Comment by lsc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lsc | Hacker News Reader

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Do you want the product that is considered the best value, the product that is the most popular? or do you want the product that the retailers are willing to pay the most to get you to buy?

Google (well, I shouldn't pick on google. All brokers of advertising) optimize to push you towards the product that their customers are willing to pay the highest ad rates for.

Of course, In a company concerned with it's long-term reputation, googlers will point out, this is modulated by a knowledge that they need annoy the customer less than any alternative.

My point is that an ad is always going to cause the broker to have a conflict between what the user needs and what the customer is willing to pay for, while an organic search result (unless it competes with an ad, which it often does) does not cause that conflict for the ad broker.

Then you'd search for "sofa with best value" and "most popular sofa". And lo and behold, the results look quite different.

Are you disagreeing with my assertion that there is a conflict of interest between the consumer and the advertiser?

Your assertion would be better phrased as a conflict between short term and long term interests of the advertiser. That is, the short term interest of making money at the expense of the long term interest in retaining users. In the long term, consumers and advertisers interests are aligned: consumers want the best service they can find and advertisers want to give it to them.

>consumers and advertisers interests are aligned: consumers want the best service they can find and advertisers want to give it to them.

Huh? Advertisers want to make as much money as possible. Consumers want to pay as little as possible for the best goods.

This is a fundamental conflict for a company that has no way to add value for the consumer.

First? google only displays ads from companies that pay them for ads. Next? they order those ads by how much money they can make from those ads.

Do you really think that how much a company is willing to pay to get a consumer to see an ad has anything to do with how good of a deal that product is? If anything, the relationship is going to be inverse. I'll pay you more for a high-margin customer than a low-margin customer.

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