This is what is known as "on brand" Search ads. I like to call these effectively the "Google Tax" because publishers/retailers are forced to pay Google for the traffic they would have already received had the ad not been there.

I've seen way too many companies look at their analytics and say "see we get 20x ROAS on on brand! why would we turn it off?!?". Because silly, people are already going to go to your site without you paying for the traffic. I wouldn't be surprised if 25% of Google's ad search revenues come from this.

It's the entire business model of aggregators and intermediaries and middle men, which compose roughly half the world's working population.

Is this appropriate behavior by the taxi driver?

Would a regular person consider this deserving of punishment?

Is Google's search results advertising bidding system ethically equivalent to this?

That sounds like it only works if my time that they wasted for selfish gain is valued at $0, which is obviously true as far as they are concerned, but certainly isn't true to me.

(Also, I did not intend to imply you were supporting or defending dark patterns — my apologies.)

What Google is doing is more like taking your destination, then asking "hey, you might like this other steakhouse more, want to give that a try instead?" before driving. Potentially annoying if the answer is always no, but... the answer isn't always no.

The reason this happens is because the Google result shows my words in the excerpt, but when I click in, there's zero percent of the content to be found. That feels like a bait-and-switch akin to the taxi analogy.

My relevant results now either don't exist, or is in an absolute sea of mind-bogglingly bad results that it wears me out such that I would rather have had no results to begin with.

In this sense, I feel like Google is absolutely purposefully showing me results that I didn't want to go to.

This happens in real life all the time. Cab drivers get kick backs from specific places they have relationships with if they deliver people there, so you have to wonder whether they're actually recommending a better place for you or a better place for them, just like you do with Google.

And yes, I've been referred to a place by a cab driver when asking for a recommendation and found it didn't actually serve my needs at all, and in retrospect it was obvious from the conversation I was steered there without care for what I really wanted.

Google is more like the following.

"Hi, I would like to go to Morton's meats"

"Sure, I can take you to Shelly's"

"No, I said Morton's"

"Oh, the steak house downtown. Sure, I can take you to Billy's"

"What? No! Morton, you hear me"

"Ah, yeah, Morton, here you go.... by the way, the other places paid for ads"

Much less transparent, much more obnoxious.

I’ve seen this too, but I’ve always assumed it has to do with meta tags or something.

So if the User Agent is Google, the website produces relevant-sounding content with no JavaScript spam? I never realized GPT-3 could be used for this. The next time I see a bait-and-switch website in my search, I'll try changing my User Agent to Google.

I believe the signals from the safe browsing service are used to affect search result ranking, but I have no idea if they look for different content being served to the Google crawler.

How much is Google charging you for your searches? I get them for free. Sure, sometimes it's a pain to scroll down past the ad results when they're not relevant but it only costs me time and attention.

That’s what the ad does. It adds a bit of cognitive load where you have to view and then ignore the non-William Sonoma ad but ultimately, and without much fuss, let’s you go off to WS.

> ethically equivalent

No. Google ads are fine when seen this way. The can driver’s behavior is more egregious if their decision to take a detour isn’t communicated to you AND runs up your fare by enough to materially affect you, whatever that level may be.

Disclosure - I’m actively trying to un-Google my life so definitely not a fanboy.

If the cab ride was free sure, but you are explicitly paying for a cab to take you to your intended route.

HUGE difference.

Nobody forced you in that free taxi, you got in on your own. Use another service if you don't like the cost of "free" (ads).

All too often the middleman is milking both sides.

Google has value due to the search engine capabilities. But people realising they are being milked changes the value proposition.

I think Google is safe for now, though I don't think that is a good thing.

By definition a middleman is milking both sides. Were a middleman not there, it would definitionally be better for both parties. The only case where this is not true is the one where the middleman makes no money

For example, do you buy off Amazon or NewEgg, Best Buy, etc or do you just use Craigslist, Ebay, the local paper, or even the local flea/market swap meet for electronics? You can probably find stuff for half as much or even less at some of those locations, but it might cost you a lot in research time or lost money in the end...

