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GOOGLE | Noah Brier

Two (Slightly) Related Thoughts

A bit more on Google's motivation and some thoughts on PayPerPost

December 5, 2007 | RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | 6 COMMENTS

Okay, first let's go with Google's motivation.

As I was sitting down with my friend John the other night and discussing my question about Google's overall motivation ("Google doesn't have any real motivation for improving search results because the worse the results are, the more likely you are to click on the ads."), John brought up a point that made even more sense. Imagine a situation where Google continues to improve their results. Eventually their engine becomes so good that you immediately click the first result (which it's close to) or you begin to just skip the results altogether by clicking "I'm Feeling Lucky". If that happens, all of a sudden the money printing machine Google's created stops running. Of course this is an overstatement, but does illustrate a point: From a financial motivation perspective, clearly Google is only motivated to improve it's results to a point that they continue to grow their customer base (which is less based on quality at this point and more based on momentum and partnerships like the one they have with Myspace or Firefox).

So what does all this mean? To be honest I'm not sure. I just think it's interesting. I don't necessarily believe that Google is making decisions this way, however, it does pose some potential issues.

Second, let's talk a little about PayPerPost. I don't know if I've written about it here before, but basically it's a service that pays bloggers to write about websites, companies, products and other stuff. When they first launched around a year ago (at least I think that's when it was) there was an uproar in the blogosphere. People were up in arms that this wan unethical and disgusting. More recently Google cracked down on the service as a paid link scheme, assigning PageRanks of 0 to those that took part. This, of course, has reignited the debate around the ethics of the program (many were happy to see users punished) and I wanted to add my two cents.

I have never seen a problem with PayPerPost. I know this isn't a popular stance, but my feeling is that your reputation is yours to ruin and if you chose to promote a product that sucks and you get found out, you got what you deserved. As for the full disclosure part of it, I don't really care that much. Paid editorial is the worst kept secret in the advertising/publishing business: You don't get editorial space if you're not running advertising. (Obviously this isn't completely true, but it's an accepted fact.) So what's the difference between PayPerPost and what's going on everywhere else in the media universe?

I guess I mostly am writing this to stir things up a bit (though I really do believe in both points of view). Not sure why I'm feeling contrarian today, but what the hell, it's a fun way to be.

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COMMENTS

1Charles Frith

It's a lovely thought and classic Noah thinking I might add. But also worth bearing in mind that I rarely search for commercial offerings so the paid for results are irrelevant. Furthermore I don't recall the last time that I clicked on an paid for ad. And dare I say it. Google search results are awesome. I'm a fanboy :)

December 6, 2007

2Joshua Porter

Been following your Google threads...

One thing your Google thoughts assume is that they can decrease overall relevance and still grow/keep market share. It might be possible in the short term, but in the long term I think it's a dangerous proposition.

Secondly, Google Ads get better as their search relevance gets better. If their search relevance went down, or stayed the same, then their ad effectiveness would stay the same as well.

Except, of course, another scenario where Google purposefully suppressed better search results while privately improving relevance and taking that knowledge to increase ad relevance. This, though, would undermine relevance as a whole...all paid placement would have its (negative) effect.

Also, Google makes another mint on Adsense (ads within 3rd party pages), whose relevance also increases as Google's search relevance increases. That service would flounder if they were to keep relevance from improving.

To your main point, though...it certainly seems plausible that Google would want to keep a certain balance between the relevance of ads vs. the relevance of results.

It's an interesting idea that Google could get so good as to not need a results page, but that assumes that people don't want more than one result. For some queries that would certainly work, but for others it wouldn't. In an age of infinite choice, it would be interesting to see...

December 6, 2007

3Noah Brier

Thanks Charles, glad you enjoyed.

Josh, thanks for the comment, I think you're mostly right. But I don't understand how ads get better as their search relevance gets better. Since ads are bought on straight keywords it seems to me that there's not a whole lot to it (beyond the auction and whatever other magic helps them decide the order).

December 8, 2007

4Joshua Porter

Sorry...should have been more clear. On Adsense (not Adwords) the relevancy of ads goes up as Google's search relevance goes up.

So that still doesn't answer your question. :)

December 9, 2007

5Noah Brier

Ah, yes . . . The quality of their algorithms should help AdSense. Actually, on the topic of AdSense, I think Google's reaction to paid text links is quite questionable as it's ultimately a competitive monetization solution.

December 10, 2007

6Clay Parker Jones

All -

Found some interesting things when I was reading Sergey Brin & Larry Page's original paper on Google. They have an appendix dedicated to this subject. Wonder how their minds have changed, or if they have at all.

Here's the quote:

"Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."

Overall, it's a fascinating paper on how Google searches work, how they calculate PageRank, and how they built it to solve the problems presented by the search engines of the time.

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Section 4 is pretty good if you're feeling particularly nerdy.

December 12, 2007