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Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me how this is problematic? If you go to a grocery store, you will see store-brand items promoted too. They will be cheaper and possibly more prominent on the shelves than name-brand items. They might even be in disguise (e.g. Archer Farms is a Target brand).

How is this any worse or wrong?

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"Wrong" or "worse" is usually measured as a product of the impact to the customer, measured in value: that is, when a potential conflict of interest results in a lower cost the consumer, it's usually deemed acceptable.

What is a similar measurement for information? Grocery stores only sell physical goods; they don't, for example, determine what medical information you see, or what information about political candidates you consume... those are things that search engines do.

So you see why this could be "worse" and "wrong": there isn't a good way to measure the impact and the scope of influence is much larger.

> What is a similar measurement for information? Grocery stores only sell physical goods; they don't, for example, determine what medical information you see, or what information about political candidates you consume... those are things that search engines do.

Okay, but that's a different discussion. Google showing Google Maps first instead of Apple Maps on a search for "maps" is not related to the kind of shadowy political subterfuge you're referencing here.

I still don't see what's wrong with highlighting your own products to your customers, which is the discussion here.

The Apple Maps service doesn’t have a web presence, so they’re not even trying to compete with Google Maps on the web. A map service is objectively more useful than a promotional page trying to sell iOS devices with a built-in Maps app.

> The Apple Maps service doesn’t have a web presence

It kind of has: https://maps.apple.com/place?address=San%20Francisco

No, it doesn’t: https://maps.apple.com/robots.txt

The robot file doesn't want you scraping actual locations.

So it does have a way of accessing the maps over the web. But because they dis-allow locations they don't compete with google for location based queries.

Everyone is wrong or right, depending on if your glass is half full or empty.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. [0]

Replace "maps" with the names of any competing products from both companies with a web presence that can be linked to in search results, if you want to genuinely rebut the point.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If they are promoted results, they should be marked as such.

When performing a search you are implicitly asking to see the "best" (most on-topic) results according to an impartial computer algorithm.

That's the user expectation.

A corporation inserting its own pages into organic results means it's not a search engine anymore. It's "a paid directory service augmented by a search engine".

> "best" (most on-topic) results according to an impartial computer algorithm.

Any algorithm looking for the "best" result is inherently partial to something. Best result in terms of most recent, most local to you, most-likely-what-you-actually-want, I mean, the dimensions are endless.

The concept of "organic search results" is only possible if the algorithm were public, and that's just not a realistic expectation.

>A corporation inserting its own pages into organic results means it's not a search engine anymore. It's "a paid directory service augmented by a search engine".

I mean, Google doesn't have to pay themselves to promote their own pages. If you want to split the difference at "a search engine, part of a larger business whose results might show up preferentially in that search because why wouldn't they," that makes sense to me.

I thought it would have been obvious, but to clarify what I meant by impartial and organic — I mean "ranked using the same criteria regardless of origin".

Of course any human-written algorithm will have bias. But it's a reasonable expectation (and the current norm) that every page faces the same bias.

I'm not sure where you're going with your last comment. If you've got evidence that Google is manually promoting its own pages within the search results (not ads) then please provide sources. This has never been proven and Google have consistently maintained they don't do it.

(I'm not a Google fan but I believe them in this case because of the anti-trust implications)

Google has been doing this since the beginning. They maintain they don't manually change the rankings.

Google originally picked a bunch of sites and included there own and gave them a 10 page rank. That meant they automatically ranked higher for the same words/term because of a higher reputation score.

I'm not sure exactly what you're alleging. The discussion was about whether Google manually moves their own properties up in the SERPS but you seem to be speaking of how their PageRank algorithm was seeded some 20+ years ago.

Search engines aren't selling peanuts clearly marked as store-brand; they're showing information most users presume is in descending order of relevance.

Both are wrong. It gets more and more wrong as the entry barrier for a new player becomes bigger and bigger. So Google promoting their content is FAR more detrimental than Yahoo promoting Verizon content, because Google drives most of the traffic. One solution is to force the producer of any service to always be decoupled from the distributor or marketplace. So Amazon cannot promote Amazon Basics stuff knowingly, Target cannot promote its own brand, and Google cannot promote its own sites.

Why are both wrong? This is a question of ethics, and is therefore subjective. It depends on your personal values. "Free markets are good" is one of my values, so both are wrong through that lens. If you do not believe that enabling competition is good, then it is not wrong.

They’re often cheaper because the store increases the price of the competitors’ wares to make their own store-product more appealing. It increases the price to consumers.

Can’t both practices be wrong?

Grocery stores shouldn’t be allowed to sell their own brands that compete with the otherwise free market. It’s an abuse of their position in the value chain. Heinz Ketchup can’t compete with the store brand on equal terms when the store sets the prices for both products.

> Can’t both practices be wrong? and an abuse of their market position?

Sure. But my point is that no one is railing Kroger for putting their cheap pasta above the DeCecco. So it's hypocritical to call out tech companies for doing what physical retailers have been doing for ages.

If we're not mad about the pasta, we shouldn't be mad about Flickr being #2 on the search for "photos". And if we are mad about Google Photos being #1, why aren't we mad about the pasta?

I’m mad about the pasta too. Price gouging is usually regulated internationally, though. E.g. groceries in India are labeled with a maximum retail price set by the manufacturer to avoid problems like this.

Your analogy is flawed.

Google's value proposition is to provide the most useful/accurate results for your query. Period. That's Google search's "raison d'etre".

Kroger makes no such (equivalent) claim.

It's a free market, shop someplace else.

Some of those shops use price dumping to kill all local competition when they move in. Try again.

> They’re often cheaper because the store increases the price of the competitors’ wares to make their own store-product more appealing

Maybe irrelevant to the point, but in my experience that is very wrong. They're cheaper because:

* they have approximately zero marketing costs other than the cost of the shelf space, which they have better insight to sizing than their competitors

* They didn't have to spend as much testing and refining to develop a quality product, because they already have a good sense of what the market is after because they're copying something people want

* They don't have to maintain a staff of salespeople working to negotiate their products into stores. They know exactly where their product is destined to go, and how much to produce to satisfy market demands.

* Because they have split-tested the price against which users see their value brand as enough of a bargain to switch from Fruit Loops to Fruity-Ohs or whatever.

Yes, there is a portion of that component that has to do with the margins applied against the name brands, but stores aren't marking up their competitors' prices beyond the normal markup, and just as an aside, if Fruity-Ohs were selling better at a price than Fruit Loops, the store would increase their pricing. TLDR, if the market agreed, it would be very possible for the generic brands to cost more than the name brands, but due to point 1 (marketing) that is extremely unlikely to happen.

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