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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

I want to point out that Larry Page himself thought advertising-funded search engines had an inherent conflict of interest, and that search needed to be in the realm of academia: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html (Appendix A)

Amazingly, several billion dollars, and a few private yachts later, nobody at Google calls into question the fact that the company's very existence is unethical.

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Hardly unethical. If academia could produce a search engine of equal quality but without ads, people would use it.

You may not like the ads, but they pay for the product. Which let's face it, is really quite good. There is probably no other software product I've been as loyal to for as long. Even linux, which is amazing, I haven't used for as long. I started out on Windows. I almost always find what I'm looking for on the first page of Google results, if it's to be found at all. That's remarkable when you think of how much information is out there.

I believe it could or it could produce something of similar quality, but the incentives aren't there. You can spend years in academia trying to build something like that or you can just go to Google and mmake bank. It's an easy choice. That doesn't mean it's not possible, it is just that our incentives are distorted.

If academia could produce a search engine of equal quality but without ads, people would use it.

Well...but it did, and they did. But you (and Larry Page) raise a good question: is it necessary for web search to be profitable?

> is it necessary for web search to be profitable?

Well, then you got two choices: run by a non-profit or run by the government.

The first one is unsustainable and the second one ... well, that would turn into even worse politics. Can you say "Welcome to TrumpSearch" or "Welcome to SearchHill"?

Every four/eight years the search database would be completely upended/suppressed/repressed/uplifted to reflect current political thinking, favoritism, lobbying, fears, hopes, hatred, etc.

It would make gerrymandering look paltry.

Even worse because you couldn't guarantee that the politicians in charge would be competent to understand a spreadsheet, much less a search engine.

The Postal Service continues delivering me magazines and solicitations for donations from politicians and interest groups opposed to the party in power.

Profits drive competition and competition discourages stasis. So it is necessary? Probably not. But we probably get a better result with it being outside of academia.

>Profits drive competition and competition discourages stasis.

In industry, yes. Academia, no.

> is it necessary for web search to be profitable?

Yes. What's not necessary is for those profits to come from advertisers instead of users.

If Google really wanted to do good for the world, it could show the world how a product like their search engine, or maps, or any of their mainstay apps, could be monetized by revenue directly from users. That's how for-profit is supposed to work: you find out what users want by finding out what they will pay for. And if there's any company that could do that, it's Google. But instead, they're monetizing our ad clicks. What the ...?

"X isn't an unethical way of doing business because the only successful people in the industry are doing it in X way" is a very bad principle. It can trivially be used to defent slavery, child labor, bribery and corruption, fraud, market manipulation, organized crime, etc.

The question is, if X were prohibited by law / social pressure, a) would anyone else show up in the market who's currently being crushed and b) if not, is the benefit to society of avoiding X practice worth not having anyone in this industry?

I'd bet that (a) is true in this case, especially considering that Google did come out of academia originally.

>Hardly unethical. If academia could produce a search engine of equal quality but without ads, people would use it.

Specious reasoning. Quality has no implied positive correlation with with ethics.

On the contrary, you can easily become very competitive by giving up on ethics (see Volkswagen diesels for example). So the best search product might belong to Google but that hardly implies its an ethical company.

True. However, the argument that advertising in search results is unethical seems weak, I don't see it. There is some conflict of interest, but Google walks the line pretty well. I don't think it necessarily follows that a conflict of interest mandates unethical behavior.

I correct my stance to be that the trade-off of having better search quality in exchange for ads in the search results and the associated tracking is still worth it to me. If I felt otherwise I would use a more privacy friendly search engine.

You may not like the ads, but they pay for the product.

Please don't think the audience here on HN is naïve enough to believe rhetoric like "Search is the product." It isn't, and it never has been. The product is the ads; they pay for the mechanisms that display the ads, whether that's search, YouTube, GMail, or whatever. Those things are undoubtedly useful services, but the product Google makes is ads. Everything else is marketing.

What does this even mean? There are a lot more engineers, designers and product managers at Google devoted to what you deem “marketing” than ads. (Source: I’m a xoogler). People on those teams believe strongly in their missions and their KPIs are mostly not revenue-related. In general, there was a strong underlying philosophy while I was there that “if you do right for the user it will work out in the long term.”

