> I work on Google Fiber. You give us money, we give you an Internet connection.
...so that there's a pretty good chance that [you] will use Google Search, and [we] will then show you ads. Also, [we] inadvertently created a channel for analysis on [your] Web browsing habits if [we] were so inclined, which would enable [us] to refine advertising even more, among other things.
If those are not the entire rationale for Google's "everybody should be online" initiatives, like Fiber and Loon, it's at least a significant portion thereof and you know it. Hell, it's probably why the Chromebook exists. You and I are kidding ourselves if we arrive at a conclusion that Google is in any other business than data and advertising impressions. Facebook needs eyeballs, too, hence why Zuckerberg has been on the same warpath.
I would contend that advertising, marketing, and consumerism are not noble causes for humanity, and engineers who devote their lifespan to enabling such things are wasting their precious allotment of time. Google's revenue driver is putting products in front of eyeballs. Imagine a world in which such a thing was not a market.
Yes, you need awareness of products for people to buy said products. I get that. But no, you don't need to do data analysis on my browsing and search habits to come up with the most effective product to show me to increase the chances of me buying it. Spreading the word about a product is one thing. Treating the human being as a means to a sale, optimizing accordingly, and creating a market for "data" is another. That anybody on planet Earth would consider my shopping habits worthy of purchase just boggles me, and that I am not even consulted in most cases about analysis and sales of such data taking place is just the icing on the cake.
It says something that I pay Comcast $100/month+ for entertainment and I am still shown advertisements for a third (or more) of every hour. I pay for the privilege of being shown new cars. Repeatedly. Black Friday comes to mind, too, as another example of the feedback loop losing control of itself.
To be clear, things are not bad. Our consumer culture is a little bit out of hand, and I'd rather devote my remaining years to producing something of actual value instead of imaginary marketing value. To that end, that Google let me go was in fact a blessing in disguise, and I just hadn't realized it yet.
Does your assessment of the value of advertising include the things that are funded by adverts?
That covers almost all print journalism, a lot of full-time internet content creators (from the onion to full time youtube content creators) not to mention Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Chrome and Youtube.
If advertising includes everything paid for by adverts, advertising is useful to humanity. If advertising doesn't include everything paid for by adverts, Google isn't only an advertising company.
We happen to currently fund some things via ads. But that's an accident of history. If we didn't have ads, there's no reason to think we wouldn't have found another way.
Now that we have ads, they're hard to get away from. You're removing a problem people notice (having to pay) and causing problems they mostly don't (wasted time, wasted money, suboptimal purchases). This path dependence doesn't make ads good, though.
Free market systems rely on informed consumers making rational decisions; advertisers rely on creating misinformed consumers making irrational decisions.
The point of my ad is to manipulate your behavior, typically your purchasing behavior. I understand people differ on this, but I'm pretty comfortable saying it's bad to manipulate others for your own profit.
It's all ads. "Organic" search is ads. The majority of online businesses are absolutely, totally, dependent on google's free ads(organic). Cf. rap genius.
... and the moment you start manually tweaking rankings... You can't possibly claim that you're not managing marketing.
Is that a profitable business in and of itself or are you actually part of the ad revenue funnel? For some reason I thought Google was doing that at a loss to increase ad placement opportunities.
Why should the investment pay off after mostly wiring just one city? The first house certainly didn't pay for all development work and physical plant, and nobody would expect it to.
"I work on Google Fiber. You give us money, we give you an Internet connection."
Real revolutionary, I tell you. No doubt Page and Sergey are having wet dreams by dreaming of the extra data that they get by spying on even more things. Because that's what every Google products ends up being, a snooping device to help Google sell more expensive ads. There's no pride or code of honor at Google, just more ad clicks than the last quarter.
Google is by no means a 100% perfect actor but some of your claims found their way into tinfoil territory. And no, fraud does not account for most of Google's income. Google is a public company and you are more than welcome to review those figures yourself.
And in my limited experience at Google, I found that most people are very prideful about what they are doing. It's just unfortunate that most things Google are doing revolve around, in the end, advertising impressions.
And no, fraud does not account for most of Google's income. Google is a public company and you are more than welcome to review those figures yourself.
Fraud: saying from every top of the mountain that we serve results best for the users, we serve unbiased results, you can't buy a top rank on Google etc etc etc and then showing barely distinguishable (from content) ads on top and in many case showing almost all ads. That's fraud to me, regardless of the fact that we have a toothless FTC.
What % of users know a Google ad vs unbiased content?
What % of users know that Google Products is 100% ads and in many cases it cost them a fortune?
If Google wanted users to know ads or bought rank from unbiased ones they'd find the way. They can just undo what they did from around 2007 until now.
I'm glad you made an account just for this, though. What a great community HN can be.