>quality ads

I've seen this term for years but I still don't understand what it means. I don't want to see ads. There are no 'quality' ads. All ads are designed to sell me things period. I don't need anyone telling me about what I might want. I understand ads exist to make money and if they didn't we wouldn't have the internet etc. But there's no 'quality' to them, they're a necessary evil i've come to accept and adapt to over my life. I dislike them, I have no need for them, there'll never be a time I say 'well gee, sure am glad I seen that ad, it showed me just what I didn't know I needed.' Ads exist to sell crap to people, they're not good or bad, they just are. Some are invasive, some are reasonable, but they're all shit.

You may have never seen a good ad then. There was a period of time I would actively look at ads on penny-arcade, because the owners of the site only ever allowed ads (mostly for games) that they themselves could at least tangentially endorse. This meant I basically got hand curated ads for products I was genuinely interested in, by people who’s taste I understood if not agreed with.

That said this ended up being the exception to proof the rule about ads being mostly noise, and I agree the world would be better with less of them. And almost certainly the current state of algorithmic ad serving is a disaster.

Just like the guitar mags I grew up with. I looked at all the ads, and even bought stuff based on what I saw in competing ads along with gear reviews.

For that matter, the same goes for motorcycle magazines, and just about every other kind of magazine that caters to a niche market.

Those kinds of ads can be great, even.

Okay, but did those ads contribute anything beyond reading Penny Arcade's reviews of games? For you as a user, how does the ad improve your experience?

Your hard-line position that all ads are bad, always, is laughable. If you search for "cheapest gasoline" it's not unreasonable that an ad for an electric car might be interesting. Or if you search for "Orlando hotels", an ad for generally less expensive hotels in Kissimmee (the next town over) is more valuable than a perfectly literal result. And if you search for "k8s cluster deployment tools" then you probably want as many ads as possible, so your evaluation doesn't fail to include a comprehensive set of options.

Perhaps you're saying I already know about electric cars and Kissimmee and kubernetes, to which I'd respond, yes, probably via ads. Maybe a commercial or sign or web ad, but also maybe through a TV news spot (pr campaign) or magazine review (expenses paid) or web article (with affiliate link).

> Your hard-line position that all ads are bad, always, is laughable.

This doesn't seem especially civil.

> If you search for "cheapest gasoline" it's not unreasonable that an ad for an electric car might be interesting.

Interesting to whom? The parent comment doesn't want to see ads. So no it's not likely to be interesting in this context.

> Or if you search for "Orlando hotels", an ad for generally less expensive hotels in Kissimmee (the next town over) is more valuable than a perfectly literal result.

For me, personally, no I would find that to be an annoyance.

> And if you search for "k8s cluster deployment tools" then you probably want as many ads as possible, so your evaluation doesn't fail to include a comprehensive set of options.

Again no, I would want 0 ads in that case. Have you read about k8s cluster deployment tools? It's hard to find any useful information because even the results that aren't literally ads are fluff blog posts with little content. I don't want the fluff posts, but I can comb through them. I certainly don't want the ads.

> Perhaps you're saying I already know about electric cars and Kissimmee and kubernetes, to which I'd respond, yes, probably via ads.

There are ways to learn about things without someone paying for the right to say them at you when you don't want them to.

OK Mr Literal, you're saying when you search for "Las Vegas hotels" you want the results to exclude the entirety of the Strip, "Dallas football stadium" to exclude where the Cowboys play, and "American airlines reservations" to provide the web site or phone number for Delta (which is, technically, an American airline.)

I'm not sure I understand your response.

Discerning the intent of a search is completely orthogonal to whether to serve advertisements.

Search engines are generally not great at discerning the intent of a search. For example they frequently return irrelevant results that don't match key words even when you ask for a literal search. This has been discussed a lot.

But that's an unrelated issue to whether the search should return advertisements in addition to search results.

Could you explain how you got this from the comment you're replying to? Are you assuming a search engine can't find things there are ads for except when serving the ads?

Please check a map. It's an "annoyance" to SquishyPanda23 when he doesn't get a precisely literal result. If Kissimmee != Orlando, then Strip hotels != Las Vegas (they are all in unincorporated Clark County, NV) and AT&T Stadium != Dallas (it's in Arlington, and the old Texas Stadium is in Irving).

But, hey, he's absolutely entitled to live his life ignorant about viable options.

You can be in favor of the search engine making the best guess to what you wanted, but still consider ads worse than search results. The reason is that ads aren't optimized only for relevancy, but for relevancy multiplied by commission. When an advertiser pays more per click, their ads will show on less relevant searches. If that effect didn't exist, I think people would be more ok with ads.

I've never claimed that ads are better than search results. I'm only stating that some ads, in certain contexts or situations, do provide positive value. 'Grawprog' summed up his comment by stating "they're all shit," and I disagreed and gave examples of when they might offer positive value.

