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Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

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Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#51

Post by lolinder »

Sai_ wrote: post #46
mwint wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant: Bits About Money, The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero : https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

Relevant that this is an opinion piece, not a study.

It's not an opinion piece or a study, it's a pretty straightforward application of the law of diminishing returns. It doesn't matter if you're talking about fraud or uptime or test scores, the cost of a 100% success rate is almost never worth the extra effort it takes to get there.

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#52

Post by uejfiweun »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #39

Google is a 1.5 trillion dollar advertising company. There simply isn't enough content in the world to monetize to keep Google growing YoY. All companies reach this point. Some glide to a natural equilibrium point (McDonalds, Subway), some cook the books and implode spectacularly (Enron), some oversteer in the other direction and fall down in chunky movements (Meta).

Yeah, Google's only hope is basically pouring money into AI in the hopes that they'll come up with another Google. Can't say it seems likely.

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#53

Post by charcircuit »

christoph wrote: post #45

The internet feels like a desolate waste ground to me at the moment. I give up pretty quickly these days "surfing the web", as I just get fed up with the constant never ending search results filled with blogspam, news sites that constantly pester you with modal dialogs from the microsecond you land on them, every site begging you for money, your email address or moaning at you because you're running an adblocker. Or…

>That seems pretty broken to me for the biggest search engine on the internet.

Not really. There isn't much value to be gained in ranking and sorting a bigger top N of the 8.5 billion results. It is better to encourage people to refine their queries to something less general.

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#54

Post by sofal »

Sai_ wrote: post #46
mwint wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant: Bits About Money, The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero : https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

Relevant that this is an opinion piece, not a study.

Do you think the tradeoffs discussed in that article are unproven?

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#55

Post by alvarezbjm-hn »

ineedasername wrote: post #48
whatshisface wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a concept from polling called a "random sample" which would apply here. If you take 10,000 clicks and sort them into legitimate and illegitimate, as long as you were able to rule out any way that your sample would be significantly more or less fraudulent than the whole pool, you would understand (roughly) the ratio in the greater pool. It's like taking a sample of a swimming pool, to check the chlorine level…

>There is a concept from polling called a "random sample"... It's like taking a sample of a swimming pool, to check the chlorine levels. And maybe the edge of the pool closest to the person taking the sample is the deep end where mostly adults swim, but if they walked a bit further and took the sample from the shallow side with the babies and toddlers they'd find out the water is actually 50% piss with more than trac…

Strawman. Parent was talking about [(Cl^(-1))]

If you care about excrement content, that should be another study.

Bottom line: Representative sample https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#56

Post by eddythompson80 »

charcircuit wrote: post #53
christoph wrote: post #45

The internet feels like a desolate waste ground to me at the moment. I give up pretty quickly these days "surfing the web", as I just get fed up with the constant never ending search results filled with blogspam, news sites that constantly pester you with modal dialogs from the microsecond you land on them, every site begging you for money, your email address or moaning at you because you're running an adblocker. Or…

>That seems pretty broken to me for the biggest search engine on the internet. Not really. There isn't much value to be gained in ranking and sorting a bigger top N of the 8.5 billion results. It is better to encourage people to refine their queries to something less general.

> It is better to encourage people to refine their queries to something less general

My search experience has been consistently the opposite. Google rejects more defined queries. The more terms you add to your queries, the more likely it’s that it’ll just ignore them.

This is a recent trend btw. It wasn’t that use 4 or 5 years ago, but it’s certainly increasingly random the more terms I add to my search query.

One of my biggest pet peeves with ChatGPT is how conversational I have to make my query to be. I can’t just type terms and let it figure them out. But that’s to be expected I guess. Google search seems to struggle with both atm. I have no doubt they are aware and working on it, but it just sucks atm

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#57

Post by totallywrong »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #9

This story is complex. If there was an obvious way for CMOs at major brands to distill this issue, such as a metric, they would do it. But instead, if they are brand advertising, they want a CPM that "looks right," and Google delivers that to them with garbage inventory. If they want pure return-on-advertising-spend, Google will show to people it knows will impulse buy, but the ads will be insanely expensive. You can…

> At the end of the day, either you make a good creative or you don't. Everything else is noise.

There used to be great ads. Campaigns on TV and print media that people would talk about. That just doesn't happen online, and every single ad to me is, as you say, noise.

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#59

Post by christoph »

charcircuit wrote: post #53
christoph wrote: post #45

The internet feels like a desolate waste ground to me at the moment. I give up pretty quickly these days "surfing the web", as I just get fed up with the constant never ending search results filled with blogspam, news sites that constantly pester you with modal dialogs from the microsecond you land on them, every site begging you for money, your email address or moaning at you because you're running an adblocker. Or…

>That seems pretty broken to me for the biggest search engine on the internet. Not really. There isn't much value to be gained in ranking and sorting a bigger top N of the 8.5 billion results. It is better to encourage people to refine their queries to something less general.

I'm sorry, I don't like to argue on HN, but this is a really silly thing to say.

For instance, search for: "how voltage affects metal in a frozen liquids"

About 15,100,000 results (0.41 seconds), but you can't get past page 10. Page 10 of about 92 results (0.44 seconds)

And on page 10 is a result with this as it's description:

"lyrics to let it go. wolf pup for sale. the taste of chicago 2015 hours. crash landing auto water. prefect des yvelines france. 90s music hits playlist."

Sorry, but it's broken. You can argue until you're blue in the face, but it didn't used to work like this.

Re: Reverse-engineering Google’s "Skip Button Guarantee"

#60

Post by hedora »

mwint wrote: post #32
floomk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google says that it actively keeps it under a certain %, and advertisers are generally okay with that number How about actively keeping that at 0%?

Relevant: Bits About Money, The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero : https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

The title doesn’t generalize to “the optimal illegal ad spend at sanctioned websites and countries is non-zero”.

They’re running EU ads on household-name Russian government propaganda sites in the middle of a war. Manual curation of a block list should’ve caught that!

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