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It seems to me that a larger company could use this to crush smaller competitors, keep them from gaining market share by advertising using the smaller business name as a keyword, and constantly outbidding the smaller competitor. Enabling that kind of anti-competitive practice is pretty horrible.

Placement isn't solely based on your bid. My experience has been that branded kw bidding requires only token spending to be the top result for your brand term.

Too bad you're downvoted. I agree. For example, Apple barely needs to advertise, as (until recently at least) its products are a quality class above everyone else, so basically, every non-Apple laptop is an Apple advertisement. I haven't used Basecamp so I'm not so sure about them, but ... maybe they're just not that good?

>Apple barely needs to advertise

Apple has a $2B marketing budget and has advertising everywhere, all the time.

Indeed, absent advertising, how would the previous poster, like so many others, have come to believe the fiction that Apple products have better quality than their competitors'?

What they do have is higher prices. They could, in principle, deliver better quality, but Apple's record-breaking pile of cash demonstrates clearly that they are not spending it to give customers better quality, but rather pocketing it.

So, what are customers getting for their extra money, instead? They are displaying an ability to spend wastefully, a social dominance signal. They feel like they benefit, and Apple actually does benefit.

Everyone who thinks they attracted a more desirable mate via such a display has, instead, attracted a mate who was fooled by such a display. What is the correlation between quality and foolishness? It must surely be negative.

Apple's value is it's advertising and brand. It's products are objectively not higher quality. People just say that because they have been told that by other people.

High quality products last a long time. Apple's products are engineered to not last a long time. There's absolutely no reason I should be forced to buy a new macbook pro to run xcode. Either xcode is a low quality product, the macbook is a low quality product -- or both, which is the case. There are vastly superior products to both the macbook pro and xcode.

I've a 2013 MacBook Pro and am in a market for a new laptop. Please suggest a higher quality product. Even just matching this product, is a challenge - keyboard, trackpad, retina display, battery life, operating system (Windows is spyware, Linux hardly works on laptops). Not to mention that e.g. Apple's ecosystem (iCloud, iPhone, MacBooks, ...) are way better integrated than anything else. Privacy advantages (iPhone is literally the only sensible option for a privacy-oriented consumer). I could go on.

Look. I wish any other company would step up and make anything even remotely similar. But they just keep dropping the ball. Closest are probably XPS laptops, but (1) they run inferior OSs, (2) the hardware is probably subtly inferior (e.g. trackpad, battery life, heating & ventilation, plastic chassis (LOL), weight, ...), so for the price I might just buy Apple again (or stay with my old laptop, which, contrary to your comment, still works very well - though admittedly I don't have to use XCode).

The keyboard on my wife's MacBook Pro is already malfunctioning pretty egregiously after like a year of ownership so even the latest Apple stuff is not a great 2013 MacBook replacement.

Yeah, I agree, but to catch up to 2013 Apple, 2019 Apple only has to fix the keyboard and a few other hardware updates, whereas other manufacturers have a whole new OS to write :)

I chose a Lenovo Thinkpad with a Xeon processor, which you can't get in a MacBook Pro, which I also have 2 of, and from personal experience having owned and/or extensively used Dell Latitudes and Inspirons, a Toshiba Qosmio, and Surface laptops, my opinion is that the Lenovo is the best laptop available.

Well I mean that's not really a real question, is it? You've specifically phrased it so that only a macbook would be acceptable.

But if you're at all serious, the Xiomi probook is pretty good. It doesn't have a retina display but non-retina displays work better with linux so I actually prefer that for a linux laptop. It also has an nvidia-optimus gpu setup, which is a big improvement.

Everything works out of the box on linux.

Of course if you're married to mac OS you're married to mac OS.

