The Most Evil Tech Company

[Aeson]

You're missing the point. Privacy is the red herring. "Look, you need your privacy! That's why we have to do this..." (Nevermind that your privacy is safe with us and advertisers! PRIVACY!"

This is really about screwing competitors to Adsense which use that query to target their ads. Now, perhaps Adsense won't have access to the information either, but somehow I doubt Google just gutted it's income stream.

[Asher]

You're missing the point. Privacy is the red herring. "Look, you need your privacy! That's why we have to do this..." (Nevermind that your privacy is safe with us and advertisers! PRIVACY!"

This is really about screwing competitors to Adsense which use that query to target their ads. Now, perhaps Adsense won't have access to the information either, but somehow I doubt Google just gutted it's income stream.

I'm not missing the point. I'm seeing the point and dismissing the unwarranted hysteria.

[Aeson]

Nope, you clearly got distracted by the privacy red herring. The real evil here is this is being done in a way which benefits Google dramatically in regards to ad serving on third party websites. Adsense will still benefit from the search data, all other competing ad servers will not.

[Asher]

I'm not distracted by anything.

It's Google's search engine. Google is providing their customers with data, not competitors.

What am I missing here?

Google is an advertising company. That is how they make their money. This is not only not surprising, it's not offensive and it's certainly not evil. If Google did not provide their customers with data about the effectiveness of their ads, their customers would be very unhappy.

[Aeson]

Google is a search engine. Adsense is also an ad server on 3rd party websites.

What this does is leverage Google's market share as a search engine to impact the competition to it's ad serving on 3rd party websites.

Before, Adsense and Chikita (a similar ad service) both had access to the search data from Google search queries. Both could target visitors. (Google still had an advantage there due to search history.)

Now, Adsense (presumably) still has access to the search data. Chikita is ****ed. So is any other competing ad server. A lot of webmasters too. (The Webmaster Tools reporting is ****, and in any case can't help target ads to visitors in real time.) It can make a huge difference in eCPM to be able to target to the specific search term.

[Aeson]

Sorry, that should be Chitika, not Chikita (an online MMS service)

[Asher]

Google is a search engine. Adsense is also an ad server on 3rd party websites.

What this does is leverage Google's market share as a search engine to impact the competition to it's ad serving on 3rd party websites.

Before, Adsense and Chikita (a similar ad service) both had access to the search data from Google search queries. Both could target visitors. (Google still had an advantage there due to search history.)

Now, Adsense (presumably) still has access to the search data. Chikita is ****ed. So is any other competing ad server. A lot of webmasters too. (The Webmaster Tools reporting is ****, and in any case can't help target ads to visitors in real time.) It can make a huge difference in eCPM to be able to target to the specific search term.

So what?

It's Google's site. Google invests in their search engine so they can drive their actual revenue-earning business, which is advertising. The Google Search engine is not public domain.

Maybe whichever ********* own Chitika could build their own search engine instead of leaching off others.

[Aeson]

Whoever wins the search engine contest (which is fine to put whatever ads you want on your search engine) shouldn't be allowed to affect the 3rd party ad serving contest. It's your basic monopoly (which they do have in some markets) anti-competitive behavior.

[Asher]

Amazingly, they don't "affect" 3rd party ad servers. In fact, they're affecting them even less now.

Google is not at all required to be passing on search terms to all links in the page. The idea that they must do this is absurd.

The "monopoly" comments are even more absurd considering it's not a monopoly. There's plenty of competition out there that anyone can switch to at any notice. The problem is no one else is building a better search engine than Google. Google should not be punished for that. Google has built a best-in-class product and is using their product for revenue in a completely fair way.

This is not evil. This is just business. Google is not a charity.

[Aeson]

And Windows is Microsoft's product, yet they can't say that Windows will no longer send data from the keyboard to competing apps. (I'm sure they would if they thought they could get away with it.) This is essentially what Google is doing. Even if it's legal in this case (which I'm sure we'll find out in a few years) it's evil.

Determining who can effectively serve ads on third party websites based on who has the biggest search engine share is ridiculous. They are separate industries. Google using it's search engine market share (which in some countries is >90%) to give it an advantage over competitors to Adsense on third party websites is about as anti-competitive as it gets. The fact that they do so while claiming it's about a need for privacy (which for some reason doesn't apply to them or their advertisers) just shows how evil they really are. Hypocrites, liars, and probably just shooting themselves in the foot for a larger percentage of a much smaller pie. (I make my money off Adsense and Google traffic. So if I was biased it'd be towards Google here.)

The other search engines are going to have to do it too, to protect their ability to serve ads competitively. (If you advertise with Adwords, you get all the data you need for targetting, whereas if you advertise with Yahoo/Bing you only get ~30% of the data. No brainer.) This means Adsense will perform worse than it was before, because Google will not be privy to the ~35% of search data that they were before. Whether or not it can make up for that with additional market share seems iffy.

Google is just way off with this one.

[Aeson]

And Windows is Microsoft's product, yet they can't say that Windows will no longer send data from the keyboard to competing apps. (I'm sure they would if they thought they could get away with it.) This is essentially what Google is doing. Even if it's legal in this case (which I'm sure we'll find out in a few years) it's evil.

Determining who can effectively serve ads on third party websites based on who has the biggest search engine share is ridiculous. They are separate industries. Google using it's search engine market share (which in some countries is >90%) to give it an advantage over competitors to Adsense on third party websites is about as anti-competitive as it gets. The fact that they do so while claiming it's about a need for privacy (which for some reason doesn't apply to them or their advertisers) just shows how evil they really are. Hypocrites, liars, and probably just shooting themselves in the foot for a larger percentage of a much smaller pie. (I make my money off Adsense and Google traffic. So if I was biased it'd be towards Google here.)