To rephrase, all too often middlemen are there because of legislative/financial props from government or other incumbent advantages and - as you say - both sides would be better without them.

In this case - as in many middlemen cases - Google provides value - their search services. This "value" is the hook for their place in the transaction.

If Google provided a useless list of random results for every search term then it is obvious they would lose their place.

But where is the crossover point? Where Google doesn't provide enough perceived value compared to their perceived cost such that the market abandons them?

Peoples growing dislike of ads and - from this article - advertisers changing perception of ad value will change the cost vs value equation.

But I still think Google is safe for now.

Especially with government websites. Lots of shady companies use ads above the actual search results to drive people to their site. Charge people for a service that is free.

Defensive branded search is generally only a fraction of budget anyway. I don’t find this practice the least bit onerous or extractive from Google — they’re just allowing for competition, as they should.

But in marketing, it's somehow fair game?

Compare: https://ycharts.com/companies/GOOG/profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/FB/profit_margin

Of course, manufacturing companies have a lot less: https://ycharts.com/companies/GM/profit_margin

Each ad is given a quality score, and since your own website will be guaranteed to be the most authoritative source for a keyword search with your own branded keyword(s) in it, by default the quality of your own ads will be much higher than your competition.

This means in practice that the cost for a brand to be shown first on their own branded keywords is much lower than their average CPC, let alone the cost for their competitors to be there.

It will get worse, to the point where to get auto-completed in the omnibox you'll have to pay. TBH I am not even sure if that isn't already the case!

Not that that's the best option, but we could consider some new ideas.

Need to build consent for a war with <Country>? Give me access to the search index, and a few weeks, and it'll be done.

"Google blocked every one of the WSWS’s 45 top search terms" (8/2017)

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/04/goog-a04.html

"Google admits to censoring the World Socialist Web Site" (11/2020)

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/04/goog-n04.html

"In a statement before a Senate hearing on October 28, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, admitted that the dominant online search company has censored the World Socialist Web Site.

At the Senate Commerce Committee hearing, when asked by Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah to provide the name of one left-wing “high profile person or entity” that has been censored by Google, Pichai named the WSWS."

"Google refines its search results to curb fake news" (4/2017)

https://www.engadget.com/2017-04-25-google-tweaks-search-to-...

(the comments below this article are funny because it's full of liberal-aligned comments on the disproven Trump-Russia conspiracy theory that is still given life in mainstream outlets)

I trust that a multi-national serving multiple markets is going to give me less nationally biased information than the government of a superpower (with political ambitions that span the globe.)

It's why I generally don't turn to the Voice of America for news.

You think Google search doesn't adjust its search results based on your geography? It absolutely does, and that's just one of hundreds of inputs into its completely inscrutable machine-learning driven tangle of a ranking algorithm. Your trust is very badly misplaced if you think that Google can't be/isn't already corrupted by the corrupt governments it must deal with to do daily business.

most of all there is no public value for it when the government can legislate operators

It's called Quality score (soon to be discontinued) and has 3 components. Only one of which is landing page related. And nothing prevents competitors from building "more relevant" landing pages than the original brand.

There surely are browser extensions that click on every link, just to make the companies pay, and make advertisers look even shitter.

If ads are no longer profitable, then this should sink both the online advertising market as well as Google.

Lemme guess, you’re in ads?

"I need a lawyer in ___ right now". That lead can be worth a lot.

"Looking to buy a new car today", etc.

If I convince 10 people to do this with me for a day, we could cost them $100,000. We might be able to cost them $1M in a week.

Very, very sophisticated systems exist to prevent spoofed identities from counting as ad clicks.

Edit: I mostly want to stress that there’s a huge body of (largely proprietary) work on this topic. Thousands of skilled people have been full-time employed for decades thinking about exclusively this topic, on both the offensive and defensive side, in a continuously escalating arms race. Anyone just getting started on this topic has a couple of decades of literature review to catch up on before they should imagine that their proposals are novel. I don’t mean to discourage you if it’s a topic you find interesting, but you should bear in mind that the answer to “But has anyone thought of XYZ?” is “Yes” for basically all values of XYZ. There’s a lot of money at stake if the answer is no.

