One Google quirk I've been thinking about lately is the times when you search for something and the thing you want is the top advertised and organic result. Seems like a waste of money.
An example, if you search for "heroku" then you get an ad for heroku, which, yeah, is what I was searching for, but heroku is also the top result and obviously what I was looking for. Heroku is paying Google to provide Google with the search result that Google should've (and does) already identified as the right result.
I assume the reason these ads exist is because if they didn't competitors would take them, but still, it feels like an odd arrangement very much to Google's benefit where companies pay Google up prevent competitors from taking their traffic.
That's an interesting idea. I just looked up "heroku" on Google's keyword planner and the max cost per click is 3.00. Is it really worth three dollars a click to know the ratio of people who click heroku over people who search it?
Afaik, on Google ads, cost per click scales inversely with page quality. So clicks on the heroku ad searching for heroku generally find what they are seeking and therefore don't cost very much. If Google thinks you are advertising people toward trash, they charge a lot more.
Those ads have very good click and conversion metrics, if you're not sophisticated it looks like a good idea to cannibalize your organic traffic that way.
Only if people actually click on competitor ads. I imagine it's pretty rare anyone searches for ebay and clicks on amazon ads instead. So you're uniquely situated to outbid the competition with absurdly low CPC because click through rate is dramatically higher.
And sure, it's not fun handing over money to defend your brand. I could see an argument be made that you want the competitors to outbid you because the costs are so high for them.
I get 30% discounts on delivered pizza by googling the name of the competing brand in my area. It's an extremely effective strategy, at least in my case.
Try it in a private/incognito window and see if you get the same results. When I did that it was all about digitalocean. I'm guessing they used your "anonymous" profile to figure out which ads were best for you.
I think having competing ads make sense because it shows consumers alternatives which is competition. Google does add a relevance factor to the cost which means Heroku would have to pay a lot less for the spot than its competitors.
You give them a choice between divesting all their various businesses, or the FCC dictates how the business is run. The latter will be boring stuff like % of search results that are ads, etc., rules for auditing algorithms, etc.
It's definitely a questionable business model, whose obvious problems are underscored by the fact the Google doesn't allow you to do it with some some entities. In other scenarios, it's a borderline protection racket.
For example, you can't use ads to squat on search terms for government agencies. I haven't tested it extensively, but I'm pretty sure even searches for things that are outsourced to third parties still land on the .gov page. Search for "<state> state park reservations" and you'll usually see only organic results, with the .gov as the top result. The actual provider (Reserve America in many states) is below the .gov in most cases. Sometimes (most notably california), the provider is the top organic result.
In most verticals, you'd see a wall of bullshit ads for affiliates to the reservation provider.
That's the cost of directing customers to your website even if they misspell your brand name or don't remember if you're a .com or .net or many other things. After all, if they knew to go to topicseed.com, why didn't they type that URL in and go directly there? I certainly don't search for Hacker News or Apple.com or Twitter on Google each time I go there, do you?
Most people going to a specific store do Not know its address. You just know where to find it. You trust that the storefront you're roughly familiar with belongs to the actual shop you're wanting to get into.
You are right but in practice it's just not the same as street stores and restaurants.
It's really not. You're asking for a seafood restaurant and are given directions to various seafood restaurants. You are not shown directions to one (a link) and when you show up there, it's another (link was fake).
I disagree. We're not talking about an instance where you search for "search engine" and the first result is Google. We're talking about searching for "Bing" and the first result is Google.
And that's the crux of our disagreement. I don't think you have any right to be the first result for any query. If you want Bing when you search for "bing" then go directly to bing.com. You are using a third party's service so you accept the terms of use (and therefore monetization).
If I search "apple", should I get apple.com, a Wikipedia article on apples, or recipes using apples on allrecipe.com, or something else? You see how that doesn't work? What about "caviar"? At what point is Google obligated to show you Caviar the delivery service as the first result? I say never.
Note here that I'm talking about first being first whether it's an ad or organic result.
>And that's the crux of our disagreement. I don't think you have any right to be the first result for any query. If you want Bing when you search for "bing" then go directly to bing.com. You are using a third party's service so you accept the terms of use (and therefore monetization).
What if I didn't want to go directly to bing.com, but just wanted to know more about Bing? Maybe I want to see some reviews and determine if it's appropriate for my use-case. But then there's a big ad as the first search result for "bing" that says, "Looking for Bing? They suck! Use Google instead!"
>If I search "apple", should I get apple.com, a Wikipedia article on apples, or recipes using apples on allrecipe.com, or something else? You see how that doesn't work? What about "caviar"? At what point is Google obligated to show you Caviar the delivery service as the first result? I say never.
I definitely see your point here, and I do agree - in circumstances like that. However, I've only been talking about the ads that are above the first result, not organic results. No, there's no special reason that apple.com should or shouldn't be the first organic result for "apple", but as I hope I showed above, there are reasons that the first result, which is always an ad, shouldn't be microsoft.com, or samsung.com, or alibaba.com/knockoff_iphone. It forces companies to choose between buying the ad space themselves or allowing a competitor to advertise directly to their potential customers. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a digital protection racket, but I do think it can be used maliciously.
To follow the GP's point ITO this being a protection racket: You "pay to be at the top" of that list of seafood restaurants. Let's not pretend like google aims to find you the "best" answer to your search question.
No contest, just don't see how this is unique to Google. When you go to a store and you look at an aisle at eye level, do you see the objectively best products or the ones that paid the most to be there? Before you get to that aisle, do you see the best product on the endcap? Do you grab that item regardless or only if it's what you're looking for anyway?
It's okay to have a problem with advertising -- I think it's pretty healthy to do so -- but this is a societal problem and not one with any single player.
An example, if you search for "heroku" then you get an ad for heroku, which, yeah, is what I was searching for, but heroku is also the top result and obviously what I was looking for. Heroku is paying Google to provide Google with the search result that Google should've (and does) already identified as the right result.
I assume the reason these ads exist is because if they didn't competitors would take them, but still, it feels like an odd arrangement very much to Google's benefit where companies pay Google up prevent competitors from taking their traffic.