[HN Gopher] Googlespeak - How Google Limits Thought About Antitrust ___________________________________________________________________ Googlespeak - How Google Limits Thought About Antitrust Author : cyrusshepard Score : 247 points Date : 2021-08-24 20:06 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (zyppy.com) (TXT) w3m dump (zyppy.com) | clipradiowallet wrote: | The author could use another search engine, or put their business | efforts(SEO) into a field _not_ dependent on another | company(Google) making zero changes to their services. They aren | 't the power company(or another utility), they are a for-profit | corporation, behaving in a manner the shareholders of a for- | profit corporation expect them to. | | Or is that...unreasonable? | mcrad wrote: | Okay so do shareholders of public companies encourage the | management to commit fraud and deception? | coldacid wrote: | What good would "[putting] their business efforts" towards | other companies accomplish, other than cutting off their own | air supply? With how much of search is dominated by Google, you | have to deal with them if your job is SEO, simply because all | of their search competitors _combined_ don 't add up to the Big | G. | kwhitefoot wrote: | > Or is that...unreasonable | | Yes. And I suppose that is what your downvoters mean too. | nixpulvis wrote: | If Google would like to return the public investments in the | creation of The Web perhaps then and only then should we allow | them to destroy it. | benatkin wrote: | It can get pretty nasty. Last year @jaffathecake who works at | Google called @getify's "language" Trump-like for trying to raise | the alarm about Chrome looking at hiding the path from the URL | bar until the URL bar is focused, like Safari does. The original | tweet is deleted, so you can't check whether it was "sowing | division", but it wasn't IMO. | | https://twitter.com/jaffathecake/status/1275030931577896962 | ryankupyn wrote: | I think that a lot of this makes sense from Google's legal | perspective, where antitrust litigation is a constant | consideration and any internal document mentioning market share | or competitors could be used against them. | | I'm sure that there is a great deal of discussion about potential | anticompetitive issues within Google and with their outside | counsel, but in a context where legal privilege protects against | disclosure. | WesolyKubeczek wrote: | One could argue that they position themselves as an | accomplished monopoly already, because their internal | correspondence pretends competition doesn't even exist, or is | of no consequence whatsoever. | ec109685 wrote: | >It's difficult to imagine any new flight search, no matter how | innovative, winning today with Google acting as the web's | gatekeeper. | | Google results are dominated by the Expedia Group (a conglomerate | of tons of different brands: | https://www.expediagroup.com/home/default.aspx). While Google's | practices have definitely hurt, it's a _huge_ business, and | probably a larger reason why a new flight search competitor can | 't get off the ground. | | As a customer, it's annoying there isn't more diversity anymore. | Generic travel searches are dominated by these brands, plus | articles full of affiliate links that are hard to trust. | ummonk wrote: | It's not just legal risk but PR risk as well it's hat they're | trying to avoid. Notice how the press often gets its hands on and | makes a big deal out of shocking comments made by a few random | employees in a company employing tens of thousands. | dleslie wrote: | While looking at the tables of good versus bad phrasing I | couldn't shake the feeling that I was reading something not so | dissimilar to how leaders of organized crime historically avoided | prosecution. By not naming the crime, by speaking about it | indirectly and with softer language, they hoped to invigorate | doubt in a hypothetical jury. | | It's a method of avoiding responsibility oft credited to Henry | II, who stated off-hand "Will no one rid me of this turbulent | priest?" | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur... | JadeNB wrote: | Or the earlier example "Edwardum occidere nolite timere bonum | est" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_ | sen...). | eunoia wrote: | Sometimes I wonder how much of the push against remote work from | certain large companies comes down to the increased | discoverability (in the legal sense) of employee communications | over Slack/Teams/etc vs in person... | tytso wrote: | When I was at IBM 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a | monopoly, since there were plenty of competitors in the hardware | space (HP, Sun, Dell, etc) and in the software space (Oracle, | SAP, etc.) and in the Services space (Accenture, PwC, KPMG, etc.) | employees still had to complete annual legal training that was | very similar to what was described in the post. | | Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is going | to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our | competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of | their women." Instead they will tell their employees to focus on | making life better for their customers. It's a much healthier way | for product managers to focus, and what you might do if the goal | is "crush/dominate the competition" is *not* the same than if the | goal is delight the customer. So it's not just a messaging | strategy to prevent embarassing e-mails from coming out at trial; | it's a business strategy, too. | yakubin