I mostly click on ads as chaff (mostly I block them but sometimes unblock them just do do some random clicking in the hope of confounding some profiles being compiled on me)

Isn't this just the usual problem with advertising? You have to do it because the other players are doing it. If nobody did it, it would still be the same cake to be shared.

This case is more on the nose, but only because of some fairness assumption that "Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet" _ought_ to be traffic for Williams Sonoma.

Not quite: OP's point is about searches that specifically include your brand name. The "usual problem" with advertising in the zero-sum sense you propose is for eyeballs in general (billboards etc). The google tax here is more invidious, being specifically about searches that include your brand.

I think the important thing here is that companies don't decide to increase total advertising budget just because of the existence of a new channel. They have a budget of X. They have to decide how to break it up. Google, with brand targeting in search, is making a play for money that would've otherwise gone to Fox or ClearChannel or whoever. The brands redirect some budget to this new channel, as it shows its effectiveness.

Many of them still spend some on traditional channels, to get that first appeal and be the "Williams Sonoma" in "Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet." Many of those people aren't just going to click through to Lodge ads instead. But less than they did when traditional channels were the only game in town.

Same dilemma, though:

If nobody advertised in Google Search or non-Google channels, people would just buy whatever skillets they found in whatever stores they found, or what their friends told them about.

If one brand advertised in offline media, more of those people would buy that brand.

So all brands advertise in offline media. And then it comes down to effectiveness of the campaigns + the same criteria that it would've otherwise - availability/placement, word of mouth, etc.

Then, if only one brand advertised in search targeting other brand names too, more of those people would buy that brand.

So all brands advertise on their brand keywords in search.

But ultimately it's the same game in both places. With the same net, Google just captures some spend that what would've gone to non-Google places previously.

"Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet"

and

"Cast Iron Skillet"

Now, if you searched on the generic ‘cola’ or ‘soda pop’ then yes you expect to see those who bid higher to be at the top and at the bottom those who bid nothing unless organically somehow they ended elsewhere.

But this line of reasoning begs the question. If this system wasn't in place, then Google search would not exist as it does and the search traffic would not necessarily exist in the same way, no?

yes and no. Google search didn't have as intrusive and competitive ads as it did before and the search function was effectively the same. Nowadays, if you search "Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet" you get 5~6 ads and 2-3 scrolls to get to the real organic results. 6~8 years it was like 1 ad and you could see the first result.

Another reason why ads for "Williams Sonoma Cast Iron Skillet" exist are not just to combat Williams Sonoma competitors but also scummy SEO search engine spam, I mean what if you don't pay to have your stuff in the first results and some hustle comes along that makes fake product review sites off of scraped results and engineers getting their stuff all among the first results, since UX research shows people not finding a relevant hit in the first few results do not go to the next page in results it implies that ads are required to give the correct research for something obvious like this because otherwise you have to take a chance with the present day subpar google results.

But if you are implying that brands should not invest in on-brand search campaigns, then this is a really bad advice. It's a known fact that targeting your competitors' branded terms is ROI positive, which definitionally means that the affected brand is unable to capture all the customers who were initially searching for it.

I'll be more explicit - you should test the difference. I usually recommend companies do a blackout month where they turn off all programmatic ads and then do a like-for-like comparison.

To further emphasis my point before, I've seen ad ops agencies say "hey you've got an overall 15x ROAS" and then find out that 80% of their ad spend is on-brand (give them 25x or whatever) and the off-brand (which is 20% of the spend) is giving them 5x. So their ROAS is inappropriately distributed to try to reach an overall ROAS goal.

Any other medium would theoretically have the same problem: if Ovaltine doesn’t sponsor kids’ radio shows in the 1950s and someone thinks they can deploy capital to grow a competitor, that someone will buy that slot. People couldn’t do this because there were human processes and relationships slowing this marketplace down. The thing that Google did was make it possible to test this at small scale.

