Google's Paid Search Ads Are 'Shakedown' and 'Ransom', Basecamp CEO says (cnbc.com) 120
An anonymous reader shares a report: Do a Google search for Basecamp, a web-based project management tool company, and you might see one or more ads for competitors show up in results above the actual company. Basecamp CEO and co-founder Jason Fried sounded off against the practice Tuesday, calling it a "shakedown" and saying it's like ransom to have to pay up just to be seen in results.
"When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own brand name, you're forced to pay up if you want to be found," he tweeted Tuesday afternoon. "It's a shakedown. It's ransom. But at least we can have fun with it. Search for Basecamp and you may see this attached ad." The tweet includes the screenshot of an ad for Basecamp, reading "Basecamp.com -- We don't want to run this ad." The copy says "We're the #1 result, but this site lets companies advertise against us using our brand. So here we are. A small, independent co. forced to pay ransom to a giant tech company."
"When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own brand name, you're forced to pay up if you want to be found," he tweeted Tuesday afternoon. "It's a shakedown. It's ransom. But at least we can have fun with it. Search for Basecamp and you may see this attached ad." The tweet includes the screenshot of an ad for Basecamp, reading "Basecamp.com -- We don't want to run this ad." The copy says "We're the #1 result, but this site lets companies advertise against us using our brand. So here we are. A small, independent co. forced to pay ransom to a giant tech company."
Forced? (Score:1)
You're free to advertise through other means. Search isn't the only way to be seen.
Sadly you'd be better off firing your highly paid SEO staff and paying Google directly for better search results.
Sorry SEO is dead occupation, I guess?
Re:Forced? (Score:5, Interesting)
You're free to advertise through other means. Search isn't the only way to be seen.
Not only way, but Search IS how consumers find providers on the internet.
For example; end users commonly type "Google" in their browser bar in order to find google: and they would type "Basecamp" into their google bar to express their intent to access their Basecamp account.
It seems not only Trademark Infringement or Dilution, but an Unfair deceptive trade practice as well for Google to be displaying
A competing company's Advertisement ahead of legitimate search results. By law, other companies are not allowed to make confusing uses of the mark in advertising, and having competing products shown due to paid placements when typing another company's exclusive word mark can be considered Confusing.
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But if you are searching for "Basecamp" are you going to click on an ad that isn't basecamp?
Ok, you may click on the ad but I would assume that you would also go back and click on the actual Basecamp site. This is especially true if you are trying to log into your Basecamp account. I always skip the top links that have the Ad logo when I am searching for a specific site.
P.S. I don't know if Google changed something but I just tried searching for just Basecamp and the first link was to basecamp.com (no ad li
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Worse than that. People would type "basecamp" into their browser bar and the browser, seeing that it's not a valid URL, would send it to the default search engine installed, which is quite likely google.
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Quite a while ago one Japanese automaker 'bought' the search keyword for another automaker... A bit of a hoorah then, complaints of trademark infringement, etc.
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https://nissan.com/ [nissan.com] ?
Re:Forced? (Score:4, Insightful)
> Not only way, but Search IS how consumers find providers on the internet.
Sure, and before then it was the Yellow Pages or other paid business directories. Nobody has a god given right to show up first on a search engine's results page, especially if they're not even paying a nickel to keep that search engine's lights on.
This is the opposite of old man yells at clouds, more like younger technoweenie doesn't grasp how business works and has worked for centuries.
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The level of integration is making it really hard to make better choices, though. How many web browsers have ditched bookmarks in favor of URL bars that send all your data to a search engine? Hell, will we even be able to type in URLs in a few years?
This is why regulation is necessary. The integration gets out of control and even if choices exist, they are severely limited.
Re:Forced? (Score:5, Interesting)
A 'correct' search result for 'basecamp' should probably start with links to information on basecamps in mountaineering or military operations.
Wikipedia gets it right. Basecamp the company comes second after "A base camp is a staging area used by mountaineers to prepare for a climb."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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But if you do a google search for just the word basecamp, it's probably pretty unlikely you are looking for anything but the company.
