61–70 of 220 posts
Nowadays you're supposed to buy ads to stay competitive. Google grew so much that it's now a monopolist behemoth, and that's why they're swimming in money. But because they keep all the nerds in love with them, they manage to get zero flak for it.
It's rather simple.
When you type terms into the search box, just imagine the words, "Please show me advertisements for " in front of it.
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…
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…
Privilege Underwriters Reciprocal Exchange (PURE) is not "non-profit" but theoretically "policy holder owned" with surpluses to the benefit of subscribers.
To your point about credit unions, insurance 'unions' are interesting:
Overview: http://www.pureinsurance.com/about/index
That said, there is a marketing arm that extracts value as fees for marketing and management, and a financial stakeholder umbrella seeking return on capital. It's an interesting structure:
Structure: http://www.pureinsurance.com/about/pure_group
In any case, my experience with PURE has been superior to my experience with other insurers (except Met-Life who was excellent but unable to competitively insure my property), and my costs have been 30% less than the most competitively priced usual players.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In light of "designy" things like this, and other "ideological" things that have transpired in the past few weeks, I've been forcing myself to use DuckDuckGo. It's been about a month now, and I find the results terrible . I want to love it, but the first 10 results are pretty much never what I want. Sadly, Google still performs better on this front for me. If anyone has tips to make it better, I'd be very happy to he…
I've found DDG to be better at finding obscure content, and the Goog to be better at finding what I call "canonical" content. For example, if I search for "binary tree" I probably want Wikipedia followed maybe by StackExchange. Google does that, while DDG sends me deep into the netherworld.
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…
USAA ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAA#Returning_profits_to_the_i... ), although most people aren't eligible ( https://www.usaa.com/inet/pages/pub_eligibility_task_entry ).
It is a great example of how constraints build value. By constraints I mean, they have had to deal with military customers stationed in far flung places for years. This built their capability to conduct business virtually.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How long have you been using google? Probably long time. During this time you (unconsiously) learned how to ask questions "google way", now you need to learn to quack :p I understand this, but most of us are looking for an alternative to Google and not a completely different search engine.
Google with Adblock does the trick.
I assume I could configure Adblock Plus to hide the Google ads, but at least for me and what I normally search for they're not really an issue.
I'm typically a Google fanboy, but spot on. Here's a search for sushi for me: https://www.dropbox.com/s/q3epmld2ffqzg3f/Screen%20Shot%2020... It's like full circle back to Yahoo. Maybe this is a result of listening to the data too much, and not depending on the greater vision enough. Or maybe it's the future and you're gonna love it.
Maybe I'm the weirdo, but I think that's an extremely useful results page. What are you looking for when you search for "sushi" besides (more likely) nearby sushi restaurants or (less likely) information about what sushi is. The screen real estate seems to reflect those two possibilities in what seems to me to be a sensible proportion.
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 'masked results' option [1] to show how much better our results were than Google's in contested searches) but there isn't enough outrage about that yet to build a business yet.
Most of our business (people who pay us money) comes from folks who either want to figure out how to game Google's results, or want some organic results to create a 'search like experience' much as Google does. When you think about it with only 7% of the page dedicated to organic results that is like 2 or maybe 3 actual search results and the rest of the page is a carefully crafted advertising vehicle. Sort of like a free 'newspaper' which has one article of editorial content and the rest are all ads. You can serve that market quite effectively with a relatively small index (a couple of billion URLs).
If you look at Google's financial performance over the years you can see how this evolution has affected their bottom line. Today you see it in declining revenue per click sorts of things. It feels to me as it did when banner ads went from this massive cash cow into something less useful.
One thing is true though, the world is changing yet again.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/21/be-the-mark-in-blekkos-3-en...
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…
I've been doing a lot of thinking about this topic recently, so it's nice to see a discussion on HN. AdWords ad placement is determined by a mix of quality score and bid size. It's good that they're using quality of links to influence ad ranking, but here's what troubles me: We're allowing money to influence information salience. You could say this is how the world works, and I can't deny it. Money = power = eyeballs…
Ironically, considering the original article starts off by complaining about its effect on search results, the most-free-from-financial-influence way of ranking information salience is probably the Zagat review model (selling aggregated secret shopper info)
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…
I will refine your hypothesis a little.
a) It isn't companies with the highest margin who win, but the ones which are able and willing to devote the greatest percentage of revenue to performance driven advertising. If the company has a slim margin to begin with, they will never even be able to start in the "race."
b) Education is a better example than car insurance. While there are geographic variances to what ads are shown, nearly all of the ads will be for for-profit schools (many of whom spend more on acquiring a single enrollment than on educating them.) Additionally, the organic results will either be for performance marketers driving leads right back to these schools, or it will be objective journalism plastered with banner ads and contextual text ads for for-profit schools (Forbes, Washington Post (who owns and receives half of their revenue from Kaplan but thats another story..))
c) Some markets get so abusive Google puts very heavy handed and aggressive rules in place. For example, if you read the FTC's news releases regularly a common scam is someone operating as a payday loan operator simply emptying bank accounts (not sure why this isn't an FBI/DOJ issue.) Its easy to bid high when your end result is the entire content's of your customer bank account. If you are operating in a market and your competitors start doing this stuff -- your fucked. Google can take years to catch up.
d) The "quality score" means little. It largely has to do with how a site looks, not what it actually does. Misleading ads tend promise more and thus get better click through rate which means they are even more likely to show up higher, not less. At the end of the day, Google will let low quality site run, they just charge them a little more.
e) The most disturbing thing to me is how Google is trying to wash away organic altogether. The original article points this out. Aaron Wall (SEOBook) has been pointing this out for year. Ben Edelman has been doing an excellent job of busting Google's bullshit PR (even though he may be paid by Microsoft for consulting its academic level work of the highest quality.) Google wants to keep serving that organic content to users, but block them from flowing through to the original source. Google Images' recent changes reflect this exactly.
f) All of this makes me think Google's original business model is in serious crisis. Ironically, Google is doing the same revenue escalation to their own users as their advertisers are forced to employ. If desktop revenue is dropping fast, Google has to crank up the "aggressive" meter to milk out more revenue from a diminishing ad clicker user base.
g) This is great news for the next search companies. Google is dependent on their ad revenue to fuel their behemoth enterprise. They are sacrificing their own product in an escalating fashion. (If you use AdBlockPlus you probably never even noticed..)