It's arguable that queries like [southwest airlines] are even a search. The vast majority of instances are probably URL-illiterate users merely trying to get to Southwest Airlines' web site. (And Google must know rather precisely just how many.) For these users, search is really operating as a natural-language alternative to DNS so such a clickable banner will help them get there.
More than just advertising, this represents an element of curation on such search terms, to get you to the place you're really looking for. It'll help avoid situations like when that one blog post appeared at the top for [facebook login] and suddenly bunches of users couldn't find Facebook.
Like any technological tool, it could be misused for evil, and so will require vigilance in the court of public opinion if not in actual courts.
(Disclaimer: I'm a potential Googler, currently in the interview pipeline, but these views are my own.)
I would say that even URL-literate users use it this way, because the business-to-URL mapping is not always clear, and the naive guess is sometimes the worst possible one (e.g. Dick's Sporting Goods.)
Good to know that the company that holds my email, appointments, two-factor-auth, credit card number, and search data has the reliability of a flaky college freshman.
Also good to know that there will literally ALWAYS be people willing to minimize the broken promises of corporations (when they're not insisting that no corporation would ever be so stupid as to break a highly visible promise because the outcry would be tremendous).
And... Did you leave her? or just break up as a common agreement? In legalese language, I am pretty sure that a promise is synonym of contract, and contracts might be dissolved if both sides of the contract agreed.
This being an open promise is not a contract but a reaffirmation of a goal, since people change is regrettable but OK to break promises to ourselves sometimes when the interest of the goal had changed.
This isn't a banner ad. This is essentially a branded search. It's not like Google is targeting users with Flash-based crud here. To call it a banner ad is kind of silly.
While it may not be a banner ad, it's a foot-in-the-door technique. Display these branded search for a few years, so when they're ready to implement real banner ads, users won't be shocked.
Just imagine the press release.
"This isn't something new we're doing. We've been experimenting with showing users highly targeted banner image when querying for specific terms. We're only expanding that target to help users find what they need faster."
If that's a banner ad, it's the most relevant, pleasant, and appropriate banner ad I've ever seen. It's directly related to the search term and is not obnoxious in the least.
If all ads were such high quality I'd have no problems with this (but would still probably use adblock!).
Corporate promises aren't worth a dime as history has shown repeatedly. In fact, corporations (especially large ones) can't ever be trusted for pretty much anything and anything they say or do you should always react sceptically by default. They just don't care, and this lack of caring is an inevitability for growing corporations.
Granted some might consider this to be a minor breach of a promise, some might not. The point still stands.
You can absolutely trust them if they are say "we are doing this to maximize profits for our share holders / owners".
Then, what is this expectation that one should be able to trust them to do anything else at all? Surely the mere existence of consumer law should tell us something.
If you take the full quote, this isn't an open and shut case as it certainly isn't a 'banner ad' in terms of what everyone understood to be banner ads in 2005. The full quote is:
"There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever."
That Southwest Airlines screenshot doesn't look like a banner ad as described by Marissa Mayer. It doesn't seem to be flashing or flying around or popping up.
And, arguably, Google has been doing things that flash and fly around with the Google Doodles on the homepage for years. And no one freaked out about that.
>in terms of what everyone understood to be banner ads in 2005.
Everybody understood banner ads then in exactly the same as they understand them now. Ads in a banner. Banner ads never had to be "crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping," and you never needed a banner ad to do any of that.
Mayer isn't actually saying the two things are the same either, because she uses two different, complete sentences.
That promise was made when Schmidt was running things. We all know by now that Page is much more aggressive at monetizing existing products and killing off non-essential ones. We can expect more of these things in the future.
> Based on your search query, we think you are trying to find a specific brand. This box provides information about that brand. The brand owner is sponsoring this collection of content, some of which would appear even without this sponsorship. The brand owner is compensating Google and providing images and other content relevant to the brand.
This is replacing Southwest's search result. It's noteworthy to me that only "some" of this content would appear without sponsership. So not only are they showing "banner ads" in search results (that's a little bit of a stretch), but it's a bit like them allowing compensated reordering of search results.
I love how people continue to attach emotional investment to an arbitrary thing like a corporation. Apologists, fanboys, and people with a child-like innocence. Do you really expect a for-profit company will stick to a promise like it means something?
The entire point behind a capitalist corporation is to make more profit, year after year. That is the entire idea behind the stock market. To think that they'd evade eventually exploring every avenue available to avoid making more money is mad.
But there are plenty of companies that make a lot of money specifically because they 'stick to a promise'.
Whole Foods, Chipotle, REI, Patagonia all spring to mind as companies that I will happily pay a premium to shop at because of things they do that fall outside of the ruthless race to the bottom to cut costs. They make a profit off of me specifically because they stick to promises like "don't put antibiotics in chicken feed" or "don't use sweatshop labor".
