Put some money on the altar, who knows what might happen if you don't. The Algorithm is only impartial until it isn't. You surely don't want to go to irrelevancy?

An ad directing shoppers to your competitors who pay them is not a protection racket, no more than a travel agency directing travelers to businesses that they have a relationship with.

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

You tell a cab driver to take you to Morton's Meats and instead they take you to Shelly's Steaks (who pays them a kickback each time they do this), and then charge you for that detour to earn their kickback when you demand they take you to Morton's like you asked in the first place.

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?

The abuse is worse on the merchant's side, but on the consumers, it's more like getting a cab to go to Morton's Meats, instead they take you to Shelly's Steaks (because they got a kickback), then say they'll take you to Morton's for no extra charge, but tell you how great Shelly's is, and you're already at Shelly's, so is it worth the extra effort?

So they're allowed to waste my time and earn a kickback, as long as they give me a free cab ride from their kickback to where I wanted to go in the first place?

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.

I don't defend dark patterns, it obviously is one there, but your time is worth zero when you pay zero. The analogy would be free taxi drivers taking your to their kicking back spots first. If your time is worth X, spend X. It may prove a bit difficult since the paid search engine marketplace isn't thriving. How much would you be willing to pay for a search engine that only displays organic results? There are actually free solutions easy to set up to get that from Google results, but I'm wondering since you mention value of time.

That's a very spot-on question. How much would people pay for advertising-free results? I suspect the answer is disillusioning :(

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

Eh... that's not a great analogy. The equivalent of your story would be if you clicked a link for Morton's on the Google SERP and it actually redirected you to Shelly's.

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.

I think the analogy is pretty spot on. The whole point is that your query expresses your intent to Google. Assuming their algorithm can figure out what your intent is (it certainly can in this case) then they are intentionally acting counter to your expressed intent.

A point to add though that highlights the issue is that for many many years prior, Google had gotten users used to the ideal that search results were fair and not influenced by payments under the table though. The injustice is turning a free and fair situation into one of deception and payola that will likely get much worse because rising consumer cost is the end result.

Search isn't influenced by payments, ads are. It's not that hard to understand. If the idea of ads offends you that much, the organic results are a couple inches down.

Especially annoying if they ask four or five times, as shown in that cast-iron pans screenshot.

It's a poor analogy. Google isn't taking you to the wrong website, they are showing you the alternatives at the same time as the search result you wanted.

Wait. Is thst true though? I'm a technical person, with a lot of very specific searches. Around 70% of the time, I don't actually get the results that answer what I'm looking for, no matter how many quotation marks I surround my strings and no matter if I use site:x.com, and various other Google hacks I've had to come up with to try and find my relevant results.

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.

It is. If you want a more accurate analogy, it's like getting into a cab and asking to go to Morton's Meats and the cab driver saying "are you sure? I know this really great place called Shelley's Steaks that's better and cheaper! What do you say?" and then you get to make a call as to whether to trust the cab driver (google) has your best interests at heart or not, and whether to go where you originally wanted or to where you were recommended.

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.

Your analogy is much more transparent about it.

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.

And then Billy's and Shelly's actually make terrible steaks with all kinds of hidden costs and cheap side dishes because they cut corners in order to make up for the loss on their annual advertising spend.... Google helping business... Yeah. :L

"Yep, headed to Moron's Meats, it's really popular...(mumbles) let me know if you really meant to go to Morton's Meats..."

Don't forget the real-time bidding market. If you're wearing an expensive watch, Shelly's will give the driver a 10% bonus, or if you have a nice pocket square, then Morton's will offer you a window table.

> 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.

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

No, it's due to illegal SEO practices where they serve Googlebot a plate of GPT3 meets keyword spam, and then serve you a page full of advertising and phishing links.

I've been wondering for a long time what's been going on. This makes a lot of sense!

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.