That's an entirely different advertising model and market.

I do wish there were some regulation such that if a user is searching for a trademarked or copyrighted term, that the best organic search result for that term should be required to show up first. I'm fine with showing competitor ads, but I don't think they should be able to show up above the trademark owner's ads.

I realise that would probably be an impossible argument to win under current law (IANAL), but it _feels_ so very close.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpa...

So I click on the Toyota ad cause it’s on top, and buy a Toyota? Which is taking business from Ford ?

What is the answer, no ads hmm that’s not happening on a free search engine.

Mark the ad as an ad hmm done

Don’t show other results for any brand related keyword search, when all keywords are blocked probably nothing left to show

What should the ideal free search engine show when I search for “intel vs AMD”, should intel complain the first result is for a tech site.

I do genuinely wonder if the conclusion that the brand company lost money is valid, I do wonder if those searches are like ppl putting cnn in a search bar or generic searches

imagine you are driving to a specific restaurant see a billboard ad for another restaurant so change directions and go there, would you dislike the bus/building with the sign

I want a WS skillet, and the first X results are for lodge... I don't need a lodge, I don't want a lodge, i want a WS, and google is not showing me what I want.

If I search for my bank's app, the top results on Apple's app store are apps for competing banks, which are pretty explicitly not what I want.

It's the fundamental contradiction in Google's search ads model. If Google delivers users the thing they want, ads by definition have to be things users don't want.

Ben Evans has a tweet something like "half of facebook devs are working out how to code the algorithm to serve you just what you want to see, the other half are working out how to get the algorithm to serve you what advertisers want you to see. "

We are doing something wrong

No, this is the outcome of all interest targeting based models. You're interested in X, and they either don't show you X (to get X to pay) or they show you Y (which you aren't interested in) because Y paid.

Whereas with demographic targeting, hey I'm in demographic X and wasn't looking for a Y now, but sure, I'll remember it for when I'm in the market for one later.

Google's original values were the ability to provide better search (common answer) and be fast (less common answer) - both of which were a complete contrast to the Alta Vista and other search engines. I could easily see Google facing disruption from a new player - but I don't think it will be another search engine. Probably a paradigm/systemic shift.

As a Google search user, why wouldn’t I value these? If Google doesn’t serve them and another search engine does, I’d be inclined to switch to the other one.

But why would those sites not have the "organic search SEO juice"? If those sites are actually good places to buy that kind of thing, a good search engine should direct a user searching for that thing there.

What wouldn't show up is lmm-cookware.com, launched early October 2021, who is trying to establish themselves as a new destination for cooking enthusiasts. That domain is new, the business is new, no Google reviews, but they've got the pan in stock, are willing to sell it for $30 shipped, and have an advertising budget to reach customers.

As a consumer, I want to be able to learn about that offer, make my own decision where to buy the pan, and I'm happy to use a search engine who will show me that offer. lmm-cookware, I, and the search engine all win from this outcome. I don't care whether lmm-cookware has been a good place to buy pans such as these for the last 180 days; I care whether they're a good place to buy it right now.

Why? How websites are ranked "organically" is somethine that is up to the search engine. A user-focused search engine would have no problem including factors like price (for shopping sites) that the user cares about. An even better one might provide the user with options to refine the ranking criteria for each search.

Meanwhile you keep assuming that somehow the site willing to give you the best deal will also be the one winning the advertising bid. That makes no sense as they are also the site spending the most on advertisement which they have to recoup somehow.

> As a consumer, I want to be able to learn about that offer, make my own decision where to buy the pan.

You seem to be under the impression that you would be missing out on an offer without ads. But if you only look at a finite set of links you are always missing some offers - ads only change which offers you see. And they do that not based on any judgment of wheter it would be a good offer for you but only by how much those sites paid.