That's only true if you are a person for which "Project Management & Team Communication Software" is a relevant topic. And that should show plenty in your Google Profile. By the way, 'we' are a tiny minority of the generic Google Search using populous.
I'm a software developer / programmer and work both alone or in a project team, whatever the project requires (i'm sort of half a freelancer, half employed). For me such software COULD BE relevant. There should be enough searches on proper tools, programmi
If your success depends on... (Score:2)
...being top in search, your product isn't worth a fuck in the first place.
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I noticed this way back when Microsoft launched Edge, and any search containing "Internet Explorer" or "Edge" would give as first result an ad for "The new replacement for Internet Explorer" - linking to a Chrome download page. It was a clear violation of their advertising T&Cs against deceptive ads, so I reported it, but that went about as well as you'd expect for reporting a companies violations of their own rules.
Re: Forced? (Score:2)
I tried to see what came up, Ad Block made google look correct based on what I looked for. Lol.
Either way, sorry. Google is free to display whatever it wants on its search results, and you are free to contract with them to manipulate it how ever you want if you pay them enough cash. Ads is how they decided to productize their search. Don't like it? Sucks for you. Implement one better. You don't have a right to force another private entity to display what you want. You can only incentivize them through payme
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That's how free markets work. And it works great.
Markets actually work better when there is quite a bit of competition. There are like three players in search and two of them are relegated to niche status. When plenty of competition exists, your argument is valid. But when a single company dominates a market then what would be okay in a competitive market becomes an abuse of that dominate position. The sorry state of U.S. antitrust legislation allows this, but that doesn't mean it works great. Markets only self-regulate with competitive pressures. When yo
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When plenty of competition exists in the ad provider market, it means you have to phony up at every relevant competitor to cut off your competition. Same difference.
Your idea only works if a third party undercuts Google AND becomes dominant at search. Not gonna happen. If someone gets dominant over Google, they will start to extract the same 'horrendous' prices. Not a single search provider will allow a third party ad network for delivering the ads. The data profiles generated by the searches are too valuab
Re: Forced? (Score:2, Insightful)
That's not how free market works. In an actual free market, shipment and road companies could collude to bankrupt any other company.
How would you like to have your company's products undeliverable because the owner of the street in which it's located established a new rule preventing you from unloading your warehouse goods on it? And then all the shipping companies in town decides to refuse shipping any of it? Ditto for railroad operators etc.?
Government interference, by limiting some freedoms, maximize all
Re:Forced? (Score:5, Interesting)
This has become the canonical group-think response on Slashdot any time a tech company is accused of doing anything wrong. "Vote with your feet and quit complaining."
But there is another way to look at this. Google offers free search. They have achieved monopoly status in the search market by providing free search for many years. On the other side of this process, if you want to be in business, you have to show up on google. When Google stacks a large number of paid ads in front of your company search result when people are specifically searching for your company, that is not reasonable. That is abuse of monopoly power. This is just one example. In general, there is a problem with the way Google, Amazon, Facebook, et al operate. Your knee-jerk response just about absolves all companies from operating within any kind of ethical constraints because you believe the free-market will fix it somehow. But this can't work because Google is operating as a monopoly in search. Similar arguments can be applied to Amazon. Is Amazon a disruptive, genius level play? Or did they just spend 20 years undercutting every other retailer on the planet to achieve monopoly (or near monopoly) power in retail? Maybe that is not really genius. Maybe that is just classic unethical monopoly play.
Just try to keep an open mind. If there is a problem and it is getting worse every day with disastrous results for society, then maybe a deeper analysis is warranted instead of falling back to simplistic Ayn Rand libertarianism. Big Tech is not anyone's friend.
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Amazon has monopoly power in retail?? Ummm.. . they have about 5% of retail and 10% of groceries. Walmart is much larger. You just think Amazon is a monopoly because that is what you use.
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Walmart has near monopoly power in retail. They beat the crap out of suppliers because they have so many customers. They claim all margin for themselves. They suck, but if your product isn't in walmart, well, that is a lot of lost sales.