I don't care about a banner ad the way I care about antibiotic use in agriculture, so this doesn't matter to me, but maybe someone out there does and will stop being a profitable google customer because of this action.
This is in turn naive, as if corporations operate within a mathematical model, not the real world. Corporations rely very heavily on the trust of their customers, whether those are consumers, or other businesses. Google's entire business model rests on the willingness of its consumers to hand over their data, the value of their word is fundamental to future profitability. Although admittedly this particular issue is not directly important in that sense.
No one is complaining about profit or exploring ideas. People are complaining about this specific idea.
Profits only show up if customers like the decisions that corporations make. NBC picks its shows to make maximum profit, just like CBS does. But CBS has made more popular decisions.
Complaining about a corporate decision doesn't mean people are naive. It means they just don't like that decision. That is a data point for Google to consider as they think about whether to roll this out broadly.
When Orkut was all the rage, Google claimed that Orkut would never be merged with the Google core and would remain separate to Google.
The same seems tobe happening with YouTube. Sure, they still allow users to keep their YT & Google identities separate but IDK how long that will last.
Remember when they claimed their motto was 'Don't be evil'?
(NB: Before you come screaming at me for making vague accusations, please take that previous sentence with a pinch of '/s'. Thank you.)
Umm they forced me(as in I wasn't able to use youtube otherwise) to connect my Google account to my Youtube so...that is pretty much combining the accounts in my book.
I think, they just needed that to collect my aggregate search+video watching behavior for ad targeting, which they got.
This is not wholly unexpected, after all their earnings have shown that CPC is down and while you can make that up in volume for a while, eventually you exhaust that path too.
And that then is what I think the real "problem" is. You reach a point where your biggest money maker, search advertising, by at least one and possibly two decimal orders of magnitude, is no longer growing. And all of the things you've ever done which were never as successful as search advertising are supposed to give you the growth that your stockholders are looking for. Interesting place to be for a company like Google I expect.
This is just another example of how that it process is coming along. It will be interesting to see what happens if it starts damaging their brand.
Right. Soon they will run out of surface area. And then they will squeeze out more money by cutting costs. Such is the life cycle of the corporation. They aren't able to monetize their other novelty projects yet, they are almost wholly reliant on advertising. I'm surprised their stock is priced as a growth company.
Are we putting that much significance from a quote in 2005 by a Google executive who has since left Google?
While some see it as a social utility, Google is a $350B public company that generates its revenues from advertisements. 8 years ago, the world of advertising (and the world in general), was a different place. Holding Google accountable for something so far in the past by someone who is no longer there is a seemingly unfair standard.
What a sensationalist headline. The guardian really seems to have learned the need to go sensationalist from the Snowden affair.
"Google breaks promise" followed by "Google is testing banner ads" in the first paragraph. So umm, "breaks" is the wrong verb, more like "thinking of breaking"
The reality is, Google runs hundreds, perhaps thousands of experiments all the time and only a few make it.
This is addressed directly in the article. "We're currently running a very limited, US-only test, in which advertisers can include an image as part of the search ads that show in response to certain branded queries."
1 Big ass ad
3 "News" items
5 genuine "Search Results" (with no heading or any way to know when the ads and nonsense stops. One of the 5 is a link to the Southwest Airlines Android App
3 "In-Depth Articles" I don't know what this is, i guess long blog posts?
This honestly looks more to me like a domain squatting BS ad page that we hate on ISPs for than a research tool (which is what I used to think of google search as).
I used to dislike ads in general, until Google came along and made ads actually useful. There have been many times when I needed to search for reliable vendors in my area, and being able to perform a query for a product and receive an ad for a vendor that sells said product proved to be very useful and a huge time-saver. I no longer had to dig through search results, the ads were my search results. Same thing goes for the great set of Youtube video ads that have been improving lately: some of them actually are useful. Gmail ads are also very interesting. They sometimes inform me of new technologies, or other things that are related to what I'm reading in my inbox: that can be valuable. I really hope the trend continues with these banner ads. Being able to add a touch of graphic to an otherwise dull search result page can be useful if done right, and Google does seem to care about their ad business. Anyway, those are just my personal thoughts on the subject.
I guess they are relatively "classy", as other people have pointed out, but I still don't want them in my search results. Regardless, it's just a test, so discouraging them from moving forward with it is good, but "breaks 2005 promise" is dumb because they haven't actually done it. "Poised to break 2005 promise"? Still overly dramatic, but less wrong.
Also, I first saw this over on search engine land yesterday[1]. It's possible the Guardian author remembered that Marissa Mayer quote (and blog post) on their own, but it seems unlikely. It's pretty shitty to take a story and not even cite where you got the idea.
