1. When I search an exact domain Google will take money from a competitor and show their "advertisement" first. I say that in quotations, because it looks like they're showing a search result, not an advertisement. At this point it feels like companies are paying for their search placement. Pay enough money and you can be the first result for any search term.
2. Does Google give Expedia the option to not pay for an advertisement when there is no competition? I don't think so, and in the example I posted, Google has basically scared Expedia into outbidding no one.
The whole thing feels like extortion. Pay us money or we'll send people trying to navigate to your website to one of your competitors.
Google made their favored ones easy.
Now that fails to deliver expected results. Too many people not making the choices Google would have them make.
but for #2 there's a pro-competition argument here. If you search for Expedia and all you ever get is Expedia and expedia pages underneath that, in theory that's good. But what if you don't know about other online travel sites? You'll never see them, so it kind of makes sense that you are shown other sites in there.
Google should recognise that a search for Expedia is either: a) For Expedia b) For a travel holiday
and let other competitors rank for b), showing Expedia as the biggest and main CTA on the page.
Why? If I search for a specific thing (Expedia), why would Google assume I want to see other options that I did not ask for other than "it's more profitable for Google"? More specifically, in the event I want other options, why is the correct answer "you want to see the other options that are paying Google the most"? That's not "pro-competition", that's "pro-Google".
Google should recognise that a search for Expedia is either: a) For Expedia b) For a travel holiday
Why, short of mind reading (I assume they're working on it, but it's not in the 10Q), should Google ever assume B?
And the same applies to other terms like Kleenex, Ziploc, aspirin, etc.
I don't think that makes sense. Or, at least, such results should be below all the actually relevant results.
If I'm searching for Expedia, then what I want is results about Expedia. Nothing else. If I want to know about other travel sites, I'd be searching for "travel sites" instead.
Jacuzzi, styrofoam, and Super Glue are all brand specific trademarked items[0], but I doubt most users care about that when they're searching for those terms.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...
If customers searching for your brand are happy to buy from your competitor with a different name, maybe your brand isn't so strong?
And if you are profiting from advertising your brand to people who don't choose your product over alternatives, isn't your marketing just "stealing" purchases from competitors?
User: "Google, how do I get to Costco?"
Google: "Here are directions to Target."
User:"But I asked for directions to Costco."
Google: "Target gave us a lot of money. So, firstly here are directions to Target. If you still want Costco, keep scrolling, but Target is great. You should shop here."
When you literally search for one brand and the first result is a competitor, just because they bought out the ad space for your brand name's keywords, that is theft, imo. Or extortion if you'd prefer. It's at the very least, extremely disingenuous and sleazy. Customer loyalty is looking up the preferred brand to begin with.
Two stores, A and B are competitors. I visit company A and say that I'll stand at the entrance of their competitor, store B. I'll tell each customer trying to enter store B about store A and attempt to refer them, as long as store A pays me $0.50 for each person I try to send their way.
This works, some people that drove to visit store B now go to store A instead. Now, store B is getting annoyed at me "stealing" their customers, but I have a solution. I tell store B the more money they pay me, the less likely it is that I'll refer their next customer to store A. So, store B starts paying me $1.00 each time someone tries to enter their own store, and in return, I do nothing but stand there.
A year goes by and I'm standing at the entrance of every store in the country. I collect a dollar when someone tries to enter every store, and I do nothing but let them pass.
Why do I owe you a fulfilled promise? Because I said I'd be honest? Why do I owe you honesty about my honesty?
Reductio ad absurdum
If I build a search engine and promise that it will give accurate and honest results to your search queries, and then it doesn't do that... why do I owe you? "I didn't force you to trust me" is the most childish way to try and weasel out of broken promises there is.
To answer your question though - they don't, but it makes them a shitty company to lie to/manipulate their users.
You'll probably figure out at some point that they do, and that this whole law thing is a proxy for ethics we put in place so that we can punish people that don't.
Until then, live in your world.
The only real solution is to regulate this to make competition fairer again.
We've even seen this happen with repeat customers of ours. It's tough since Google allows the ads to be very confusing, but then we also have competitors who have blatantly copied our style, content, and have even named themselves in a similar manner.
We also spend just under five figures a month on branded keywords to combat this. We rank #1 organically for all of them, but there are always 3-4 competitors bidding on them so we only get a small portion of that traffic if we don't pay for those keywords and get the #1 paid spot as well.
Even with that in place people will still get duped and click ad #2, #3, or #4 that go to competitor sites.
Essentially, the bid to be #1 is discounted by the click-through rate. If 90% of people who search "expedia.com" will click an ad for Expedia, and only 10% of people who search "expedia.com" will click an ad for travelsite.com, travelsite.com has to pay 10x what Expedia does to make up for the lost revenue.
This gives Expedia an advantage when purchasing ads on the search term "expedia.com".
Of course, Expedia would probably prefer not to purchase ads on "expedia.com" at all.
If nobody bids against Expedia, they'll end up paying a penny to win the auction. Source: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2996564?hl=en&r...
Would it be possible to fund a search engine startup by selling shares to all of those sites who now have to pay to stay at the top? In the long run, it should be cheaper to fund a competitor.
That's a pure antitrust play.
This is the sort of practice that will get Google in trouble with Congress.