You only have to look at Google Search to see how this plays out. Their ads were also clearly separated and distinguished from the organic content, until they weren't.
You only have to look at Google Search to see how this plays out. Their ads were also clearly separated and distinguished from the organic content, until they weren't.
https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-goog...
It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademarks (+/- some reasonable edit distance).
Long ago, Google search used to be its own product. Now it's the URL bar for 91% of internet users. This is no longer fair.
Google gets to not only tax every brand, but turn every brand into a biding war.
International laws need to be written against this.
Searching for "Claude" brings up a ton of competition in the first spot, and Google gets to fleece Anthropic and OpenAI, yet get its own products featured for free.
Searching "{trademark} vs" (or similar) should be the only way to trigger ads against a trademark.
> It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademarks (+/- some reasonable edit distance).
I get the intention here, but how do you limit the collateral damage? (Or do you not care about it / see reducing the ability to advertise as a positive?)
There are a lot of trademarks, and they have to be scoped to specific goods and services, but Google has no way of knowing if you're actually looking for something related to that trademark.
e.g. doing a quick trademark search, I see active, registered trademarks for "elevator", "tower", "collision", "cancer sucks", "steve's", "local", "best", "bus", "eco", "panel", "motherboard", "grass", etc. etc. I'm not familiar with any of those brands, but that's just a small sample of the fairly generic terms that would no longer be able to be advertised on.
Google has a way of knowing. They can ask for documentation on who their customers are and what markets they operate in, and do some due diligence. Just like they have ways of knowing whether the ads they run are for blatant scams.
I'm not saying Google doesn't know if a company is in a particular market, I'm saying that a) Google doesn't know what market I'm searching for something from and b) even if they know both from context, it puts them in some awkward positions.
e.g. Vice Media has a trademark on "motherboard" that covers the tech news blog website service.
Is it now impossible for Asus to place an ad for the official Asus motherboard blog on the search term "motherboard"?
Is it legal to advertise for "motherboard" for any good or service other than a tech news blog website?
Is it now illegal to advertise a website featuring in-depth motherboard reviews using the term "motherboard"?
If I search for "motherboard website", what is Google allowed to show me for ads, given they don't know if I'm looking for the Vice website, or motherboard reviews, or the Asus homepage?
If a plain search for "motherboard" results in Vice's website not being in the top results, is Vice allowed to advertise on their own trademark to put it above other results? (Either above organic results, or above paid results for motherboard manufacturers, depending on whether you're allowing the latter.)
There should be no ads on the internet.
Yeah, and like, I commiserate with that view, I think it would make the internet/world a better place, but I don't think "no ads for trademarks" is helpful way to reach for that goal.
> It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademark
this was one of the biggest problems of AdWords from beginning on: You could do brand-bidding unlimited, even today you see it every day: Search for brand X and competitor Y will show up with same words
I agree it's a bit perverse, but the problem predates Google. People do the real world equivalent all the time. When there are big conferences for specific companies, rivals buy up local ad space on billboards and subways.
That has caused some companies hosting conferences to pay for some of those ad spaces in advance.
Ads on billboards and subways actually bother me far more than search ads.
It's visual and cognitive pollution on public space that I've never consented to - I find it viscerally offensive.
We don't accept billboards on hiking trails, or in elementary classrooms, or in courtrooms (as far as I'm aware, though I wouldn't be surprised if someone turns up a real-life grotesque examples) - we shouldn't accept them in other public spaces either.
I don't agree. If I search for "leatherman" it seems totally reasonable to give competitors a chance. I generally think brand recognition is too powerful. If there is another high quality multitool on the market for a better price, why shouldn't I know about it?
Disclaimer: See my sibling comments for some my general thoughts on the problems with banning trademark ads.
But for your specific example - I get where you're coming from, but I'm skeptical that the ad market is even that functional.
Firstly, if I google "leatherman", every sponsored result for Leatherman brand multitools anyway. (And no amount of refreshes or re-searches gives me anything other than Leathermans.)
Secondarily, I'm not convinced that the set of advertisers (not counting Leatherman itself) that will advertise for "leatherman" are actually on average a better products for the consumer. (e.g. as opposed to lower-quality, higher-priced knockoffs.)
These are both fair points (generally, the consumer market is pretty dysfunctional and not behaving at all like economists would like it to), but the comment I was replying to ("It ought to be illegal to buy ads against trademarks") seems both too heavy-handed and unlikely to actually do any good.
And now it's become an anti-signal. If I search for a hotel the top N results are for other hotels, and then results for travel agents, and buried somewhere in this sea of uselessness is the result I searched for. The managers at Google have become self interested promotion hunters, and the programmers weak sycophants. It wasn't like this in the early days when I was there, the best ideas won, but then the B player managers were hired and the rot started.
It isn't the managers it is the business. All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads. I pay for ad-free YouTube and would happily pay for ad free search. As would many. Many people would like a google scale micropayments system that isn't ads. The failure to do this led directly to social media becoming customer devouring experiences rather than making good products people want.
Paradoxically, the people who pay for adfree experiences would be the most valuable targets for ads, so I suspect any pay for no ads arrangement will be temporary at best.
Exactly. Next up, it'll be on the Plus tier to "help subsidize the low price of this tier".
Check out kagi; adfree search
I refuse to pay for ad free YouTube + otherwise I'd watch even more of it. The annoyingness of ads is a pretty important brake.
There's other options to break this kind of cognitive pattern, like https://unhook.app/
If I want them, I can use them. No need to justify ads for this use case.
That doesn't work on the TV. It also apparently requires using a specific browser (Kiwi) to work on mobile.
But thanks, still useful on desktop.
> All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads
This isn't true, there were many other ideas. It's just that only KPI was how much money they can make, thus ads won. Companies don't have an axis of ethics or morality.
Ideas don't count - it's persuasion and execution that matter. One of the several reasons that the rule is not ruled by smartness/rationality.
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> If I search for a hotel the top N results are for other hotels, and then results for travel agents, and buried somewhere in this sea of uselessness is the result I searched for.
The other day I had a DMV appointment scheduled on my Google Calendar with the office address saved in the location field. I opened the event and clicked on the address to navigate there.
I didn't realize initially but the first few Google Maps results were ads! When clicking on an exact address link!! I almost ended up at some apartment complex 2 miles away. Absolutely bewildering.
Never thought I would go to DuckDuckGo for searching, ever. I'd do Kagi but I don't like their use of Yandex so I'll keep an eye on whether they figure their stuff out politically. I'd pay for search but not if it's paying Russia, I've been very unhappy with what Russia does with money in recent decades.
Been using DuckDuckGo for almost 2 years now - couldn't believe it at first, but results are at least as good, if not even better than Google.
I used Kagi for a year or two then switched to DDG. It's fine. I do not miss Google at all.
Kagi is using Google search behind the scenes. I think that’s why it felt so easy to switch to.
> The managers at Google have become self interested promotion hunters, and the programmers weak sycophants. It wasn't like this in the early days when I was there, the best ideas won, but then the B player managers were hired and the rot started.
I bet they run some metrics, and while hyper-intelligent persons like you are annoyed, there is a chance that avg joes representing 95% of revenue are fine with that.
In the early days they werent a publicy traded company and Brin/Page did not get exposed to the taste of being ultra-wealthy.
Steve Jobs looking back now is incredibly rare - someone who was wealthy but had the spirit of innovation to keep going again and again.
When it comes to anything tech related, the HN crowd are trend setters.
And.... the world is crying out for a google alternative. If it ever appears, the tech savvy people will be the first to move, followed by everyone else.
Kagi is waiting for your money