Google (and possibly many human's) principle over time..
Don't be Evil (2005) >>
Don't be Evil over short period of time (2013) >>
Oh screw it, now we are Evil enough. Let us plunder the hell (2021).
Now they will show ads for the key word, South West Airlines. Next it will be a whole flashy ad when you search flight, then it will when you start to think about flying or your girlfriend sends an email about flying for someone's funeral. But these profits too will dwindle after a point. Then they will start selling your profiles, what you read, what you think.
For a corporation privacy and trust, or any other values are only as important as the profit it can bring. Its only a matter of time before you will erode your own values, when profits are what we are maximizing. This is all the more likely when you are ambitious.
And then you repent it, and the cycle is complete.
Interesting how this submission went from being #1 20 minutes ago, to #5 15 minutes ago and now is sitting at #9, despite the fact that the number of upvotes increased.
Google workers mass flagging this submission? Don't be evil.
As was talked about with the recent controversy of Nokia and Microsoft news being penalized while Apple news was on the front page, HN has some pretty intrusive algorithms that play with the positioning of the article on the page, algorithms that aren't always clear to the users or necessarily productive to the discussion.
[+] [-] T-hawk|12 years ago|reply
More than just advertising, this represents an element of curation on such search terms, to get you to the place you're really looking for. It'll help avoid situations like when that one blog post appeared at the top for [facebook login] and suddenly bunches of users couldn't find Facebook.
Like any technological tool, it could be misused for evil, and so will require vigilance in the court of public opinion if not in actual courts.
(Disclaimer: I'm a potential Googler, currently in the interview pipeline, but these views are my own.)
[+] [-] peejaybee|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffclark|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mapgrep|12 years ago|reply
Also good to know that there will literally ALWAYS be people willing to minimize the broken promises of corporations (when they're not insisting that no corporation would ever be so stupid as to break a highly visible promise because the outcry would be tremendous).
[+] [-] pmelendez|12 years ago|reply
This being an open promise is not a contract but a reaffirmation of a goal, since people change is regrettable but OK to break promises to ourselves sometimes when the interest of the goal had changed.
[+] [-] recuter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dylan16807|12 years ago|reply
The advertising situation hasn't changed, and promising no banner ads is not puffery.
[+] [-] gauravpandey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macspoofing|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macspoofing|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] shortformblog|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chollida1|12 years ago|reply
This is not a duck, its merely an animal that came from a female duck that happens to live in the water and share a nest with other ducks.
A banner ad, by definition, is a paid add that is an image. Google is showing banner ads for any definition of the word.
[+] [-] null_ptr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nodata|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whyenot|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xux|12 years ago|reply
Just imagine the press release.
"This isn't something new we're doing. We've been experimenting with showing users highly targeted banner image when querying for specific terms. We're only expanding that target to help users find what they need faster."
Bam.
[+] [-] vidarh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hughes|12 years ago|reply
If all ads were such high quality I'd have no problems with this (but would still probably use adblock!).
[+] [-] bovermyer|12 years ago|reply
Nor do I take issue with Google changing its stance in this way. Corporations change with the times.
[+] [-] TomGullen|12 years ago|reply
Granted some might consider this to be a minor breach of a promise, some might not. The point still stands.
[+] [-] alan_cx|12 years ago|reply
You can absolutely trust them if they are say "we are doing this to maximize profits for our share holders / owners".
Then, what is this expectation that one should be able to trust them to do anything else at all? Surely the mere existence of consumer law should tell us something.
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|12 years ago|reply
"There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever."
That Southwest Airlines screenshot doesn't look like a banner ad as described by Marissa Mayer. It doesn't seem to be flashing or flying around or popping up.
And, arguably, Google has been doing things that flash and fly around with the Google Doodles on the homepage for years. And no one freaked out about that.
[+] [-] pessimizer|12 years ago|reply
Everybody understood banner ads then in exactly the same as they understand them now. Ads in a banner. Banner ads never had to be "crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping," and you never needed a banner ad to do any of that.
Mayer isn't actually saying the two things are the same either, because she uses two different, complete sentences.
[+] [-] jakozaur|12 years ago|reply
For any query less and less percentage of first page is dedicate to organic example.
E.g. a silly example: https://www.google.com/search?q=trash+can 25-30% organic, rest are the adds.
[+] [-] raldi|12 years ago|reply
Also, do you get better results on another search engine? If so, which one?
[+] [-] ChrisClark|12 years ago|reply
Maybe check to see if you have some malware inserting ads?
[+] [-] gabemart|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sker|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nandhp|12 years ago|reply
This is replacing Southwest's search result. It's noteworthy to me that only "some" of this content would appear without sponsership. So not only are they showing "banner ads" in search results (that's a little bit of a stretch), but it's a bit like them allowing compensated reordering of search results.
