Google emails revealing disagreements b/w Product and Advertising teams about manipulating search to drive ad revenue

restingboredface@sh.itjust.works to Technology@lemmy.world – 395 points – New Google Trial Docs May Explain Why Search Sucks So Bad Now
gizmodo.com.au

tl/dr: email chains used as evidence in DOJ Google antitrust case show internal arguments about drops in # of searches, and how to increase them so that people see more ads. Search team wants to create better search results to keep people coming back.

Advertising team wants to find any way to make people search for as long and as often as possible ("increasing the journey length") even if it means delivering less relevant search results.

You can actually read many of the trial documents here -
https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-and-plaintiff-states-v-google-llc-2020-trial-exhibits

this file was particularly interesting. https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417557.pdf

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Advertising team wants to find any way to make people search for as long and as often as possible (“increasing the journey length”) even if it means delivering less relevant search results.

i now understand what i've been seeing a whole lot better.. any time marketing starts interacting directly with engineering, your tech company is in trouble..

And this is why I consider advertisers leeches. Anything to get more crap shoved in our faces no matter what it costs us, not them.

Advertising and marketing always get in the way of engineering

And legal/ compliance, too

Legal getting in the way of engineering is usually a very good thing.

software engineer in a medium-large public tech company, i agree. i can’t even imagine the amount of stress the legal team must be under to constantly be discovering what management and engineering have messed up this time…and discover the problem is 6 months old and if a regulator catches wind of it it’ll be painful.

I was actually thinking about the goal of those laws, protecting society from unbridled capitalist tech companies. The fear of regulators is only an intermediate tool.

i personally see them as different tools of the same end goal - wealth generation in a checked and sustainable manner. capitalist environments inspire innovation, but require boundaries set (regulators) and a political environment which is alert and aware of exploitation and can make the calls about what is or is not acceptable.

Constant minefield and multi-shift alliances.

I lead web applications.

Last year, I + legal team was in a war with ad team because they were whining about tracking during the CCPA rollout.

This year, it's me + ad vs legal team over them wanting to slap compliance notices everywhere that affects user experience.

After reading all this stuff, I stopped advertising and have started going to independent sources for traffic. Advertising on podcasts has been fruitful.

I’m kinda done advertising on social media and search. It all feels… ick

I believe podcast advertising is way down across the industry.

Yeah, I see why, it’s the same audience. Your first ad run will be your biggest performer and it diminishes from there.

You have to cast wider and be infrequent with your ads. It’s been a learning curve.

There’s a lot of traffic out there to find but yeah, a lot of that traffic is from social and search, which gives you as an advertiser 3rd tier quality results if you advertise on websites.

Having to get creative. Need to pay sites that monitor traffic and find the ones that get a lot of direct traffic. Now getting an ad on those sites has been tough too. It’s been a grind but worth it so far.

I've decided to just pay Kagi for my search. I had completely forgotten how it feels to search somethingand actually find it

I have a question if you don’t mind, can you use the same account on multiple devices? I use 3 computers throughout the day and don’t want to pay 3x because is this.

I use it on my desktop, laptop, cell, and two TVs, you should be fine

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Up next: should you cut off and eat your own limbs if you're really hungry?

No, I mean like, really hungry.

Objectively speaking: it would higher your chances of survival.

I think the blood loss and infection risk may be a problem. I think they may have speculated about it in academia though, not sure what the outcome was.

Yeah, and if you're that hungry that the meat would save your life, you're in no state to recover from such a devastating wound. Your immune system and ability to generate new blood would be severely compromised.

And then there's the added mental toll of coping with the lost limb and having to learn to use it, whilst you're already dizzy from hunger and blood loss, so any chances at other food would be much harder to exploit.

I think objectively it would make your situation much worse.