I guess the prospect of literally a hundred billion dollars each made them reconsider.
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It would be interested to know how this process looked like. I'd imagine it was very gradual and consisted of little steps each leading to the next one, and when they finally started to serve ads they were probably thinking it's not that bad. I believe crossing that line made paved the way for considering things like tracking the whole web morally acceptable, maybe even positive.
My hypothesis is that at some point someone was given clearance to try a couple of plainly-evil things, and the results were so wildly lucrative that the "don't be evil" faction either defected or lost all sway.
Notably, ads in-line with results. I suspect that was the first move that sent them irrevocably down the evil-path. Watch a non-tech-geek use Google and you'll see why—I bet ad-clicks went up 10x with that change, or more. Then they began to serve ads beyond those early "non-evil" clearly marked text-only ads. That led to them making tons of money from webspam sites, while also putting tons of effort into fighting webspam, and some time around '09 or so they realized they should lay off the latter, on account of the former.
And here we are. Google search is worse, Google advertise deceptively on purpose, and the whole web is overrun with webspam.
For one, when they started ads, they were not inline with the search results, and in brightly highlighted boxes. So it was easy to say, you know, we have ads, but they don't affect search results.
Today they say the same thing, but nontechnical users can no longer distinguish ads from their organic search results.
Non-technical users can't read the bolded "Ad" in the top left? Ok, it's more subtle than before but it doesn't prey on the less sophisticated among us.
For one, that Ad logo spent about two years being yellow-on-white, so people without well-tuned contrast monitors couldn't see it at all.
Last year they made a change that made them so indistinguishable to the untrained eye that even Google rolled them back: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/squint-and-youll-click-it/ https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/24/google-will-iterate-the-desi...
But no, generally, they don't notice that. Studies have been done demonstrating how few users can tell the difference between an ad and a search result. In one study, half of respondents "didn't spot" ads in Google search results at all: https://www.123-reg.co.uk/blog/seo-2/how-google-is-profiting...
That study was in 2013, when Ads were much more obvious in search results than they are today. By 2018, the statistic of people who couldn't identify search ads on Google was up closer to two-thirds: https://marketingtechnews.net/news/2018/sep/06/two-thirds-pe...
it normally takes me 1 sentence max to realise i've clicked on an ad by mistake. I think even if there was no ad shin i would still manage to work out what is promoted content. If ads ever stops being generic, irrelevant clickbait, we might have a problem on our hands. But that particular danger doesn't seem to be very likely at all.
> it normally takes me 1 sentence max to realise i've clicked on an ad by mistake.
Good thing that has no cost, then. Especially with how poorly optimized all the javascript on these pages is, slowing loading to a perceptible crawl (unless, perhaps again, if you’re in the bubble where every machine you use is latest flagship android or a workstation, blind to the experience of the less ‘sophisticated’ users).
It sounds crazy, but they really can’t. Seriously, have you ever been over a non tech person’s shoulder while they are googling? They click the first thing they see with zero scrutiny.
I have an incredible number of personal anecdotes to offer about not just watching ordinary users click on ads, but also Google Ads being the primary source for most scams and malware on the Internet, that Google pushes to the top of their results for money. (When you have helped dozens of seniors taken advantage of by scammers that Google profited off of, it's hard to be particularly amicable about the company and their business practices.)
However, I went with showing studies because unfortunately, our personal real world experiences rarely win online arguments. ;)
Watch a non-nerd use Google. They 100% do click on those ads without realizing they're ads. Constantly. I wouldn't be surprised if most ad-clicks for Google are performed by people having no clue they're clicking on an ad.
They hired Eric Schmidt as CEO. That’s how it happened. Larry and Sergei were still in “don’t be evil” mode. But you have to be a little evil when this much money is involved, so they hired Schmidt to be evil for them. They then learned how to be evil under his tutelage. Schmidt is absolutely an ethical nihilist, just listen to any of his speeches on privacy and security.
The DoubleClick acquisition was the inflection point, even obviously at the time. Before that AdWords was reasonably in-line with Google's standards and culture.
We ran a DoubleClick ad engine on the Clear Channel websites right around that time period. The front-end was a Java Web Start application, ugly, slow, but very intuitive to use for ad-targeting. I wrote several extensions for it using their plugin-api and the ad engine worked really, really well. Had several calls with the DART team and they were all smart people delivering a necessary service to keep websites free to use. Hard to believe that something so simple and useful could become the tool for evil that it has.
I think the truth is that they were naive or focused on their consumer existence, but as soon as they were the owners of the hottest and best search engine it was a simple next step to monetize with ads. I don’t this excerpt suggests they had any personal qualms with ads, just that they had problems to be overcome and often detract from the user experience - which almost anyone would agree with including people who are rich from ads.
I thought it wouldnt be suprising, especially that we're on news hacker out of all places
Which would one?
1. One search engine w/ hundreds of thousands of employeers & bajillions in revenue
2. One search engine w/ like 3 people & a chonky Patreon account
That’s a bit of a false dichotomy though. Although the original AdWords also made them an adverting based search engine, it made them massively profitable without violating anyone’s privacy.
It was the need to make even more billions that led them down the slippery slope of mass surveillance that makes everyone uneasy now.
Original AdWords in early 200Xs were quite a breath of fresh air compared to other type of advertising on the net.
The ads seemed relevant. I actually clicked on them with a sense of purpose!
At the time AdWords truly seemed how advertising should be done ethically with an iron wall between search and advertising.
That wall started crumbling pretty quickly by mid 200Xs.
Maybe the wall was never there?