How's Bing these days?
[+] [-] peterwwillis|12 years ago|reply
The entire point behind a capitalist corporation is to make more profit, year after year. That is the entire idea behind the stock market. To think that they'd evade eventually exploring every avenue available to avoid making more money is mad.
[+] [-] mynewwork|12 years ago|reply
Whole Foods, Chipotle, REI, Patagonia all spring to mind as companies that I will happily pay a premium to shop at because of things they do that fall outside of the ruthless race to the bottom to cut costs. They make a profit off of me specifically because they stick to promises like "don't put antibiotics in chicken feed" or "don't use sweatshop labor".
I don't care about a banner ad the way I care about antibiotic use in agriculture, so this doesn't matter to me, but maybe someone out there does and will stop being a profitable google customer because of this action.
[+] [-] Brakenshire|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snowwrestler|12 years ago|reply
Profits only show up if customers like the decisions that corporations make. NBC picks its shows to make maximum profit, just like CBS does. But CBS has made more popular decisions.
Complaining about a corporate decision doesn't mean people are naive. It means they just don't like that decision. That is a data point for Google to consider as they think about whether to roll this out broadly.
[+] [-] DjangoReinhardt|12 years ago|reply
When Orkut was all the rage, Google claimed that Orkut would never be merged with the Google core and would remain separate to Google.
The same seems tobe happening with YouTube. Sure, they still allow users to keep their YT & Google identities separate but IDK how long that will last.
Remember when they claimed their motto was 'Don't be evil'?
(NB: Before you come screaming at me for making vague accusations, please take that previous sentence with a pinch of '/s'. Thank you.)
[+] [-] rajivtiru|12 years ago|reply
I think, they just needed that to collect my aggregate search+video watching behavior for ad targeting, which they got.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|12 years ago|reply
And that then is what I think the real "problem" is. You reach a point where your biggest money maker, search advertising, by at least one and possibly two decimal orders of magnitude, is no longer growing. And all of the things you've ever done which were never as successful as search advertising are supposed to give you the growth that your stockholders are looking for. Interesting place to be for a company like Google I expect.
This is just another example of how that it process is coming along. It will be interesting to see what happens if it starts damaging their brand.
[+] [-] cylinder|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajiang|12 years ago|reply
While some see it as a social utility, Google is a $350B public company that generates its revenues from advertisements. 8 years ago, the world of advertising (and the world in general), was a different place. Holding Google accountable for something so far in the past by someone who is no longer there is a seemingly unfair standard.
[+] [-] mathattack|12 years ago|reply
Would it be less evil if Google had to put banner ads up to make payroll?
[+] [-] cromwellian|12 years ago|reply
"Google breaks promise" followed by "Google is testing banner ads" in the first paragraph. So umm, "breaks" is the wrong verb, more like "thinking of breaking"
The reality is, Google runs hundreds, perhaps thousands of experiments all the time and only a few make it.
[+] [-] wodow|12 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/search?q=SouthWest%20Airlines doesn't do it for me at the moment, from the UK.
[+] [-] randlet|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmduke|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdmichal|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] canthonytucci|12 years ago|reply
I count:
1 Big ass ad 3 "News" items 5 genuine "Search Results" (with no heading or any way to know when the ads and nonsense stops. One of the 5 is a link to the Southwest Airlines Android App 3 "In-Depth Articles" I don't know what this is, i guess long blog posts?
This honestly looks more to me like a domain squatting BS ad page that we hate on ISPs for than a research tool (which is what I used to think of google search as).
[+] [-] jggonz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magicalist|12 years ago|reply
Also, I first saw this over on search engine land yesterday[1]. It's possible the Guardian author remembered that Marissa Mayer quote (and blog post) on their own, but it seems unlikely. It's pretty shitty to take a story and not even cite where you got the idea.
[1] http://searchengineland.com/google-testing-top-banner-ads-17...
[+] [-] anonmyous|12 years ago|reply
Don't be Evil (2005) >>
Don't be Evil over short period of time (2013) >>
Oh screw it, now we are Evil enough. Let us plunder the hell (2021).
Now they will show ads for the key word, South West Airlines. Next it will be a whole flashy ad when you search flight, then it will when you start to think about flying or your girlfriend sends an email about flying for someone's funeral. But these profits too will dwindle after a point. Then they will start selling your profiles, what you read, what you think.
For a corporation privacy and trust, or any other values are only as important as the profit it can bring. Its only a matter of time before you will erode your own values, when profits are what we are maximizing. This is all the more likely when you are ambitious.
And then you repent it, and the cycle is complete.
[+] [-] asdf001|12 years ago|reply
Google workers mass flagging this submission? Don't be evil.
[+] [-] freehunter|12 years ago|reply