Amazon is just as bad and is now challenging Walmart. Walmart and Amazon view each other as competitors. If and when one of them finally defeats the other, that will be even worse for consumers. And it is terrible for local businesses. The big companies force everyone else t
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0. 'free search'. I do not think that means what you think it means.
1. Ayn Rand libertarianism? What's that, an easy way to describe something else?
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If there is a problem and it is getting worse every day with disastrous results for society, then maybe a deeper analysis is warranted instead of falling back to simplistic Ayn Rand libertarianism.
Ironically, you've just summarized the plot of Atlas Shrugged, with "worse every day" the goal of Ayn's, in order to force (but not with a gun) everyone to John Galt's notion of libertarianism.
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> . They have achieved monopoly status in the search market by providing free search for many years.
And I mentioned elsewhere, prior to the internet, THE way to find most businesses for decades was the other monopoly - the Yellow Pages - and nobody whined about them selling premium ad space.
Even if Google is offering the search action for free, they have a right to make money - and an obligation to do so to keep their business running. If we want things to be 100% fair and impartial there, it sounds lik
Re:Forced? (Score:4, Interesting)
What is your proposed solution?
Keep in mind that the proposal must include a way for Google to make money from web search. Google spends billions on hardware, bandwidth and engineering to make web search what it is -- and what it is is a search engine that is so good that people can and do reasonably expect that the top hit for whatever they type in will be the thing they wanted. This is an incredibly-valuable service for the world, one that deserves compensation, and one that must be compensated if you wish it to continue existing and to continue being excellent.
Since its inception, the model for funding Google web search (once it found one; it was just funded by Stanford for a while, but that was never expected to be a workable long-term strategy) has been advertising, with simple, unobtrusive, text-only ads that are clearly labeled to distinguish them from organic search results. It is your contention that this has always been bad? If not, what changed, and what does that indicate about what should/could be done?
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Re:Forced? (Score:4)
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Perhaps. You're basically arguing for some sort of a legal line for how "distinct" is distinct enough. ISTR that this has already been litigated, perhaps more than once.
Personally, I find the "Ad" box next to the URL to be perfectly adequate and from the comments on this article so do many others. See the posts that comment on how their eyes automatically skip past the ads (which I often do, too, depending on what I'm searching for).
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>"maybe a deeper analysis is warranted instead of falling back to simplistic Ayn Rand libertarianism. Big Tech is not anyone's friend."
A good posting to which I agree with most everything you said. But I will clarify that libertarianism still depends on the government to maintain a fair playing field in capitalism to prevent and control the inevitable formation of actual and near monopolies. Few l/Libertarians support dismantling anti-trust laws, they are aware that for competition to work, there needs
free monopolies are bad news (Score:2)
The government should force them not to give us free search, make us pay for it.
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Cue the ACs with the "Just because they're paying for it doesn't mean they can decide what to do with their own service!!!111!" whining.
While you're at it, why not complain that ABC and CBS won't run YOUR show that you've been writing in the basement the last 20 years. "They get to do this because it's their broadcast network...."
And ignore large numbers of potential customers? (Score:2)
Glad to see that the comment earned no favorable mods. I strongly suspect there are some google (and Amazon) sock puppets deployed to astroturf Slashdot. At least Apple's fanbois are sincere. Sex crazed, but sincere.
I recently read an anti-Google book that went into some depth about the google's advertising scams. Search & Destroy: Why You Can't Trust Google by Scott Cleland and Ira Brodsky. I was thinking about writing up a book review for Slashdot, but it doesn't seem worth the effort. First, the bo
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I didn't get any mod points because it wasn't very funny. Meant to be dry but it was oblique.
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Hmm... Well I was trying to be funny, too, but I was probably farther from the goal... Actually I see you have a downmod now.
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Even negative attention is some attention, better than being totally ignored. ;-)
Google Search Results (Score:3)
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Well, I don't see any ads on google at all. But when I turn uBlock off, I still didn't see the basecamp ad.