As far as the OS goes, having used MacOS at work for 6 years across 2 separate Pro laptops, ending about a year ago, I'd now rather write code on Windows 98. The terminal was one bright spot until it started crashing repeatedly about a year or two ago (many reports of that online and it was not fixed for months, until I no longer had to use MacOS). I have a looong list of glitches, crashes, hangs and feature rants, but my favorite was the proliferation of "Memory cleaner" apps, one of which I've actually had to use. The way they work is they take up a ton of memory and then release it to force MacOS to actually manage memory properly, so all your other apps don't stutter or crash with allocation failures. And it worked like a charm for me! I've had a free app but apparently people pay for them, too. That's pretty much MacOS in a nutshell as far as my experience goes.

> Every non-Apple laptop is an Apple advertisement.

Really? Does this work for cars? Is every Hyundai Elantra on the road a BMW advertisement? How about watches? Every Timex or Casio is a Rolex advertisement?

And then you have all the users who goes to the address bar, type basecamp, hits enter before clicking on the first link in the search result without even looking at the link

“Also I would point out that people searching Basecamp on Google rather than going to Basecamp.com may look for Basecamp type products”

From what I have seen most people don’t even know the difference. They type in “basecamp” and Click the first link.

How many people have you personally observed searching for Basecamp? I mean, it can't be that many, right? Or, do you mean, most people you've watched use Google just click the top link for whatever they're searching for? But even then, how often do you look over people's shoulders when they're searching?

Maybe I'm weird but, like, I don't have any idea how my friends or colleagues use Google, and I work in the industry. So I'm really curious via what mechanism you were able to gather enough samples that you feel you can make a strong statement on this one way or another. Are you in SEO? A UX researcher? Do you have a business interest in the way people use Google, somehow?

I work in ML for search engines and have been part of very large cohort (n > 5000) user studies carried out by a former employer to measure eye saccade movements over search result pages to understand where user attention is drawn in different search modalities.

In list form results, users typically just click whatever is the first thing without much consideration for its relevance.

In gallery form results, users will scan in a ”backwards C” shape along the first row, down the far right column, then from right to left along the bottom row above the fold, pretty consistently, but still usually just click things in the first row.

The cohort was meticulously designed to allow controlling for factors like age, search interface familiarity (users completed tasks in sessions prior to the eye measurement portion), country, language, etc.

Interesting! It might go without saying, but just to check: I assume the study intentionally included some cases where the first result was not the most relevant one, right? Did the study find differences in the rate of clicking on the first result when the first result was irrelevant?

Yeah, the study included tons of variation in result relevance because a big goal was to develop actual relevance information for understanding NDCG as an evaluation metric.

One of our conclusions was basically that you can’t use relevance measurements as a function of rank position virtually at all unless you can identify when a user is a member of the very tiny subset that actually hunts through results for relevant ones. In some cases this is tipped off by highly specific queries.

But in the general case of highly generic or popular queries for the vast majority of users, they will click the first thing more or less regardless of relevance. It’s more like a reflex at that point than a decision.

In a very real sense, Google ad placement at the top of list-view search results is a tactic to monetize totally unconscious reflexes. I think in the future it will be considered in the class of behavior as marketing cigarettes to teenagers or something. It’s not a conscious value proposition, but exploitation of cognitive flaws.

There is a much older, smaller - but public - study done by MSR a long while ago as well: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/what-ar...

There's a great answer here on search engine studies but I want to point out the position the parent comment is making: most people don't know the difference between using a search engine like Google and using the WWW itself. Domain names, URLs, protocols, search engines, links, paid placement, they're all just annoying babble between you and the cat pictures you're looking for. Fortunately, you can learn the clicks and the typing you need after a few tries and then it's just muscle memory to repeat at will; you never have to figure all that stuff out.

If you work in "the industry" you owe it to yourself to watch "real users" for a while. Sure we're talking about anecdotes here but you should have your own.

> Also I would point out that people searching Basecamp on Google rather than going to Basecamp.com may look for Basecamp type products.

It does not make much sense from pure search engine quality perspective, top hit for a navigational query should be the main url, it also better redirect right away from browser addressbar context (“I’m feeling lucky” like) Alternatives are fine if the query contains the word “alternative” or other intent markers

As a counterpoint (also discussed in other threads below), often few other people want to bid on those keywords, so it's not as expensive. It's still a crappy thing to do.