There are many factors that might determine which search results I will want to see. Under no circumstances will those factors include "how much money did they pay the search engine". By definition, that can only change my search results to something less aligned with what I want.

Not at all! The positive sum game here goes

* Company creates thing people like you want to buy.

* Company knows if you know about the thing, you will want to buy it.

* Company knows you don't know whether a thing like their thing even exists, so you have no reason to search hard for it.

* Company upfronts the money to defray your search costs, knowing it will be paid back when you buy the thing. This is called advertising.

I am constantly learning about things I would have enjoyed if I had known about them. It is damn hard to make people aware even that you are giving away free lunch. Advertising breaks down that needless ignorance.

Advertising creates needless ignorance, by giving the impression that well-advertised products are quality products.

GoDaddy and NordVPN, for examples, are garbage products with highly effective advertising. Seeing ads for these products actively harms people, because it prevents them from finding better products like Gandi or PIA.

I used to buy hand tools at Lowe's, Home Depot, or occasionally Autozone if it was car-related. One day I saw a search result ad for Harbor Freight. Had heard the name, never knew they were a tools shop. I've joked to friends that discovery was life-changing. (for reasons, compare prices on just about anything, a good example would be a 1.5 ton floor jack)

Mostly tangential to the original point on this thread, but Harbor Freight tends to sell the cheapest, and far from the best, tools.

Might be fine for your use case, I donno.

I'm not a contractor beating up on these things every day. I need an impact wrench a couple times a year, my HF stuff is fine for my use case. I love the Bosch impact driver I got at Lowe's 10 years ago, but they've changed the battery pack so I can't take advantage of compatibility with other Bosch tools. HF also has random stuff for close to free... packs of zip ties for $2, decent work gloves for $4, actually free LED light perfect for under a car, etc.

It's rather naive to believe they only arbiter of what's an ad or not an ad is payment to Google.

Signs like those famous Golden Arches can be useful.

However, when browsing the web in 20+ years I have never seen a useful paid for online add. That’s an inherent product of the medium where the only point of an add is to be less useful than the content I am looking at.

Supose your GPS added advertising. so it’s priority is not the best for you but what’s best for 3rd parties. That’s what online adds are, they take something useful and inherently degrade the experience.

> Signs like those famous Golden Arches can be useful.

I know this is picking on your example rather than your general concept, but this is a great example of how advertising is harmful. McDonald's has done incalculable damage to the health of Americans, and even if you don't go there, seeing the arches sometimes will get your kids yelling in the back seat, "I want to go to McDonald's!" This isn't helpful to us: it's helpful to McDonald's.

> If you search for "cheapest gasoline" it's not unreasonable that an ad for an electric car might be interesting.

No, I still don't want to see an ad. It's not unreasonable that a search result for electric cars might be interesting, but I want results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the advertiser that serves themselves.

> Or if you search for "Orlando hotels", an ad for generally less expensive hotels in Kissimmee (the next town over) is more valuable than a perfectly literal result.

No, I still don't want to see an ad. A search result for a cheaper hotel in Kissimmee might be valuable, but I want results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the hotel that serves themselves.

> And if you search for "k8s cluster deployment tools" then you probably want as many ads as possible, so your evaluation doesn't fail to include a comprehensive set of options.

No, I still don't want to see an ad. I want to see search results of a comprehensive set of options, but I want those results from an independent third party that serves me, not from the hotel that serves themselves.

> Perhaps you're saying I already know about electric cars and Kissimmee and kubernetes, to which I'd respond, yes, probably via ads. Maybe a commercial or sign or web ad, but also maybe through a TV news spot (pr campaign) or magazine review (expenses paid) or web article (with affiliate link).

No, I'm saying that I want to discover products that are the best for my needs, not products with the best ad placement. I want tools that serve me, instead of serving the best-funded advertisers.

Literally none of the cases you describe are what I want. Ads inherently give inaccurate information.

Excuse me, but who are these benevolent 3rd parties who freely exist to "serve" you? Do you mean sites like Expedia or Booking.com, who are, of course, getting paid behind the scenes to highlight specific hotels? Or "review" sites who select their winner based on top paying affiliate links (see Sleepopolis)? Or car review sites who glowingly praise some new model, right after the writer was flown to California and given an all-expense paid weekend to tour wine country?

I'm assuming kerkeslager is talking about publications like Consumer Reports. Basically any publication that sells you access to curated aggregated content. It would be up to the readers to decide whether they trust the impartiality of the authors.