Re:Google Search Results (Score:4, Informative)
Here are my results:
Ads:
Project Management Software | Manage Projects From Anywhere
try.wrike.com/
Make the Switch to Asana | Get Up and Running in Minutes
www.asana.com/compare/basecamp
Search Results:
Basecamp: Project Management & Team Communication Software
https://basecamp.com/ [basecamp.com]
Right column:
Basecamp
Web development company
basecamp.com
So yes, ads are shown before the actual search results (as usual), but it's not like Google are trying to hide the results of the search. Basecamp is shown as the first search result and is also shown in the right column, which is top-aligned with the ads.
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Asana
Wrike
Smartsheet
Then I have Basecamp.
You keep using this word "shakedown" ... (Score:2, Flamebait)
/Oblg. You keep using that word -- "shakedown" -- I do not think it means what you think it means. /s
It's called cost of advertising, aka Pay-to-Promote. Just like in politics, outspending the other guy, has benefits.
File this under: No shit, Sherlock.
Re:You keep using this word "shakedown" ... (Score:5, Interesting)
On the one hand, that's true. This is sort of a reverse shakedown. Putting Google's reputation on the line to say that they are not a good source of organic search results and that you can't trust search results.
Yelp, on the other hand, truly is a shakedown. They tank real positive reviews if you're not paying them and distort reality based on who pays the most.
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Google is Altavista'ing themselves...
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Google is Altavista'ing themselves...
Google is beating themselves by offering dramatically better search results than themselves? How does that work?
Results Must Vary (Score:3, Interesting)
I googled "Basecamp" on my desktop and saw no advertisements above Basecamp's website, and then googled on my phone and saw one advertisement above them. I also typed in JIRA and Planview to make sure Google hadn't made changes to just Basecamp after this article broke, and I saw the same results. I'm not sure what Basecamp is complaining about actually happens.
And even if it did, Basecamp is free to send out flyers at conferences or get ads on TV and radio if it wants to attract customers through channels other than Google search. Google is under no responsibility to a company that refuses to pay for advertisement to actually advertise for them. Google does need to take care of the needs of those performing searching or else they would use competing products though, which is why Basecamp still appears at the top of unpaid search results.
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What ads? (Score:3)
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Of all the things to complain about (Score:4, Interesting)
Of all the shitty things Google does, this one lands squarely in the Meh category. If Google made it so you couldn't tell the difference between paid and real search results, they would have a legitimate complaint.
Yeah, grandma and grandpa probably can't tell the difference, but those aren't really Basecamp's target audience, is it?
Actually I suppose I take that back. Basecamp's target audience is project managers, right? Ok, they are probably stupider than grandma and grandpa.
Re:Of all the things to complain about (Score:5, Informative)
If Google made it so you couldn't tell the difference between paid and real search results, they would have a legitimate complaint.
That's exactly what Basecamp is complaining about. From the featured article:
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They can complain about it all they want but that doesn't make it true.
I, like so many above me on here, did the search myself. They were the first organic search result. There was exactly 1 paid result above them that was demarcated with the standard "Ad" icon that Google has used for years ever since they started having paid results in the first place.
In a world where the term "basecamp" should legitimately match SO many other things than this company, the fact they are #1 in the organic results is pretty
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They were the first organic search result. There was exactly 1 paid result above them
Unless Google has modified the Search ad display for this particular term in response to complaints made alongside this article.
that was demarcated with the standard "Ad" icon that Google has used for years
Then the complaint is that Google has made this icon less and less conspicuous in Search over the years to the point where a median user could not instantly distinguish an ad from an organic result, especially when the first organic result is below the bottom of the viewport on a median smartphone.
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I don't mind that. If my competitor wants to pay upwards of $100 per clickthrough to outbid me, that is their prerogative.
The real problem is that it has been made illegal to pay someone to repeat the search and clickthrough the competitor's ads until they run out of budget.
Google is the new AOL & CompuServe (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't news. We have an entire generation of late webusers who consistently confuse Google with the Web. Rely on Google for your business, and you're screwed. I'd wish for Basecamp to find ways for sustainable business around Google.
