a podcast network and for 90% of situations, it works fine and there's no trick or scam.

2. I totally agree that companies should make it easy to cancel, and it's despicable if they don't. It's also generally bad business practice because it hurts your relationship with them. But again, there's lots of companies with recurring subscription models that handle this right: just look at Netflix. Not only will they cancel easily, they'll also put your account on hold if you're going on vacation, etc.

Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search

#205

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 02, 2013, 3:57 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #180

tomkarlo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you provided initial payment using the credit card account, but you signed up for the service until you cancel it, not until your method of payment expires. Even if you cancelled the card outright, you're generally technically (and legally) still on the hook for a subscription if you don't go and cancel. Read the ToS for just about any recurring subscription. It's your obligation to cancel, not their obligation t…

interesting - so there is a business opportunity to collect these overdue amounts in large numbers, and exact the payment along with a "fine"…

[deleted]

Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search

#206

Post by bobsil1 » Tue, Jul 02, 2013, 7:04 PM UTC

narrator wrote: post #108

jcampbell1 wrote: post #22

The auction model for ads basically ruins internet searches in transactional categories. If you want to win at the "italian restaurant" search game, you have to bid the highest for the ad, which means you must have the highest margin. The best way to win is to open a restaurant with ridiculously high margins (over priced wine and cheap ingredients). Want the "cheapest car insurance"? Google is zero help. It sends you…

What's funny is how different using Consumer Reports online experience is. What? There's no free content? I have to pay a monthly fee to read content and it's not trivial. Best investment I ever made. Especially when buying new appliances. Ha.. It's kind of pathetic that I flinched at spending a few bucks a month for good content. If you're getting information for free your information likely has a cost you're just p…

This will be solved using big data, and it will be free not subscription. Working on it right now.

Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search

#207

Post by ohashi » Tue, Jul 02, 2013, 9:05 PM UTC

jcampbell1 wrote: post #22

The auction model for ads basically ruins internet searches in transactional categories. If you want to win at the "italian restaurant" search game, you have to bid the highest for the ad, which means you must have the highest margin. The best way to win is to open a restaurant with ridiculously high margins (over priced wine and cheap ingredients). Want the "cheapest car insurance"? Google is zero help. It sends you…

So this comment really resonated with me because I am competing in a space like this. I have a better product but a better product means making substantially less money.

Do you have any ideas on how to better compete without the same type of margins?

Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search

#208

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, Jul 02, 2013, 10:28 PM UTC

tomkarlo wrote: post #173

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You provide payment using the card. The card expires and can't - supposedly - be used beyond the expiry date to make a payment. There is no expectation of continued payment beyond the expiry date. Guessing the new expiry date in order to exact a payment is taking an unauthorised payment. It can't be authorised because the card-holder can't authorise payments beyond the expiry date. Taking a payment that isn't authori…

No, you provided initial payment using the credit card account, but you signed up for the service until you cancel it, not until your method of payment expires. Even if you cancelled the card outright, you're generally technically (and legally) still on the hook for a subscription if you don't go and cancel. Read the ToS for just about any recurring subscription. It's your obligation to cancel, not their obligation t…

>you signed up for the service until you cancel it //

Maybe, that would depend on the legal terms under which you signed up. Mostly you sign up and pay for a fixed term. So contractually the expectation is that you don't continue payment.

If legally the payment is due, then that's still doesn't mean you can have authorised it on a card beyond the expiry date. Moreover you haven't authorised the payment with the new card (in the circumstances we're considering).

So the payment may be due, but it's been fraudulently acquired. There are procedures for collecting overdue amounts. Of course the companies don't want to follow those procedures and air their unfair [attempted] retention practices in court.

Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search

#209

Post by lazyjones » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 1:26 AM UTC

brlewis wrote: post #199

lazyjones wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Measuring the usefulness of a page by percentage of screen real estate only seems useful if the user is looking or clicking randomly around the screen. You should tell Google that. They claim to be penalizing web sites with too many ads "above the fold": http://searchengineland.com/google-may-penalize-ad-heavy-pag... The bigotry in this has been pointed out by many people already ... Google is basically forcing oth…

Try thinking about this from the user's perspective rather than the site owner's perspective. How do you like it when you click on an ad that looks like it has useful information behind it, and you come to a page that's mostly ads?

> How do you like it when you click on an ad that looks like it has useful information behind it, and you come to a page that's mostly ads?

Was that a Freudian slip? If I click on an ad that doesn't fulfill my expectation, the advertiser failed and will feel it, the market fixes this in the long run.

If I click on a search result (perhaps you meant that) and I get to see mostly ads, I can a) install an ad blocker, b) go back and click on the next result, c) ignore the ads or actually click on the ads. But there's nothing about this that warrants special treatment for Google's pages, which are full of ads. If Google thinks, users will not like pages full of ads, they should stop cluttering their search results with them. If they don't, they're just giving themselves an unfair advantage over the indexed pages.

Re: How Google is Killing Organic Search

#210

Post by chii » Wed, Jul 03, 2013, 2:33 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #195

chii wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a restaurant that had over priced wine and cheap ingredients would fail miserably in short order, regardless of how many Google ad auctions they won. unless if there's so many restraurants, and the quality of wine is so subjective that most customers cannot really differentiate it. Then exposure is really the only thing a (time poor) customer can rely on, and thus, by massively spending on advertising, and not on i…

>I want some way to have word of mouth recommendations work over the net, without it being game-able. perhaps a system where you must pay (a very small token amount) to review? That would make it even more of a money arms race. Ultimately you want something like personal recommendations where people attach their own reputations to their recommendations; google is trying to push something on these lines with google+.

but a person's reputation on the net is inherently non-existant, unless they're forced to use their real name, and is somewhat known/famous.

Being able to create fake reviews and fake recommendations is the same problem as spam in email (cept spam is easier to filter out). If sending email costs the sender some token amount (say, 1cent per 1000 email), it would probably stop majority of spam, because it just became cost-ineffective. That was why i was suggesting paying token amount for writing reviews - tho i have no doubts there are flaws with that idea….