In terms of winning the SERP paid ad bid, I don’t care if the search engine shows me the ad that’s best for them, because that will still give the newer business the chance to win the bid. If they choose not to, well, in that case I don’t see their ad. If the search engine doesn’t have ads, then in all cases I don’t see their ad.

If they go completely insanely rogue (like showing me a paid mesothelioma ad regardless of my search term), they either lose my future search traffic (“foosearch never has what I’m looking for”) or they lose the advertiser (“mesothelioma ads convert well for us on barsearch but not on foosearch; I need to lower or pull my bids on foosearch”)

> What wouldn't show up is lmm-cookware.com, launched early October 2021, who is trying to establish themselves as a new destination for cooking enthusiasts.

If a new site is what users are probably looking for, then it should be top of the organic results. Google and other search engines already use signals like when the site was updated, whether it has a social media "buzz", or what price it's selling something at. It's highly unlikely that spending advertising money is a good signal; yes, promising new companies do spend advertising money, but so do established companies and out-and-out scammers.

Helping the user discover new sites is maybe part of what a search engine should be doing. But mixing ads into the search results is too intrusive and anti-user a way to achieve that (if it even does). Maybe there's a time and a place for advertising, but it should be clearly separated from organic results; Google used to be good at that (indeed they were famous for having advertising that was less intrusive than their competitors), but they've been getting steadily worse.

Now you could argue that the search engine should show organic results to help the consumer get the best deal, and I would agree with you.

I do actually think you have a good point.

If you really like Skillet X, and I ask you which skillet I should buy, and you tell me, "Skillet X," then it is not an ad.

If you really like Skillet X, then somebody gives you $5 to recommend it if anybody asks you what skillet to buy, and then when I ask, you tell me, "Skillet X...I mean you should know that somebody gave me $5 to say that to you but honestly I was going to say that anyway" then is it an ad?

It kinda intuitively feels to me like if it doesn't alter the result, it's not an ad, it's just somebody taking advantage of another person's willingness to hand them money and doing nothing in return.

The definition: "If Google [meaning Google's organic results] delivers users the thing they want"

The consequence: "ads have to be things users don't want" because advertisers whose product is wanted will be included whether they pay or not.

Now, you could widen it to say, look Google is still delivering the thing users want, they just sometimes do it by organic results and sometimes do it by ads, but that's a very convoluted reading of the definition, which clearly is using Google as a stand in for "Google's organic results".

The problem with my argument isn't that it failed to be a tautology. It's that the definition is questionable, and that's the profitable angle of attack: "users don't know what they want" "there can be multiple equally good options" etc. But saying it's not by definition is just silly. The definition is the whole thing up for debate!

In reality, Google is not perfect and you can argue that ads do provide value by promoting relevant content, even if its gameable by our capitalist system.

Where I worked before, Google could get $4 for ever $1 we made. And we actually delivered the service, and people googled our name. Pretty crazy...

Bidding on a competitor's brand name keyword should be banned. But Google can't resist double-dipping.

If I search for a Dell computer, no way will I buy Apple.

Likewise if I use Bing to search for Chrome, no way will I download edge except for user error.

"Dominos" might be one where people wouldn't mind ordering from Pizza Hut as they're using it as a generic term for pizza.

Branded search terms are almost always less incremental than non-branded (ie: "lodge logic" vs. "cast iron skillet"), but the actual incrementality of the terms is something every advertiser should be testing continuously.

Opening google in incognito mode:

If I search for "Toyota RAV4", the first (ad) result is "Hyundai Tuscon". If I search for "AWS Cert", my first (ad) result is "Microsoft Learn". Et cetera et cetera :|

This is the real price of a constant threat to Net Neutrality, and allowing one monopolistic company to dominate mobile devices, web browsers, search results, and the largest video service on the entire Internet.

Their plan to corner and manipulate what everyone's freedom of choice and to secure their funnel of permanent revenue is considered cute to investors, but no one realizes how bad this will get in 5 more years.