Take GMail as an typical service. GMail exists solely to show me ads. It's not Google's product, Google doesn't sell it to me, it's a free tool that exists to display Google's real product, the ads. It's a billboard. A brilliant, useful, and clever billboard, but still a billboard nonetheless. This is true of every Google service that they give away for free.

This is rewriting history. GMail was created by Google engineers (as an internal only project) way back in the day because they wanted a better email client (Gmail was, originally, a 20% project). Eventually they added ads because well, sure, companies want to monetize things. But to say that it exists solely to show you ads is a disservice to the people who originally created the tool. It was not made to, and does not exist to show ads. It was made to, and exists to be a better email client. To do that sustainably, it now show ads.

Also I'm pretty sure you can disable all promotions within Gmail, and I'm fairly sure that Inbox has, to my knowledge, never shown ads. So as billboards go, I think it's anything but brilliant, since it has never shown me an advertisement!

Much like how CoLab[1] apparently exists solely to show you ads and how hangouts and Google Voice are there just to show you ads (I'm not sure where though). Duo is just a video chat app to show ads. Clearly.

This argument is so silly. Indeed there are people at Google whose job it is to do things with ads. That doesn't mean that everything that Google does for free is intended to be monetized with ads (see, again: CoLab, which gives away free GPU compute). There are a variety of reasons for a company of Google's size to make products freely available. Showing ads is one of those reasons, but by no means the only one.

Note: I work, tangentially, on Gmail.

[1]: https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/welcome.ipynb

Wait, I thought "You are the product"?

It's a different aspect of the same. Your attention to ads or the ads themselves are the product. In the end if it sells it doesn't really matter what you call it.

This is such a silly proxy-argument altogether.

For a very contrived definition of "product", search isn't a product, and for other definitions, it surely is.

You're trying to make a point that as search engine users, we are a means to an end for Google, like cattle on a farm.

And I agree with that.

But we can discuss this directly, there is no need for a passiv-agressive proxy discussion about what definition of product is right. And there is no need to draw the whole HN audience into this.

How is that different from say broadcast TV or any other media though? Or are you saying that ads are their product as well?

Yes.

Whatever creates the revenue is the product that is being sold. Broadcast TV creates content for the purpose of attracting viewers that watch the ads that are sold as ad space/time for revenue. Product placement within the content plays a role as well.

I don't understand how this isn't clearly understood. That's been the business model for broadcast TV since pretty much the beginning. It hasn't been a secret, the networks have been rather clear about it.

> If academia could produce a search engine of equal quality but without ads

Um, isn't that exactly what Larry Page and Sergey Brin produced while they were in academia?

I also use Google daily (startpage actually) but your reasoning is flawed a little. You always find the result in first page not because Google's product is that good because you're very familiar with the product and know how it behaves on what input. When I can't find the result in the first page I don't go to the second page, instead I change my input and find the result in some other first page. But ultimately Google failed to give me this result on my first try.

We don't need academia to do this. Those of us old enough to remember know that Infoseek was once a far, far better search engine than Google, but sadly, it was borged by Disney, emasculated as Go.com, and eventually, killed. (It's also worth remembering that Excite turned down Brin and Page's offer to sell Google for $750K!) Bing is the only real competition to Google today, and to its credit, it is approaching parity with Google...

20 years ago I'd have believed that a government funded or non-profit search engine would show honest results. Now I would just assume the results would be determined by political and legal pressures.

A for profit company at least faces the fear that people will just switch to an alternative.

Here's another take: someone was going to control the advertising space. Would you prefer it be a place like Google where there's vigorous debate about right and wrong, or someplace that isn't investing in that debate?

Back before Google, other search engines would let advertisers pay to boost their search ranking. Google promised not to do that. Ads are labeled and advertising is a separate division from search ranking.

These days, most of the first page for some queries may be covered with ads, but they are still labeled as ads. It appears that technically Google hasn't broken that promise for the actual search results.

(But if you know otherwise, please share.)

They may be labeled as ads, but they still appear at the top of the search results as if they were search results. The only difference is that there's a small word with the url line that says "ad"; otherwise looks exactly the same as the results. Having ads presented in such a way I choose to interpret that as breaking that promise. Especially considering with an ad blocker the Google experience feels much different.

If they were boosting actual search results, your ad blocker wouldn't work, because there would be no way to distinguish them.

The fact I have to use an ad blocker to avoid having them pollute the search results proves my point I believe.

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