wrote: | _> Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is | going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to | crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the | lamentation of their women." Instead they will tell their | employees to focus on making life better for their customers._ | | The lawn mower would like to have a word with you: | <https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2040> | delusional wrote: | I agree that others do the same, but the observation that | vocabulary somewhat affects thought is still interesting. As an | example, the sentence about "defensive rationale" didn't just | reformulate the sentence, it completely changed the meaning. | | If people aren't allowed to talk about "crushing competition" | they also can't think about it. If they can't think about it | they also can't recognize it when it happens. | ajb wrote: | Yes and no. | | Via market share, competition amplifies the rewards of being | better. if you make your product 1% better than the | competition, you might go from 30% to 70% market share. But to | do so, you have to actually gain the market share. You can't | just "build it and they will come"; in many industries, someone | has to go out and win the market after the product is built. | And so a lot of people in companies are really, really, really, | motivated to gain market share. That's what increases their | share option value, and gets their bonuses. And that's what | tempts companies towards lock-in and all the rest. | greatgib wrote: | I was a direct witness of such a brain washing case a few years | ago. | | Google was about to release a new version of Android or of Nexus | phones. (I don't remember the exact details) | | And there was an insider leak, so the details of the innovation | were published on internet a few days before the official | announcement. | | Leaks are now very common and often organized by companies, but a | few years ago it was not yet the case. | | I had a lunch with a few people including some Google engineers a | few days after the leak. A discussion started about this topic, | and the googlers said things like: "what a scandal the leak, we | hate so much the person that did that, that we would have like to | have him dead. If anyone in the company find who he his, we would | seriously punch his face". | | I was surprised, because, this was just a leak of the features, | same content has what would have been disclosed in the PR | announcement. Personally I would be happy that people have so | much interest in my product that they spontaneously reshare early | details about it. I did not see where the offense was for some | random engineers of the company. | | So, I asked them, and they told me that they felt that the | insider "stole their announcement of their product". | | I told them that it is ridiculous, because as an engineer you | should like that your product is known, and that people hear and | talk about it. But it should personally make no difference if the | feature list/preview is published a few days earlier by a leak | instead of by a random PR guy or by a big head of the company. | | The only offended one might be the big head and the PR/marketing | guys that had their plan ruined, but not common Google software | engineer salarymen. | | But the Googlers were not able to understand this idea, and then, | they became hostile to me for the rest of the lunch for even | having suggested that their feeling might not be justified. | | So then I realized that they were brain washed by the company | internal communication to feel that anything annoying for Google | was bad for them personally! | | In the exact same way that there are dictator led countries were | most of the inhabitants are blindly following whatever the | dictator says is the truth! | wccrawford wrote: | I've never even worked at Google, but if my team is working | towards something and our announcement is pre-empted, yeah, I'm | going to be upset. I would never wish anyone dead over it, but | I would definitely be pissed at them. | | There's a lot of work that goes into those announcements. It's | not just advertising the product that is the goal, it's | presenting it their way. | | Similarly, when someone is telling a joke and someone else | tells the punchline, they get upset about it. According to your | logic, they shouldn't. The joke was told, and the audience | heard it. But I've yet to meet anyone who wouldn't be upset | about someone else telling the punchline to their joke. | | They were not brainwashed. You were incredibly insensitive to | their feelings. | bigcorp-slave wrote: | Every large company has these trainings. I personally have worked | at multiple companies with very similar trainings. | | With thousands of employees, a company can't take the risk that | some random college hire mouths off over Slack on something they | don't know anything about and it shows up in discovery for | something in the future and is used as evidence of planned | malfeasance on the part of the company. I know we don't like | Google but this is not a Google thing, it's a "opposing lawyers | will take speculation from random low level engineers wildly out | of context and judges and juries are too dumb to put it in | context" thing. | hospadar wrote: | On a literary note: another great sci-fi reference point is | Samuel Delaney's "Babel 17" - the hook is that a government | creates a language that enables extreme thought capabilities, but | prevents you from