The other search engines are going to have to do it too, to protect their ability to serve ads competitively. (If you advertise with Adwords, you get all the data you need for targetting, whereas if you advertise with Yahoo/Bing you only get ~30% of the data. No brainer.) This means Adsense will perform worse than it was before, because Google will not be privy to the ~35% of search data that they were before. Whether or not it can make up for that with additional market share seems iffy.

Google is just way off with this one.

[Asher]

And Windows is Microsoft's product, yet they can't say that Windows will no longer send data from the keyboard to competing apps.

Yeah, this discussion is over.

There's virtually no uproar over this, for a good reason. In fact that stupid blog from some braindead pseudo-journalist is the only time I've heard someone complain.

This is not at all comparable to Microsoft no longer sending data from the keyboard to competing apps. Google is not blocking anyone. Google is instead just providing extra information to their paying customers (which are bound in how they use this data by an agreement, and even then only get the top 1000 most common terms and not more detail). The alternative is leaving it wide-open to everyone, which I've always found creepy (I hate the feature at the bottom of these pages which shows search terms used to find the site, for example).

[Sava]

Can anyone name a good tech company? Or a good company for that matter?

It seems as if... when one person is doing something, selling a product or service, it is at its highest level of goodness. One person isn't polluting the environment, paying slave wages, putting a crappy product out there (because if it is crappy, nobody buys it and the person goes out of business very fast).

You know what? I would go so far as to say that the existence of the corporation makes capitalism impossible.

Can anyone name an example where the "goodness" of a business increases with the size? I can't. In human history, I don't think there is a single example.

It probably isn't necessary to have business limited to single individuals... but probably no larger than a hundred. Any organization larger than a hundred, or a few hundred, would need an increasing amount of administrative levels to manage the branching hierarchy. The labor costs associated with increased levels of administrative jobs diminishes the efficiency of the organization.

There shouldn't be such a thing as a CEO who makes $100,000,000 a year... raiding employee pension funds. How does that contribute to the efficiency of an organization? Also, so called "intellectual property" (scientific designs, not necessarily art) rights are tantamount to a monopoly and result in further inefficiencies in the marketplace. If businesses are allowed to compete in the open market, each producing their own models without fear of corporate persecution, consumers would reap the rewards of lower prices.

I'm sorry... but there are a lot of people on these forums that wave the "capitalist" flag that I've come to know over the years that, quite frankly, aren't capitalists. I can almost predict word for word what the response is going to be to everything I've said.

Capitalism is the enemy of the corporation.

Communism? Corporations can deal with communism. Well, at least the Soviet-style.

But if there were ever laws passed to promote a more truly capitalist system, it would read in the history books as the "corporate busting" era.

Maybe then the average person would have a chance to make a decent living again... working for themselves... without a government handout... and without the corporate backed government manipulating the market to big businesses overwhelming advantage.

[Aeson]

Google is instead just providing extra information to their paying customers (which are bound in how they use this data by an agreement, and even then only get the top 1000 most common terms and not more detail).

No, you don't understand this at all. Simple facts you're way off on here.

Webmaster Tools is where you get the 1000 most common terms. Everyone can get this (except some very low quality sites, but even they will find a way since you only need one normal blog or something to get an account. There's about a week delay in the reporting, so it's useless to use to target ads. This is why they will give the data this way. It's anonymous either way, but this way they don't have competitors to Adsense.

When you open an Adwords account, you get all the data you would before from the search query reported in Adwords. It hasn't changed at all. There's no new protections for searcher's privacy here, it's just business as usual. Same with Adsense.

If you really are worried about privacy though, this is a play by Google to get more of your data. When you're logged in to Google, they keep your search history by default. They track what web pages with Adsense and Analytics (which is most of the web) you go to. Now they're saying, "Hey, to protect your privacy you need to give us access to all your browsing history! No longer will you have anonymous information being passed to 3rd party websites, only personalized information passed to us and our advertisers (and thus indirectly to our 3rd party publishers... so anyone on the web)".

It's all very underhanded and manipulative, throwing their weight around as a search engine to try to manipulate other markets, and using misdirection to scare people into giving up more of their personal information to Google and anyone who pays them. They've gone way overboard on this one regardless of whether it's legal or not.

The alternative is leaving it wide-open to everyone, which I've always found creepy (I hate the feature at the bottom of these pages which shows search terms used to find the site, for example).

Oh no! When you go searching for something, someone, somewhere, knows that someone from Calgary just searched for whatever the hell it was you searched for. And it's been like this for 15 years. Now only Google and ANYONE who pays them 5 cents will know... and to protect your privacy in this way all you need to do is give up your PERSONALIZED INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR SURFING. YOUR PRIVACY IS NOW SAFE!!!!

You've fallen for it hook line and sinker...

[Aeson]

The reason there isn't more outcry about this is because it's not yet obvious how much of the data will be affected. For now it's just the default search option for logged in users using google.com. I'm not even sure what % of users this will affect. It's not active on 3rd party websites using Google search (AFAIK) or on other localizations of Google.

This is how Google rolls out updates though. First it goes into an internal sandbox for testing. Then they usually roll it out on the US as an option. (They've had a secure search for quite a while now. Everyone was so worried about their privacy that no one uses it... thus everyone must really need it!) Then it becomes default for everyone.

You already could have this privacy if you wanted. No one cared. This makes it obvious what this change is really about. All their "PRIVACY" claims are just to confuse people as they try to give themselves a huge advantage in ad serving on 3rd party websites. Even if you think they should be able to throw their weight around this way, they're evil for how they are presenting what they are doing. If it's such an acceptable practice, why all the misdirection and lies?