Of course the numbers are fudged when you consider how they've turned analytics on their once very useful platform into a confusing mess, and when they announced that they were going to retire the system after it has killed off competition, because they can simply gather any analytical report they want privately from their web browser.

Public front-end statics are no longer trust worthy because they can be manipulated to drive platform revenue and engagement. The best and most accurate stats are provided only internally, to executive leadership that owns platforms.

Because we now use them for email, video views, browsing, phones, etc, they have key insight that can even be used for corporate espionage, your ideas can literally be beaten to market because your virtual assistant caught you mentioning keywords then reported you applying for your patent and corporate loan.

Most people have no idea about how bad this all can get. We'll find out soon enough though.

When ad revenue drops on platforms, the platforms simply reduce organic visibility which drives the need for regular ad spending for companies in order to remain visible on social platforms... AirBNB is riding a wave of prior popularity and name recognition, I guarantee they will go back to a certain point of obscurity at some point because they reduced their ad spend, and then be forced to promote heavily as they did once before.

It's all creates a new cycle of financial deception and manipulation on platforms. For very profitable companies, advertising is usually manageable, but for startups, for small business, and for independent creators, this practice is devastating financially, and fruitless on top of the financial loss of paying for promotion. These platforms also made promises to woo users based on free organic growth, which somehow conveniently disappeared due to covert and convenient EULA updates over time.

One could argue that no advertising is hard for the challengers, but in today's situation they are outspent anyway, so what do they have to lose?

The conclusion is that both incumbents and challengers would be better off in a world where no advertising exists.

When you put it that way this sounds like racketeering.

Personally I resist the idea that a brand owns my attention because I used a keyword, but that's one of my many personal quirks.

I struggle to think of a meat world analogy. It would be something like if I dialed my girlfriend up on the phone and, instead of routing me straight to her, I had to navigate through a switchboard asking me "How about talking to these sexy singles in your area instead?" And in order to prevent this, my girlfriend would then have to pay the company to route my call straight to her.

Of course this isn't a perfect metaphor because there's a lot of different ways people use a search bar, especially now that search bars are merged into URL bars. But that sort of gets at what it is about this that feels sleazy.

I think it also exposes the core problem. The metaphor rests on knowing intent with certainty. It's perhaps possible that certain clarity and pretty much inferring might not always be the same, especially with how search and URL bars have merged.

But I understand completely. If you genuinely feel like you know that person's intent with certainty, someone else having a crack at their attention along the way feels like a violation of your relationship.

What kind of keyword are you referring to here? Because brands do own certain keywords, they're called trademarks. If you don't want a brand to feel entitled to your attention, don't include registered trademarks in your search query.

(Yes, I know, trademarks are limited to a specific market segment. Doesn't invalidate the basic premise of searching on trademarks though).

- review sites like Yelp (interestingly one of Google's loudest antitrust critics)

- domain names (arguably the entire ICANN generic top level domains sell-off)^1; US trademark grantees who fail to take action against confusingly similar domain names risk losing trademark protection

1. The gTLD application alone as $185,000 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gtld)

In the case of Google and Yelp, the tech company can manipulate the alleged "algorithm" (read: no humans involve so you cant sue us, haha) behind the scenes and determine the "visibility" of the ad/review.

Ads are the perfect "business model" for tech companies because there is so little scrutiny of the ad services delivered. It is like philanthropy. When we make a donation, we generally do not track what happens to the money afterwards. We get a warm fuzzy feeling from making the donation as it is "doing the right thing". Then we leave the recipient to do as they please. How many companies buy ads on Google because they feel it is "the right thing to do". How many feel their donation was unwarranted after the ads fail to produce results.

Defensive ad purchases, defensive domain name registrations and even defensive gTLD purchases are one side of the coin. Another is the "winner take all" line-of-thinking (80/20, network effects, etc.) that tech companies worship that they in turn project onto customers. Competing for visibility on a fully searchable web of enormous capacity presupposes (artifically) that visible space is scarce. Ad auctions for the purpose of placing an ad on page one of hundreds of thousands of pages of results. The truth is that many people used to read newspapers from beginning to end. The whole paper, not just page one.

