A lawyer for the U.S. Justice Department pressed a Google executive on Wednesday about techniques the search and advertising giant used to push up online advertising prices in an allegedly unfair way.
Does it swap search terms just for the portion that returns the ad or for the search as well? If it’s just the ad, that doesn’t seem very problematic, just an implementation detail on how it chooses which ad to show. If it’s for the search as well, I don’t see how that would benefit Google. They wouldn’t be able to consider a search result click a successful conversion if it wasn’t an actual advertisement.
He also mentioned how they may benefit from having results that aren’t quite accurate, as then you spend more time searching, which means more time to serve you ads.
That’s an interesting one, give up a bit of user experience for increased ad impressions. Pretty clever, but breaks all kinds of anti-competition laws if true.
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Does it swap search terms just for the portion that returns the ad or for the search as well? If it’s just the ad, that doesn’t seem very problematic, just an implementation detail on how it chooses which ad to show. If it’s for the search as well, I don’t see how that would benefit Google. They wouldn’t be able to consider a search result click a successful conversion if it wasn’t an actual advertisement.
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Paywalled! Fuckin Wired.
That’s an interesting one, give up a bit of user experience for increased ad impressions. Pretty clever, but breaks all kinds of anti-competition laws if true.
I find it really ironic that ads and a paywall are being complained about in the same thread
Different users lol. I think I’m one of the few Lemmy users that doesn’t care about ads…
If the ads were targeted to people searching for [brandname] then that would be straight up illegal. Companies would have a slam dunk case in court.
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