Perhaps kerkeslager could actually answer himself. Consumer Reports is behind a hard paywall, you certainly aren't getting their researched info via a search result. As far as ad-free publications "like" Consumer Reports, I'm not aware of any. Maybe it's because they don't advertise effectively...

it's really not hard to define what a "good" ad might be--a product (or service) you don't know about but that solves an immediate problem without an immediately obvious solution. it'd anticipate your need, without invading your privacy.

fwiw, i generally don't want to be subjected to ads either, particularly for the privacy-invading aspect, but also the time- and attention-wasting aspect too. most ads are absolutely horribly conceived and targeted, especially spray-and-pray email spam.

The problem with ads isn't "good" or "bad" ads, it's that the nature of building a business of serving ads inevitably leads to an unquenchable thirst for data plus customers whose primary goal in paying you is to sell things, not to provide value (though some may do so as a selling strategy). It's hard to imagine how, or even why, such an ad business could serve the best interests of the end consumer, despite the idea held at one point that perhaps consumers would be so turned off by ads that they'd defect to a different solution. There might be SOME people who don't use Google or Facebook for these reasons, but most people simply deal with poor user experience, security, and frustration because they want to see things listed with reviews on a map, or know what their friends are doing on the weekend.

> "...serving ads inevitably leads to an unquenchable thirst for data..."

well, to continue playing devil's advocate, we've had hundreds of years of advertising (newspapers, pamphlets, and posters/signs before that) without any kind of systematic data collection, so it's not necessarily an intrinsic characteristic of the advertising business to collect data.

in an alternate universe, if banks didn't have such a stodgy and stifling rent-seeking business on the movement of money (transaction fees on everything), microtransactions might be the preferred business model of many online businesses that are now dependent on ads.

You gave examples of what I assume you consider "bad" ads. What would be examples of "good" ads in your opinion? I mean, examples matching the definition you gave:

Anticipating needs of person X, (and serve person X an ad), without any foreknowledge of person X.

another poster gave a good example--offering related merchandise on a interest-based website/forum.

a made-up example might be a customer at best buy spending time in both the tv and pc departments and then having an ad pop up on a nearby screen for an intel NUC and/or apple tv (making the assumption you want a tv-connected computer). the ad didn't need to know any personal characteristics about you other than limited, directly observable behavior in the store.

i'm sure people who focus on this every day (i.e., not me) can provide better examples.

To be fair, the example you gave require facial recognition wouldn't it?

You'd have to recognize the face and track it prior to displaying the ad.

well, face recognition is more specific than you'd need in this case.

if you went that route, you could get away with simpler person recognition (height, width, clothing color, accessories, etc.). or you could just track phones and other devices via wifi/bluetooth (and presumably uwb in the near future).

but you could also just have salespeople on the floor doing the recognition & ad placement part of it, for a lower-tech solution.

i'd actually bet trained salespeople would have better hit rates over algorithmic solutions, where access to large amounts of dislocated data is the main advantage (at the cost of our privacy).

"Quality" in this Peretti's context would be "effective in selling a product": i.e. it's what advertisers consider to be quality.

I agree with your point though: from a user's perspective there's no such thing as a quality ad: ads are inherently bad.

He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does.

As to the question posed by the article, isn't the answer obvious? I don't know if users even "trust" Google's responses now. But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers. As long as Google is still the best way to search up information on, e.g., obscure aspects of Stardew Valley's economy, users who want to do searches about such things will continue to prefer Google. If Google ceases to surface good results for queries compared to e.g. DDG, users will migrate to DDG.

> He may be right, but if Google is bad at ads, it's not for any lack of incentive alignment. They make more money by serving up the most efficient (i.e. high-paying + likely to be clicked) ads. It's not impossible, but it's hard to picture another organization having both the economic means and incentives to do it better than Google does.

Yeah, I think the only way that would happen is if someone came up with a novel superior approach to search and managed to legally protect it so Google couldn't just copy it. That's a very unlikely at this point.

> But it is manifestly the case that they will cease to do so when Google's answers cease to be the least efficient for whatever purposes users have for those answers.

I don't think I agree with this. Users don't necessarily behave rationally in self-interest: they can be (and are) manipulated, and unwilling to try new tools.

I can believe that if there were another solution that were marginally better it might not be enough to unseat the top player in the market. But switching costs in search are extremely low so it would be surprising if people did not switch for a substantially better experience. In particular, it would require us to believe that what happened when Google showed up on the scene would not happen again, and to me that just does not seem likely.

Perhaps switching costs are low, but they're certainly higher than people are willing to pay in many cases. Switching costs as high as "changing the default search provider" are demonstrably prohibitive.

Peretti is talking about the quality of the ad service, not the quality of the ads themselves. Peretti is suggesting that maybe Google's service isn't anything special, and their success is due to their insanely large audience.

The comment you replied to goes even further to suggest there's no real talent to serving ads at all, and that everything depends upon the audience size. That's not just semantics.