conceptualizing the opposing government as | anything but an enemy. | johan_felisaz wrote: | Totally out of topic, but I highly recommend it ... (Not | technically a spoiler) I really liked the parallel betweens the | bad guys' language, which was manipulative to the extreme, and | the good guys' language, which was of course less extreme but | still contained deceiving vocabulary (i.e. Babel 17 is | critiqued because the good guys are called "who are invading", | yet the bad guys are themselves called "invaders" in English | ...) | mavhc wrote: | People who go to live in other countries are called expats, | people coming to live in your country are called immigrants | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | It's a shame about the downvotes, because that's a perfect | example of loaded language which imposes a conceptual frame | for both speaker and listener. | | It's not an abstract point. It has very real consequences | because it's supposed to - and does - trigger expected | emotions and behaviours. | | PR consultants, politicians, lawyers, ad copy writers, and | others who use rhetoric professionally use this kind of | loading very deliberately. | snarf21 wrote: | It is far more widespread than an interaction with a Google | employee. The phenomenon is everywhere. It was distilled | perfectly by Upton Sinclair quite a while ago: "It is difficult | to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends | upon his not understanding it!" | prox wrote: | Same with asking people here to stop using Chrome to get rid of | the way it dominates the web. | | When you are tied to the hip to something, you will never | change. The network effect keeps you on the same Ferris wheel. | SCUSKU wrote: | While I wholeheartedly agree with this article, I can't help but | think, why would Google or Googlers encourage discussion about | anti-trust in the first place? I understand that Google certainly | does dominate the market, but can you really blame them for | wanting to keep it that way? | Lammy wrote: | Google wants to be anthropomorphized. It is a non-physical but | conscious/living entity, and yeah I do empathize with its | desire to continue to exist: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore | Barrin92 wrote: | probably because for a company that prides itself on | innovation, it's a long term bad idea to prioritize eliminating | wrong-think and hiring people who are okay with that over | people who actually believe in competition and open thought | poof131 wrote: | It amazes me that the consumer welfare standard has become so | ingrained in legal antitrust. How is a company town, feudalism, | or even slavery not the purest endgame of this logic? Own nothing | and forever be indebted. "Wow, everything is free for most | consumers, I guess we created a great world!" Can we move on to | the total welfare standard, please. [1] | | [1] | https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements... | amelius wrote: | That font ... | echelon wrote: | There was a point in time when monopolies weren't understood as | economic constructs. | | We're in a new era where the Famgopolies are something entirely | new with an even greater reach. They're all-encapsulating bubbles | that ensnare people across all the interactions they perform on a | daily basis, then tax every single point of ingress or egress. | | If they keep growing, the classic _Demolition Man_ scene where | everything is Taco Bell will come true. Everything we see, buy, | eat, date, or think will come from the Famgopolies. | shadowgovt wrote: | You really need to define 'famgolopy' every time you use it. | It's not in urbandictionary and the only search results on the | topic link back to these threads. | | It's too much of a neologism to trust that people understand | what you mean from context. | JoshTriplett wrote: | Forget about "competition" and "who provides the service" for | just a moment. (I'll return to them below.) I'm saying all of | this as someone who _doesn 't use Google search_. I would like to | see more competition in search engines. But anyone seeking to | work in that space needs to think about how users actually use | search engines, and stop thinking in the conceptual model of | "finding sites for the given search terms". | | "65% of searches don't result in a click" is a feature. You asked | a question, you got the answer to that question. A search engine | isn't a tool to find sites, it's a tool to find information; once | upon a time that meant finding a site for that information, but | ideally, it means _finding the information_. Sometimes you might | be looking for "a site that has X", but often you're just | looking for X. For that matter, 100% of searches via Google | Assistant don't result in a "click", because the information has | to be digested and presented via a voice interface. | | It's _accurate_ to say that Google is in competition with every | site that provides information to users. Anyone in the business | of providing information to users needs to treat Google as their | competitor. | | So, yes, a regulator or competitor who speaks in terms of how | Google isn't driving users to other sites or prioritizing its own | sites, and doesn't acknowledge that doing so is _answering the | user 's question_, is indeed speaking a foreign language. | | If we were in some post-scarcity world, someone trying to help | user's find information should be taking a very similar approach | to Google (or finding something even better), and finding more | ways to make information more digestible and presentable this | way, and encouraging sites to provide information in a way that | can answer questions like this. | | In today's non-post-scarcity world, there is _absolutely_ an | anti-competitive issue here. But the problem is that the most | efficient and often most useful way to answer a user 's question | may well be _incompatible_ with the "just present links to sites | given search terms" model. | | In seeking to solve that problem, we can't start out by | preventing people from presenting information in whatever way | users find most useful and efficient. We shouldn't seek to | shoehorn a search engine back into a simple "here are the results | for your search terms" model. Any approach that unthinkingly | tries to foster competition by _breaking_ the ability to present | information in the most useful way possible is rightfully treated | as some outside hostile force that 's destroying something | useful. | | And _because_ so much of the effort to regulate this as an anti- | competitive issue has been unthinkingly treating a search engine | as nothing more than mapping search terms to outbound site links, | that has generated a backlash even _outside_ of Google (for | instance, here on HN), from people who see how much value would | be destroyed by such an approach. | | Not all efforts to foster competition have been this unthinking. | I've seen proposals that try to introduce the use of APIs to | present such information from a variety of sources (e.g. "here's | the service I prefer to use for flights/hotels/etc"). I don't | know if that's the _right_ approach, or if it 's _fair_ , or if | it's _necessary_ , but it's at least closer to the right | direction, and it isn't _destroying_ useful things like | "answering user's questions" or "building a useful voice | assistant". | marcus_holmes wrote: | I read a certain amount of entitlement in TFA too. Like "I | deserve to have my site on the front page of Google, rather | than its paid advertisers or its own pages". | | Why? This isn't a government-provided public service. It's a | commercial product. Why should they direct traffic to your site | for free? They, like everyone else, walk the line between | providing an excellent product for customers and creating | revenue for shareholders. | | Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Google since they stopped not | being evil. But I'm not sure that having a competing set of | search engines would solve the author's problem - they would be | writing passionate blog posts about "why can't we have a single | set of SEO rules so I can get my site to the front page of all | of them with no hassle?" | shadowgovt wrote: | The entitlement may be sourced to the fact that the author is | an SEO company. | | As a sidebar... SEO companies would love to see Google | knocked out of its current market position. Google has gotten | very good at relying on signal that SEO companies can't | control. They would much prefer a more gamable engine take | Google's position from it. | terafo wrote: | _It 's accurate to say that Google is in competition with every | site that provides information to users. Anyone in the business | of providing information to users needs to treat Google as | their competitor._ | | I think the problem that author tries to address is that Google | uses their competitor's data in order to serve that | information, which isn't that great since IIRC they do no | profit sharing which undermines long term viability of | collecting, systemising and maintaining that data. | thegrimmest wrote: | > Google uses their competitor's data | | Their competitor's _publicly available and explicitly | indexable_ data. Their competitors are free to ban Google | from crawling their site. | skybrian wrote: | This is about being careful what you put in writing, because the | discovery process for lawsuits will find your carelessly written | email and opposing lawyers will take it out of context, and do | you want to end up in court years later explaining what you | meant? | | Google has so many employees that they need training to limit the | damage from random chatter and speculation. | | It's more cumbersome to have to talk about some things via video | chat, but it's not about limiting thought. | ohazi wrote: | No, that's just a convenient excuse. | | The other side of "Be careful what you put in writing because | lawyers, lol" that is always ignored is: | | "If you think we need to dress up the way we talk about this | one particular thing we're doing, then maybe we should | reevaluate whether we should be doing this thing. If you think | we need to dress up the way we talk about _literally everything | that this company does_ , then maybe it's time to step back and | reevaluate the ethics of what this company stands for." | | A company is a machine that is going to do whatever it can to | print money, including brainwashing its employees. You and your | colleagues are the only entities capable of ethical reasoning. | The company and its executive functionaries are not going to do | this for you. In fact, they're more likely going to try and | stop you. | | It's your responsibility to do it anyway. | shadowgovt wrote: | Who is "we" and "you" in this context? | | At Google, the team responsible for deciding whether a given | project is legal is the legal team. Googlers are encouraged | to get a member of legal on board as soon as a project gels | far enough to have a concrete description that could have | legal consequences. At that point, a set of attorney client | privileged communications could begin where any of the words | listed here can be on the table (because that communication | is not in discoverable media). | | But in general, Google doesn't encourage its software | engineers to think they're experts in law any more that it | encourages its lawyers to think their experts in BigTable | performance tuning. | ohazi wrote: | I'm not talking about what is legal, I'm talking about what | is ethical. They are not the same. | | I'll grant you that not every corporate policy will agree | with me, but I would argue that every human with a brain | has a responsibility to think about whether what their boss | asks them to do is ethical, and a responsibility to raise | hell if they think it isn't. | | I don't believe it's ethical to abdicate this _human_ | responsibility to a corporate legal team. | | Part of what these corporate policies are deliberately | designed to do is condition employees into believing that | "deferring to the legal team" is where their responsibility | ends. They want to convince you that this checks the box | for both "legal" and "ethical" so that you feel like you've | done your duty, and now you don't need to think about the | ethics of your work anymore. This is what I meant by | corporations "brainwashing" their employees. But you're | always on the hook for the ethics of your work. | shadowgovt wrote: | I agree with you. But one can raise hell by advocating to | get the legal team on board as quickly as possible and | making it clear that there's a significant issue that | needs to be considered without using the words that will | get the company half a million dollars of billed in-court | attorney time _whether or not there was actually any | ethical issue._ | | That's the key difference and the purpose for | constraining what ends up in discoverable media. | | There is, perhaps, a meta-ethical question of whether | companies should, in general, be factoring into their | calculus ways to minimize the government's capacity to | hinder their activities. It's a good question. I don't | have an answer that's universally true. I suspect if we | sit down and consider it, we find lots of circumstances | where it's not in the best interests of anyone to just | hand the government a company's throat to be slashed. | After all, especially if we're talking about the United | States, it's not like the government itself has proven a | bastion of ethical reasoning either. | sa1 wrote: | It might not be intended to limit thought, just to avoid | liability, but does it limit thought anyway? | WesolyKubeczek wrote: | Well, I'd say it does. My understanding is that if you're not | limited in what you're thinking, but severely limited in | _how_ you are allowed to think about it, your freedom of | thought is limited nonetheless. | | And it's limited, by necessity, even outside working hours, | lest your tongue/fingers slip and you utter a bad word in | your Googler capacity so that a liable deed gets a liable | name and there won't be any lawyering around this. | | Heck, it's almost, though not entirely, like a brainwashing | cult! | | I guess in China they also force their Uighur camp operators | to not even think about what they do as "torture", but | "reeducation". It makes them happier in their workplace. | shadowgovt wrote: | How people think about things and what people put in | legally discoverable media like email are worlds apart. As | a basic aspect of corporate survival, it's important to | keep that in mind. | | The overarching concept is "don't make it hard for the | company to do business." The point of those trainings is | that the words to avoid have legally-defined meanings that | may or may not be what the Googler intended, but are likely | to be interpreted in an antitrust sense in a court of law. | The underlying concept is "don't talk like a lawyer if | you're not one of our lawyers." | | Watching what you put in email (as described in this | article) is in the same training where Googlers are given | the overarching advice "always communicate via email as if | those emails are going to show up on the front page of the | New York Times tomorrow." | refenestrator wrote: | Working there in the first place limits thought. Nobody wants | to think of themselves as part of the problem. | | The language, at best, just makes the cognitive dissonance a | little easier. | kyrra wrote: | Googler, opinion is my own. | | When I started at Google in 2015, in my first week here | chatting with some peers, some of them were complaining | about some of our policies around Android and that they | much preferred Apple (the person didn't work anywhere near | Android, but was complaining about it more as a user). | | There are many people at Google that have issues with | various parts of Google's businesses. Some are more vocal | about it than others. One great example was Brad | Fitzpatrick complaining about the first-gen Nest smoke | alarms (2015): | https://twitter.com/bradfitz/status/566072337020112896 | [deleted] | skybrian wrote: | It might have some effect, but Googlers can read all the same | stuff on the Internet as everyone else. | WesolyKubeczek wrote: | Have you ever been a devout practitioner of a religion | whose views on the world differ in key parts from the | established scientific consensus? | | Have you ever been affiliated with a political party that | was highly popular (or a _monoparty_ even) in your country | but was held in