Kinda surprised. Google's core business is advertising. Some vertically integrated aux services (like chrome) feel ripe for antitrust, but I wasn't expecting ads themselves. What is Google without ads?
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Everything else. Cloud provider, operating systems, browsers, hosting business apps, phone licenser, Internet provider, smart home manufacturer, and various moonshots. Their ad company is a monopoly because of those other services.
Google as an ad company that can't leverage those other lines of business to gain an advantage over other ad companies still has a viable ad business. They can compete on the basis of that lone company's strengths.
("If you're nothing without this suit, then you shouldn't have it")
(NYT really ought to add “illegal” to their title.)
I see your point, but also, if Google continued to own all these other things, it would still be a terrifyingly large spread, no?
Who gets what part of the company is the wrong question to ask. The org chart would get split along those business units. In all likelihood, the company called "Google" would be the software side, since that's where search lives.
> Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
> Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. 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.
Kind of funny how they basically predicted Google's degradation years in advance.
This is a conundrum humanity must address if we’re to survive over the long term, IMO.
Google bought Doubleclick for $3 Billion. Today it is worth $22 Billion. When Google got into ad-tech, they drifted away from their core market: users. And started to endorse the other side that turned users into products.
Who's to say that this is not actually an evolutionary adaptation that allows the more ruthlessly led tribes to dominate their enemies? The stat about 1/25 of individuals being sociopaths is very telling
DNA isn't destiny.
But stage 3 is just as crucial: once the advertisers are locked in, make things worse for THEM just for your benefit. That’s how google makes such obscene margins on adverting. Publishers and advertisers would love an alternative - but google has done an excellent job of preventing that through unlawful monopolization tactics. Hence thus case, and why it’s so important.
Greed is humanity's greatest weakness. When faced with the opportunity of unimaginable wealth, most people would sacrifice their ethics and morals, assuming they had any to begin with.
That's precisely how we've changed so drastically is an evolutionary blink of an eye.
And now, our cultural evolution has reached the point where we're even able to change our own genetics with planning and foresight in a single generation. So it seems to me that the blind watchmaker is essentially irrelevant now.
I don’t think they are inherently ethical, but they were young and naive with good intentions (Do No Evil, and all that). The position they put forward is ethical. But that youthful naivety is what the less-ethical (though still quite intelligent, as you point out) take advantage of.
Further, again as you said, greed is at the root of it.
Hopefully that clarifies my point?