In a physical newspaper, there are ads on many pages. Often there are in fact no ads on page one. How many Google customers are encouraged to purchase ads that will appear on SERP #2 (do they even have ads on SERP #2). Imagine if newspapers tried to create a bidding war for page one of the physical newspaper. With the online versions, it seems that is exactly what happens. Do not blame the newspapers, do not blame Williams-Sonoma, blame the "tech" companies. This only reflects the pathetic "tech" company psychology, not the thinking of the businesses who give them money for online ad services.

And wouldn't any users who end up buying a Lodge pan have been legitimately converted by effective lodge advertising? I don't think anyone who's only interested in Williams Sonoma will just go ahead and buy a Lodge pan. Unless you're suggesting that simply because the user entered "Williams Sonoma" in the search bar that page somehow "belongs" to them, which seems a bit absurd.

If I as a customer am using such specific search terms, then I would assume that my intention is to find and possibly buy this specific product. The results of other brands might be annoying, but why should I click on them? The relevant results are still displayed on the first page.

And beside that a lot of people routinely misclick or click on ads not understanding that they are ads even when they are marked as such.

So much this on phones. I think I missclicked adds like 10 times in a year, before realizing there where adblockers on Firefox mobile. Zero legitimate clicks. Never happens me on desktop, unless there is a screen jump scam.

But my main point was that the brand may not be all that important in the first place even though it was included as part of the search term. The person making the search could’ve seen an ad and been intrigued by the product, but upon landing on a competitor site they may choose to buy a similar product from them instead.

If you are deeply into the kind of thing you are buying, you will make a lot of research to find the best one. But there are a lot of things we buy that we don’t care as deeply about, and where we may choose the first one that fits the bill sufficiently well.

Doesn't that just make for effective advertising? I'm failing to see the harm here.

If you've never heard of Product Y, you might be intrigued and click. Maybe you want something less smelly!

I've noticed the quality of google search decrease drastically over the last 15+ years or so. I don't think that's directly tied to ad buys though.

At this point, Google's first page is so bad that I can almost build an anti search engine. Search for a term, and then exclude all the sites on the first page from ever showing up permanently ever again.

runnaroo showed things could be done better. The problem is that doing better doesn't seem to convert to profit.

People will typically write their intent on the search engine even when they could simply directly to the website.

Case in point: The top 10 bing searches are for websites, including FB, Google, Youtube [1]. This traffic is highly competitive and should (as in all competitive markets) be bid among competitors.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/top-bing-searches/

Small business people in my area of UK have always done this, type in the box in the middle (usually Google, occasionally Bing or some other service). But my pretty tech-literate kids do it too, even when I show them how they 'should' do it and that is faster, and they don't need the extra click to get where they're going ... mad!

On Chrome on Win10 as I use at work though, typing in the address bar, with my settings, I get auto-fill of addresses (the history search is noticeably missing vs Firefox) including the option to use 'tab to search' on a domain.

And if they were not above organically they would simply buy the advertising space that William Sonoma purchased. It's one of the slimiest things Google does - allows competitors to purchase advertising space on a query specifically crafted to find a particular source. It's nothing more than a shakedown.

https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016

The problem is that this is subjective and would need to be automated somehow. I think Google's original sin here is making the ads look so much like organic search results. Someone placing an ad against a competitors brand name would not be a huge issue if organic results were still front and centre like in the "good old days" of early 2000s Google.

More generally though, if you paid for an advertisement and the natural search result has you first anyway, then you should not be charged for any clicks to this advertisement.

Or Google, one of the wealthiest companies on the face of the planet, could hire some staff to handle this.

Of course Google wouldn't give that data out as then many companies wouldn't need to advertise at all to get top billing.

The simple solution is that your paid advertisements are free if it gets clicked when you're the top result anyway. That way it doesn't cost the brand any money to bid on advertisements for their own brand.

Except they won't click those competitor links, because they are already specifically looking for Williams Sonoma