Google is a good search engine - nothing more and nothing less. If they bloat their front page of results with paid ads, that only dimishes the quality. I've noticed that in recent years.
For an online business model I'd try very hard not to rely on Google ranking.
Re:Google is the new AOL & CompuServe (Score:4, Informative)
My workplace can increase the day's takings by putting up an ad for an exact match on our domain name. When you search for us you get 2-4 ads for our competitors, a row of shopping results (which we have to pay for too and then we only get 1 tile), a giant map with local businesses (who are probably not us because we aren't local to the nation) and THEN the organic results of which we are 1st for obvious reasons.
This is because the average shopper isn't as computer savvy as you. They put our name into the "google" and click something at the top because "that's what they always do" and if it's not us, they just give up and disappear. So we pay the toll and put an ad up there. It's just the cost of doing business and will be until google is no longer how the normies work their web browsers.
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Except we're all using Chrome. And the "address bar" is really a Google Search. So while you meant to go to basecamp.com -- typing basecamp into the address bar shows a search result. We're all trained to do that.
Wasn't that the original vision of the web and browser? Nobody would need to know MySite.com. Rather there'd be a big directory of things you're looking for and click on the relevant link.
Companies know that failure to be on the First page of results causes traffic to the site to drop dramat
Got full 3rd party? (Score:1)
Work the creativity, the ad and the resulting interviews.
Why doesn't Google give away free stuff? (Score:2, Interesting)
Isn't it a charity?
Oh, wait, it's a business. Back in the old days, you used to pay the Yellow Pages for a bigger ad, and named your company Aaron Aardvark Associates to be first on the list.
Oh well, Basecamp, there is always Bing.
Phone Books (Score:5, Interesting)
Back when people used phone books, if you wanted to look up the name of a company, they were listed in sections by type of company. If you want ABC Plumbing, you went to the first page of the "Plumbing" section. Plastered all over that page were large, paid ads for other plumbers. Some came before the beginning of the section. For some, more popular categories, there were multiple pages of ads at the beginning of the section.
This was totally fine and accepted. Heck, the phone companies had a de-facto monopoly on phone books for a long time and the practice was still legal. So why is Google doing it not OK?
Re:Phone Books (Score:4, Interesting)
Back when people used phone books, if you wanted to look up the name of a company, they were listed in sections by type of company. If you want ABC Plumbing, you went to the first page of the "Plumbing" section. Plastered all over that page were large, paid ads for other plumbers. Some came before the beginning of the section. For some, more popular categories, there were multiple pages of ads at the beginning of the section.
This was totally fine and accepted. Heck, the phone companies had a de-facto monopoly on phone books for a long time and the practice was still legal. So why is Google doing it not OK?
I'd argue that it wasn't particularly OK then either. IMO it's less OK with Google, who touts their ability to bring users the most relevant results for their search terms. Pushing the actual relevant organic results down the page to make room for paid listings above them is a bit disingenuous when combined with that mantra. I have no issue with Google making money; they need to do so in order to provide no-financial-cost services. But, if you're going to put paid listings on top, you're not really putting the most relevant results first.
Re:Phone Books (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd argue that it wasn't particularly OK then either.
That's fine, but it was an accepted practice that withstood multiple court challenges. So, at a base level, it's legal.
IMO it's less OK with Google, who touts their ability to bring users the most relevant results for their search terms.
And they do, after the advertising. When I just typed in basecamp, it was the fourth link on the page, not including the giant info-box talking about the company on the right hand side of the page.
Pushing the actual relevant organic results down the page to make room for paid listings above them is a bit disingenuous when combined with that mantra.
This is how nearly all search engines have worked since there were search engines. Google crushed Altavista and Yahoo because they had the fewest ads in their search results.
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Google crushed Altavista and Yahoo because they had the fewest ads in their search results.