GPT3-alike, not GPT3 specifically. Google’s bot can’t detect when it’s being fed plausible gibberish, or worse, stolen content with random keywords injected. I’m very curious if your Googlebot surfing comes up with any interesting outcomes!

I wonder if Google indexes with browser user agents sometimes: unless the site used source IP tricks, it’d let Google detect this sort of thing.

Supposedly the Chrome safe browsing service crawls the web looking for malware. Since that's focused on finding malware they likely make it look like a normal user in terms of user agent and IP address, so it can probably detect these pages.

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.

Reminds me of the tuk tuk drivers in Thailand who will show you alternative destinations like a tailor who gives them kickbacks before dropping you off at your destination.

Yes, exactly. Is this accepted as normal by locals too, or is it socially proper only with tourists?

You ask the waiter for a Coke, they ask you if you want Pepsi instead (because they get kickbacks to sell Pepsi). Is that appropriate behavior for a restaurant?

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.

Most restaurants don’t carry both Coke and Pepsi, which in this analogy would be the taxi driver truthfully saying “Morton’s is closed”. That’s a fine time to offer an alternative, but that’s not what’s being discussed here.

Also free doesn’t not mean zero cost. Your time can be used to do other things that may make money.

> You tell a cab driver to take you to Morton's Meats

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

HUGE difference.

You pay the taxi to take you to an address. You don't pay anything to google, you decided to use their ad funded "search engine", which they don't charge you anything for, and you complain that you get... Ads?

Down that road lies the argument that Google should be treated like a public utility. If the only mode of transport available were sponsored taxis, then people would be rightly demanding for the ability to pay for a car or use a government run public transit system.

There are other search engines that work just fine.

Do the other search engines work fine because you pay them directly, instead of them being ad-funded? Because that's the argument the GP was using.

Okay, assume the taxi rides are free. The taxi driver is now wasting your time taking you all across town just for a selfish kickback. Meanwhile, you value your time, presumably, so you're getting more and more annoyed as they do this. I don't see how removing the cost of taxi somehow makes this scenario acceptable. What am I missing?

A selfish kickback? Would you drive a taxi for free?

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).

Yes, freedom of choice, et cetera. But what do you think? Is this a defensible, ethical behavior by the taxi driver or not? Is it by Google or not?

There is a reason for the saying: "Cut out the middle man."

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.

"All too often the middleman is milking both sides."

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

No, that assumes perfect market information. Middlemen can provide benefit by allowing people to offload research and reputation tracking to a third party that they trust, allowing them to invest time and effort in that one entity instead of a bunch of smaller ones.

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...

My apologies, my phrase "milking" was meant to imply "overly burdensome resource taking" when compared with their value add. IE cost too much

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.

Hidden kickbacks are a racket though. Google has very deliberately been making their ads less and less distinct from their top search results, in a frog-boiling way.

Remember when they made a point about how they had a blue background and were on the right rail? Then they got moved above the organic results, then the blue changed to yellow, and every PM working on SERPs shrunk the size of "sponsored" and made the yellow a shade lighter for the next 5 years and got a nice bonus for it.

But they call it a search engine. That would be a fairer point if they called it an ad-lookup engine

lol yes, from Firefly: "About fifty percent of the human race is middlemen, and they don't take kindly to being eliminated."

Google is offering a service, namely a way to connect your customers to your website. Arguably, on brand ads are just a way to pay for that service.

They also have a responsibility towards the person searching. I know more than a few people that have been conned into thinking an Ad provider is the official site for a service.

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.

Funny. In any other industry hijacking a business's name and trademark for payment would be considered facilitating fraud.

But in marketing, it's somehow fair game?

A way to pay for that service, as well as generate an extra $40 billion a year.

Sure, most businesses exist to provide a good or service and get some bit extra beyond their costs. This is known as "profit".

The problem here is it’s not a “bit”, but “a lot”

That's not a service, that's a racket... As the previous user described