Google just shut down our $1M business

Search is not new, nor is directory advertising. Google didn’t bring anything to the table in the digital ad world until post-YouTube and Doubleclick acquisition. Overture, aka Yahoo search ads created the ecosystem that Google ultimately cloned for their business model. The only thing that Google really brought value was simple UX and better-than-average search results thanks to PageRank and such. Every B2C service they provide outside of search and gmail came from acquisitions. Google was and always will be fundamentally predisposed to anticompetitive behavior. Their acquisition and slaughter of world-changing technology and holding captive the attention of a generation or more of top talent has cost the world Trillions in opportunity costs IMHO.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/04/google-in...

Ya that’s good for competition right? Regulatory capture?

Google has done nothing particularly special to create opportunities for very small businesses online and their deliberate, persistent efforts to maintain a faceless veneer, through which meaning for customer support, for those businesses is impossible.

I had a rather business that was an AdWords certified partner and I know very deeply how many customers they have had OP’s experience. At this point, it is more important for them to maintain an operation that can ostensibly thrive without humans in the loop than to make money selling ads. That is their strategy, a choice that could have been reversed any time in the past 20 years. See how even their own employees are completely unable to help customers. I think it’s dogshit stance and they should be punished throughly in the marketplace for it. That’s just impossible now due to their size.

Moderation isn't usually a problem when there are humans in the loop who review that stuff. Google's problem is that they want to offer business services companies will depend on without providing real support for their users. The have so much money they could easily afford to have staff working with customers, investigating fraud, and using sound judgement, but they refuse because it's easier to stuff their pockets with the money they save by screwing people over.

> Google has done nothing particularly special to create opportunities for very small businesses online

I couldn't disagree more with you. For anybody selling online, Google brings most if not all paying customers and other search engines bring so few as to be irrelevant. If Google isn't bringing anything to the table, how come they are so dominant and raking in so much money? Why couldn't Yahoo compete? And don't say that they suffocate competitors because of their size, because they can't bully Apple, Facebook or Microsoft by size.

I don't like Google as a company, they censor, they are corrupt and they mistreat their customers such as OP. There are also search engines that are far better.

But Google has been one of the biggest blessings ever for small businesses and individual founders trying to make a living. Don't let your hatred blind you. There are fully legitimate businesses that shouldn't be brick-and-mortar and rely on a fair way to get their information out to lots of people. Google makes that possible - for free!

this resonates with me a bit, but i was in and out early and quickly. and, i agree with others that monopoly power is hurting us (thank you, Supremes).

i did some google advertising, and tried to do more, but got banned -- one of my sites/accounts -- for illegal category or something -- i was trying to launch a tech support business -- which i guess had been banned because of the indian tech support scams (sorry, my indian peeps).

i was thinking about doing about a grand over the first month -- then see what i had -- i thought it was weird, first of all, because... why let a tech support business sign up to advertise if... you don't allow it?

but then, you do allow it.

until you don't any longer.

and in the banning and unbanning, i would get calls from google account managers wanting to help me set up my account(s), and they didn't know which ones were suspended and why, and couldn't do anything about it/them, and couldn't tell me anything about it/them.

none of it _really_ suprised me, but also, all of it did.

i kind of thought, oh, i'm gonna just turn on some ads and see if anyone starts clicking - i'll literally know in about 5 minutes if my business is gonna fly - this is gonna be awesome.

but it was a few weeks of back and forth and emails and support centers and phone calls and frustrations and business changes and on and on and on.

and the infamous -- what do you call them -- google UIs -- the banality of evil of google's UIs -- that's how i'd characterize them. you interact with them, you do things, you submit things, and they just stare at you and occasionally blink. no change of state. nada. pretty hardcore.

the frustrating part was - i didn't know all that. if i had a friend who knew what this kafkaesque (i don't know what this means, but people say it a lot and i think it means 'bad') world could be like if you didn't know how to navigate it properly, then i would have had very different expectations, so probably a very different overall experience.

my timeline started telescoping outwards -- from an expectation of ads running within 5 minutes, to and hour, to 2 or 3 hours, to a business day, to a business week, to two weeks, to a month plus, to alternatives like fakebook and all the rest.

my realistic expectations now, were i to attempt again to advertise, or to help anyone else do some google ads (god help them), it'd be like....

  this might not work. we can try it, because all the other options are probably trash too, but if you're a professional -- i.e. you're a six figure-type person, and maybe even if not, just pay someone something to help you do it, because otherwise we might get turned into an insects and just lose the emotional energy to properly complete our task.

Yeah, with 190k headcount most of these people aren’t exactly head of the class.