It was not allowed in the early days of google adsense, but guess it was to profitable to not allow it.

This is an underrated comment.

Google are enabling fraud on a massive scale by permitting the hijacking of established names and brands. Often brands or names that some small family company has worked for years to build a reputation for.

We do indeed live in a world where tech and capitalism have birthed some sort of horrific offspring that’s choking us all.

To be fair, in this case it's more racketeering.

But that's only part of it. Google will also happily serve up ads for fake bank websites that will steal your credentials. Google will happily serve up ads for a lot of malicious content on the Internet.

Google are not only making it worse because of advertising, they're making it worse by facilitating scammers and fraudsters and various other criminals.

All because their systems are so automated as to eschew any review that might actually make advertising on the Internet slightly less distasteful (and maybe the FBI wouldn't be recommending the choking off of Google's primary income stream)

Yep, but try to put Google ads on a page with naked or scantily dressed people, you'll get banned real fast. =)

Stealing and impersonation good, sex bad.

I don't think sex bad is a Google problem as much the US problem. After all, it's not just ads and it's not just Google.

People in the US have this puritanical view on sex -> it is inherited by Silicon Valley -> it gets forced onto the rest of us.

Since the rest of us are forced to rely on US-based products in some capacity (app stores, payment processors, CDNs...), you can't make anything sex-related even in places where sex work is viewed far more openly than in the US.

Let me correct that for you - the systems are automated to provide plausible deniability, just like with the recent Hertz scandal. As soon as you admit there may be a problem with the automation the door is cracked open to admit a lawsuit in. It's the equivalent of "computer says", and the legal system is greased to permit such abuse.

The US doesn't have a smalltime corruption problem, you don't bribe your local cop, it has a bigmoney corruption problem as seen (again) here.

If we keep going down the capitalism route,

We are going to end up with 10 'scammer' ad in the top 10 result, each and everyone fighting each other with more ad budget and lower profit margins.

In the end, the website owner won't even need a website.

You could replace Google with Amazon and the same thing is happening there with fake reviews and product takedowns.

> Our company is using a very big chunk of our ad words budget targeting our own brand name to make sure it's on top.

You shouldn't need to do this. Googles ad auction on search multiplies your bid by a quality score when deciding which ad to show. A site that satisfies what the user is looking for will have a high quality score, whereas the 'wrong' site (ie. one for a competitor) will have a low quality score - partly determined by the user clicking the back button when they find they have been misled.

That means that if your competitors are pumping $100 into becoming the top search result, you perhaps only need to put $1 into getting the same ad spot.

If you are finding that not to be true, then it might be because your site is low quality for some reason (for example, maybe it doesn't load for some users in some browsers), or maybe your site doesn't have the info people are looking for when they search your company name.

I'd agree on this.

For a while I'd bid on the names of competitors (Not being scammy - just trying to win the #1 result placement); however, I found I was spending a bunch with basically zero conversions because - I assume, if someone is searching for something, they're expecting that something, so when they click it and realize it's not - they just exit.

On the other hand, bidding my own name: pennies.

> Not being scammy - just trying to win the #1 result placement

From the end user's point of view, how is "win the #1 result placement" for a competitor's name not a blatant scam?

Scammy would be pretending to be the other brand.

It's the difference between bidding on the keyword BrandX when my company is ABCBrand with an ad that says:

"Come shop at BrandX" .. when it's going to my ABCBrand, and possibly even having a landing page pretending to be BrandX

vs.

"Come shop at ABCBrand" ... and going to my ABCBrand, as it should.

This doesn't seem to work very well at all. I frequently search for a particular vendor of something by name only to be served another similar vendor as the top result. It feels like it should be doable to serve these results in some sort of "you may also like these similar vendors" box or something like that which would massively improve the user experience

It doesn't work if the real company isn't an advertiser, or if they are an advertiser but aren't in this auction due to their targeting rules or being out of budget.

Appreciate these insights. I'm just getting into setting this up for my company.

Seeing an ad for another vendor is bad. Seeing an ad that looks like what you searched for but is actually malware[1] is worse.

[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse...

Maybe this was the case before, but it certainly feels less like this now. Auto OEM ads are the biggest offenders.

I can plug OEM 1 + Model1 and get two to three ads for OEM2/3/4 before I get the result I was looking for.

The same rules that allow scammers to look like a legit result allow smaller firms to compete with the Best Buys and Targets of the world by advertising their local outfits on searches for "Best Buy" and "Target." Without that allowance, organic search degenerates into a winner-take-all system and one of two things happens: (a) small places are just locked out of search traffic, (b) they invest that money in SEO instead of ads and the organic results get worse as people try and trick Google into thinking their site is Best Buy or Target.

There should be a solution to the problem of the scammers. Banning advertising being allowed to show up on someone else's organic search results ain't it.

It may not be their biggest revenue stream, but I'll bet it's critical to Google for another reason. Advertising is somewhat zero sum. You can invent a more effective way to advertise, but the total dollars that a business will spend on advertising will remain the same, just through the new channel. So how do you increase revenue once you have captured the market? Make businesses spend to defend their own brand against imposters. This is something that didn't even exist prior to online advertising and could get businesses to actually increase their ad spend over what they would have previously. The internet is becoming more dystopian every day.

I disagree that it’s a scam to advertise over someone else’s name as long as it’s clear and you’re not trying to confuse the user. I’ve found better alternatives than what I was looking for through competitor ads. I’ve had this happen on Google and the App Store and I appreciate it.

It gives newer, or less well-known, companies a chance to gain exposure. And consumers like me might learn about a superior option they didn’t know previously.

Edit: Thought experiment. Over in the Figma thread there’s a lot of talk about trying to ween themselves and others off Adobe products. So is it really a negative for the industry and consumers if Figma shows ads on searches for Photoshop?

> as long as it’s clear and you’re not trying to confuse the user.

Fair enough, but a lot of them are trying to confuse the customer, as Cory Doctorow found

Yea, I think it should be allowed to advertise in another brand, but it should draw heightened scrutiny.

If the ad at all appears to originate from the company that is the target of the ad keyword it should be rejected or require verification that it’s from the company.

Google could even charge a $10 “review fee” for ads placed directly on competitors keywords (per ad treatment, not per ad treatment per keyword) to discourage this behavior from scammers

> is it really a negative for the industry and consumers if Figma shows ads on searches for Photoshop?

Yes, because Google's intended and actual outcome is companies are blackmailed into paying to compete on advertising for their own names. Which is highly likely a navigation query.

It would be different if someone googled "photoshop alternatives" or sth

If Figma is running an ad on the Photoshop keyword, then it should be blatantly obvious that it's not an ad for Photoshop.

Like "Figma: an Alternative to Photoshop" (you can tell I'm not an advertising copywriter).