Google crushed AltaVista (and Lycos) because its search results were dramatically better. Both search engines found all of the same results, but the PageRank algorithm did a vastly better job of ordering the results to put the ones you really wanted at the top, making it much easier to find what you were looking for. It's interesting to note that comparisons of pre-Google search engines (like this one [ariadne.ac.uk] that compared Lycos to AltaVista) focused on the ways in which users could refine their searches to manua
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The sad thing is that Google has turned into Altavista and Lycos. Their search is actually pretty terrible nowadays, and if you want to get anything useful out of it, you have to resort to all kinds of tricks to refine your search. And to make it worse, Google is constantly breaking these tricks or simply ignoring them.
Not all of this is Google's fault, part of it is the whole SEO thing in which everyone tries to game Google. But a huge part of it is how Google in monetizing their search results.
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I'd argue that it wasn't particularly OK then either.
That's fine, but it was an accepted practice that withstood multiple court challenges. So, at a base level, it's legal.
IMO it's less OK with Google, who touts their ability to bring users the most relevant results for their search terms.
And they do, after the advertising. When I just typed in basecamp, it was the fourth link on the page, not including the giant info-box talking about the company on the right hand side of the page.
Pushing the actual relevant organic results down the page to make room for paid listings above them is a bit disingenuous when combined with that mantra.
This is how nearly all search engines have worked since there were search engines. Google crushed Altavista and Yahoo because they had the fewest ads in their search results.
I didn't (and won't) say it's illegal. It's perfectly legal, I'm just stating my opinion that paid ads on top and organic results below them as an algorithm doesn't jive well in my mind with touting one's ability to bring users the most relevant results for their search terms. To me, saying "we deliver the users the most relevant results" implies that the more relevant the result, the closer to the top it is.
This is just my personal opinion. Others are entitled to theirs as well, and I'm certainly
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Heck, the phone companies had a de-facto monopoly on phone books for a long time and the practice was still legal. So why is Google doing it not OK?
This is more like skimming the white pages to find a company by name and seeing a giant ad where the real business should be. Surprised the phone company left the white pages clean, but not completely unbelievable either.
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Yellow pages are classified under category. This is a search for "Basecamp" not "Productivity software." The white pages are alphabetical by name and much closer to a general query.
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Back when people used phone books, if you wanted to look up the name of a company, they were listed in sections by type of company. If you want ABC Plumbing, you went to the first page of the "Plumbing" section. Plastered all over that page were large, paid ads for other plumbers.
It's worth noting that naming your company something like "ABC Plumbing" was the pre-Internet version of SEO. Especially for companies that provided common services like plumbing, choosing a name that put your company near or at the front of an alphabetized list was very good for business. Even better if you then paid extra to have your company's listing in a large, bold font, and better yet if you also paid for an ad.
And, of course, if your grandfather founded Zwokowski's Plumbing 50 years earlier, bef
Try looking for a hotel (Score:5, Insightful)
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The first one I got for "hotel" was a google widget with a list of hotels, than the wiki article on hotels, than a hotel search site, the next five or six were actual hotels.
I do search with "&tbs=li:1" which makes enables verbatim search, I turn that off and yeah it's a bunch of hotel search sites.
Tell your customers to not use Google search (Score:2)
Just Like Yellow Pages (Score:2)
So the same kind of shakedown that the yellow pages were engaged in? Well actually a lot less since searching for basecamp yields a quite visible and easy to find link for anyone who wants to find it while opening up the yellow pages usually meant that you either had to look up the actual business by name to see a really really tiny phone number or just see paid ads.
What is it about business owners that so often ends up with them thinking competition is unfair? Absolutely nothing stops people from heading
Re:Just Like Yellow Pages (Score:4, Insightful)
What is it about business owners that so often ends up with them thinking competition is unfair?
... but the basecamp CEO expects them to provide this service to people who want to visit his website free of charge and without letting companies who want to compete with basecamp place ads.
