A lawyer for the U.S. Justice Department pressed a Google executive on Wednesday about techniques the search and advertising giant used to push up online advertising prices in an allegedly unfair way.
Does it swap search terms just for the portion that returns the ad or for the search as well? If it’s just the ad, that doesn’t seem very problematic, just an implementation detail on how it chooses which ad to show. If it’s for the search as well, I don’t see how that would benefit Google. They wouldn’t be able to consider a search result click a successful conversion if it wasn’t an actual advertisement.
I read about this in a blog post on Wired, written by someone who was there (former executive of DuckDuckGo). He also mentioned how they may benefit from having results that aren’t quite accurate, as then you spend more time searching, which means more time to serve you ads. There is an inherent conflict of interest between adverts and fast search engines.
He also mentioned how they may benefit from having results that aren’t quite accurate, as then you spend more time searching, which means more time to serve you ads.
That’s an interesting one, give up a bit of user experience for increased ad impressions. Pretty clever, but breaks all kinds of anti-competition laws if true.
Does it swap search terms just for the portion that returns the ad or for the search as well? If it’s just the ad, that doesn’t seem very problematic, just an implementation detail on how it chooses which ad to show. If it’s for the search as well, I don’t see how that would benefit Google. They wouldn’t be able to consider a search result click a successful conversion if it wasn’t an actual advertisement.
I read about this in a blog post on Wired, written by someone who was there (former executive of DuckDuckGo). He also mentioned how they may benefit from having results that aren’t quite accurate, as then you spend more time searching, which means more time to serve you ads. There is an inherent conflict of interest between adverts and fast search engines.
Paywalled! Fuckin Wired.
That’s an interesting one, give up a bit of user experience for increased ad impressions. Pretty clever, but breaks all kinds of anti-competition laws if true.