contempt by the rest of the world because | of how totalitarian /inhumane it was? | | In both cases, you could read whatever, even critical | information about your values. But you would have an | explanation ready -- enemies envy and slander us, they | either know they lie or they are repulsed by the God's | light because of how corrupted they are, they are not aware | of the _whole truth_... You would have a whole arsenal to | explain things away, because you are _committed,_ and your | commitment makes it hurt to realize that the purpose your | values serve is not very noble, or that you 're a part of | something atrocious. It's the human nature. | skybrian wrote: | I understand what you're getting at and there is | certainly a lot of closed-mindedness going around. I | don't think any organization is immune to this. | | But there are also a lot of employees who have strongly | opposed various Google policies and engaged in various | political activity based on that, so the groupthink | doesn't seem to be working very well? Also, the company | leaks like a sieve these days. | | Even before that, there were a lot of internal debates. | (They just didn't leak as much.) It's in part because of | these debates that you need policies; people sometimes | say careless things in heated discussions. | | (Former Googler, but it's been a while.) | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | Isn't continuing to work for a company that has policies | you strongly oppose an example of successful groupthink? | | I suppose you could make a case for continuing if the | policies are/have been/could realistically be changed. | | But if that's unlikely? | Johnie wrote: | Many large companies have the same policies/training for this | very reason. You do not want to put something in writing that | could potentially appear on the front page of the Wall Street | Journal. | | The training/policies just codify that. | CPLX wrote: | This is what's known as a Stringer Bell warning[0] and it | doesn't reflect well on the organization who has to make it | this aggressively. | | Yes, it stands to reason that if you're engaged in a | potentially unlawful conspiracy you need to be careful what you | put in writing. | | However if this is coming up constantly and prevents you from | using common sense words for your regular business operations | then it's a pretty clear red flag that your _actions_ may be | subjecting you to legal liability. | | [0] https://youtu.be/pBdGOrcUEg8 | pyrale wrote: | From don't be evil to don't leave a paper trail... | titzer wrote: | They also have a corporate email policy where mails get auto- | deleted after 18 months, unless you apply labels or are on a | litigation hold (which would make such policy completely | illegal). The email policy has _no other purpose_ than to limit | legal exposure. There is no legitimate business reason for that | policy. In fact, it actively harms institutional memory and is | frankly Orwellian, IMHO. | minsc__and__boo wrote: | That's not just Google though. Most companies have an email | deletion policy that auto-deletes emails after a certain | about of time, on the premise that they eventually lose all | value and only pose a potential liability and litigation | risk. | | Even U.S. government officials have used private email | servers to avoid having to serve them up via requests. | ChrisLomont wrote: | >There is no legitimate business reason for that policy. | | You already completely answered the perfectly standard and | reasonable business reason: "to limit legal exposure. " | | In fact, this legitimate business reason is 100% the reason | for the policy. Increasing legal exposure for no reason is a | bad idea, for companies and for individuals. | gumby wrote: | > They also have a corporate email policy where mails get | auto-deleted after 18 months | | Eric Schmidt's retention policy was 72 _hours_. | alphabetting wrote: | Source? Curious what the reasoning would be there. Seems | insanely impractical | gowld wrote: | Before or after the High-Tech Employee Antitrust | Settlement? | laurent92 wrote: | How does he keep track of relationship history with | someone? Commitments? Goals? | laurent92 wrote: | > The email policy has _no other purpose_ | | Yes, it has: GDPR requires that you delete PII in reasonable | time. I have a lot of customers contacting me by email for | example, but also the JIRA notifications which all end up in | emails with extensive PII. It must be deleted in a controlled | way according to GDPR. | | But you are correct that this excuse goes away with Google, | since they don't do support ;) | zepto wrote: | Why not both? | AlbertCory wrote: | I was in Google Ads from 2008-2010. At that time, there was a | limit of 3 top ads and 8 right-hand-side ads. The top ads | generated the vast bulk of the revenue. | | They were also in blue or yellow (I forget which, but one was WAY | more lucrative than the other!) so it was very easy for the user | to distinguish an ad from a search result. | | I just did the canonical $$$ search "flowers" on my Macbook. The | entire first page was ads and they are not colored anymore | (although they do say "Ad"). There is also a Maps snippet which | shows where I can buy flowers. | | What happened? Well, I can guess: they did experiments, and not | coloring the ads produced more revenue. I know from talking to | ordinary users that they often say proudly "I never click on | ads!" Now they do. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-08-24 23:00 UTC)