In my 20+ years of dealing with business owners, I've never met a more whiny, self-entitled bunch of douches. I've had bidders on a project automatically file suit if they didn't get a bid. No reason for it; they've told me directly that after losing they automatically sue, just par for the course. In my local municipal area, there a businesses suing the city council because (extremely necessary) road construction was being done, and they feel they lost money because of it. And forget about closing down during a huge snowstorm; they have to remain open on the 1% chance that someone will come in, afraid of losing that one potential customer to another store (no matter how dangerous it is to keep the store open).
Without exception, every business owner I've encountered thinks theirs is the only one that matters; people, environment, circumstances be damned. No matter what happens, it's all about 'muh profits'. So it's not surprising that businesses are very much against competition; they all want a monopoly if they could get it.
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>"Without exception, every business owner I've encountered thinks theirs is the only one that matters; people, environment, circumstances be damned. No matter what happens, it's all about 'muh profits'. So it's not surprising that businesses are very much against competition; they all want a monopoly if they could get it."
And that is how it should be. All competing for the most customers, trying to supply what customers want now and in the future, and at the best prices they can, trying to survive and g
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Also, I have never met a successful "self-entitled" business owner. A sense of self entitlement is not exactly compatible with entrepreneurship.
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you'd think there would be some variation among the business owning population - some that don't focus on 'muh profits'. I wonder why there isn't? hmmm...
Focusing on it to the exclusion of all else (even sometimes their own benefit) is the problem. Of course businesses exist to make profit. But they can play fair as well as anyone else can. They just often choose not to. That's the part that annoys me.
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you'd think there would be some variation among the business owning population - some that don't focus on 'muh profits'. I wonder why there isn't? hmmm...
Focusing on it to the exclusion of all else (even sometimes their own benefit) is the problem. Of course businesses exist to make profit. But they can play fair as well as anyone else can. They just often choose not to. That's the part that annoys me.
Take a look at the statistics on business startup failures. Those that don't keep a laser focus on generating profit don't survive. I believe this was the AC's point, which you missed.
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You do have a point about advertising, however if google looked like it does today back in 2000ish it wouldn't be the powerhouse it is now.
In the old days you typed some search terms into hotbot, altavista, yahoo, whatever and the results wouldn't be great. Along came google with a result list that was surprisingly accurate. People recommended it to everyone and it got big by simply being superior.
But then... people got so used to google being the alpha and omega of the internet they started building it int
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Hah, just came here to say that I searched basecamp on Duck Duck Go, and the first link is for "Monday" entitled "Basecamp vs monday.com | What Is Best For You? "
It's literally the same thing as what Google does. I'm a hardcore duck duck go user, but this isn't the reason to use it.
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Their search engine, their rules... (Score:1)
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It's Google's search engine so it's their rules...
Google is competing hard with Facebook for the title of most hated tech company. At the moment due to their huge size they are a necessary evil. Expect them to be thrown to the wolves without a single tear shed as soon as a viable alternative appears. Or the government breaks them up since they have clearly picked a side in politics.
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It's funny (Score:3)
Every time I do a search and see the [AD] markers in the top group and automatically skip down to first results below them. I know the ads won't be useful so don't even look at them.
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My intention in searching something is not to generate revenue for someone else. Clicking an ad to get somewhere I can go to directly does not help me in any way.
The ads work via redirects, and thanks to security controls that tends to throw SSL errors. Since my concern for personal and corporate security far outweighs any concerns I might have about Google's revenue, that's fine.
But the absolute tip-top number one reason is that those ads are all too often malicio
I don't see what Basecamp's CEO is complaining... (Score:2)
I'm going to DJ school! (Score:2)
Not googles fault. (Score:2)
Sue the competitors that are abusing an automated system by putting your business name in their keyword list.
Google doesn't give a shit about you vs. your competition.
Ad? (Score:2)
Do no Evil bullshit (Score:2)
Whoever bought into the "Do no evil" line from Google was a fool — and remains a fool. They were — and continue to be — offering a superior search engine, but any claims of a higher ground have always been bullshit.
Trademark Law (Score:2)
When I googled it just now (Score:2)
I wonder which step caused Google to take action. The original complaint, purchase of the ad complaining about it, or the news reports about it.
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