Google Advertising and Organic Results - Then and Now

A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. - Brin and Page

Google and advertising, two words that were conceptually hard to put together just a few years ago. Today, Google reportedly is the top media company generating billions in profits and exceeding investor expectations.

For good or bad, Google has changed.

Advertising and Search Engines - Then

This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented (see Appendix A). With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm. - TASE*

Brin and Page wrote in TASE

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising.

This couldn't have been more true now. Looking at Google's SERPs, it feels like Google has been hacked by advertising world.

Through the following statement, Brin and Page communicated to us that having advertising as the primary business model of a search engine may not always result in quality search results.

The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

"Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers" - Larry Page / Sergey Brin
And then...

It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Forgetting who "deserves" to be there

Brin and Page wrote in their paper:

Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

By combining paid results with organic results, Google is doing the exact same mistake, their founders warned about in TASE*. Google is selling itself to advertisers. Where is the good Google? If you ask me, probably long dead.



* Sources:
TASE = http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html | The Anatomy of a Search Engine

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