For the record: this is a classic example of why links to X suck. If you go to the actual PDF (https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-10/417378.pdf) you find it tells a story which is vastly more coherent... The author of that thread skips a lot of slides which explain what is going on.
It's a neglected story that "Ad Quality" is an important issue in other markets, particularly, Television. Apologists for the ad industry repeat, without a pause, that advertisers crave a young audience, but look at the ads on TV since 2000 and you'd think "I want to die before I get old" and it comes from the American condition of election campaigns, prescription drugs, lawsuits and financial services for a few whales being on a different planet than anything else in terms of dollars at stake.
From time to time they have woken up, realized it drives away viewers, and put a little effort into "Ad Quality" but it has been too little too late.
The author of the thread forgot to mention the deck is from 2008. I was reading one of the tweets in his thread about funnels. Google has argued in court about funnels is outdated, and he read this deck and concluded that Google is lying.
We are gonna see a lot of such threads/articles/substacks/videos in the near term. Already saw what happened with the Wired article. It's a combination of engagement farming, creating content that gets clicks, and misunderstanding/misrepresenting what is there in the exhibits which would lead to a lot of rumors and false narratives.
A question I thought of while reading the thread was: If this was so important and crystal clear as in the thread author wrote, why did DOJ not use it directly in the trial? (We would have known given there are bloggers who are covering the trial on a day to day basis)
Thanks for PDF link. I thought the Twitter context might be helpful because:
* It’s a large deck, pretty old
* It’s important to note the deck is from the current antitrust trial and not something else. Google’s lawyers have done a ton to try to keep important evidence out of public view. This deck they were OK with the public seeing, and so that’s a part of the story.
One thing of note is that these slides looked old (dated). The "Google" logo on the slides is pre Sept 2015 (https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/1/9239769/new-google-logo-an...), when they moved to the new typeface. Internal marketing moved pretty quickly to update all slide templates to use the new logo, so that tells me this slide deck is likely at least 8 years old.
Meaning, the information on these slides may not apply anymore. The value-proposition for Chrome may have changed since then, especially with Chromebooks being in the mix.
> Meaning, the information on these slides may not apply anymore. The value-proposition for Chrome may have changed since then, especially with Chromebooks being in the mix.
The prevalence of ad blocking has grown significantly since 2015. If anything, these slides apply even more than they did when first created. The specifics might have changed but the situations they’re trying to address to preserve and maximize the revenue model for search have only expanded.
> Chrome exists to serve Google search, and if it cannot do that because it is regulated to be set by the user, the value of users using Chrome goes to almost zero (for me).
Not surprising at all to me. One of my issues with Google in the past couple years is their super aggressive push for me to be part of the system, I am usually unconcerned with sharing my data but their tactic has gone from gentle nudges to bothersome.
1) Using a non-chrome browser to access gmail? At least once a week get a popup telling me the experience is better in Chrome and I should switch.
2) Not logged into google in safari on my phone. During a routine google search, telling me with a modal to login to improve the search experience.
Its exhausting and I started backing away from google because of it. Ok, tell me once or maybe tell me every few months thats fine...but every week the same darn message. Too much.
The last straw for me was when Google Maps somehow logged me in on iOS. Maybe it was via gmail or some shared login like when I had to sign in to a google account to buy a Nest Protect, I don’t know. All I know is I have on purpose never signed into Google on Maps.
I don’t use Google for anything I can avoid and I get nagged for it all the time. It’s exhausting and the amount of data that most websites seem to be freely sharing with Google just through analytics and those annoying sign on prompts is absurd.
Why is no public interest lobbying to stop this intrusion of privacy?
Yep their iOS cross app sharing is a privacy nightmare. Not to mention just plain annoying.
The google meet app seems to include an entire gmail client for no reason and seems to show it rather than go back to your calendar / mail.
Mail loads a web view, rather than the app (say slack) or even safari. Which means half in email links go nowhere, because I’m not logged in / able to access the destination via the web view.
And they always want to continue linking my personal and business account within the same app, and then messing up which one should be trying to access. No matter how many times I remove my personal, it always reappears. Often via a “authorise access” pop up while logging in via a different device. Surely it’s a security issue to run 2FA via a device that has actively logged out and removed the account from it.
I’m looking forward to them being broken up. It’s becomes too hostile.
It is endlessly entertaining to me that we get such frequent "Help I'm locked out of my Google account" posts, while Google aggressively tries to sign in users.
They've somehow got a problem on both ends of the spectrum.
The privacy issue is a fair concern, but orthogonal to the login topic. Google has enough info to connect not-logged-in Maps usage to your user account.
- uninstalled all google apps from my iphone
- cleared icloud for google apps
- reboot
- install a google app I've never installed before (say one of the 70 different chat apps)
- somehow I'm logged in
apparently it keeps some state in the local keychain, which can't be deleted by the end user (other than by factory resetting the phone)
I might even be inclined to be part of a singular ecosystem like this if it actually was better. But telling me the experience is better on your browser when it is objectively identical just makes me think of you (the company, and the individual people working on Chrome) as a liar in the best case, and outright hostile/fraudulent in a slightly worse case.
I doubt the core Chrome team agrees with that. This was said by someone in charge of negotiating search engine deals for Android and such, not someone in charge of Chrome.
I'm sure the Chrome people see the ads people as a wallet for their development as much as the ad people see the Chrome people as a vessel for their ads.
In the end the ads people bring in the money so they'll probably get their way, but last time this case came up on the front page there was an example of the quick search feature testing well with users (clearly originating from thr Chrome team) clashing with ad delivery, and only after the ad people raised an issue did Google turn back the changes. This suggests to me that the ad people have some influence on the decisions the Chrome team makes, but the two teams clearly have very different goals in mind.
> This suggests to me that the ad people have some influence on the decisions the Chrome team makes, but the two teams clearly have very different goals in mind.
Yes, they have different goals, but you're downplaying the amount of influence from ads that this incident suggests—when the org was forced to choose between keeping a feature that was shown to serve users or scrapping it to make the ads team happy, they scrapped it.
In the end it matters very little what the Chrome team would prefer if the corporation consistently overrules them.
I wouldn't be surprised that Chrome's hook in future iterations will be that it serves like a loyalty card e.g. use Chrome and make extra savings clicking on their ads. Just don't call it a web browser.
Even if you were logged in the threads would be FUBAR. "Twitter Threads" are mostly for the gratification of people who post them, not the ones that read them. The one intervention I'd like to see in HN is for the links to X to go away. It's not like you're allowed to link from Twitter to the outside world anymore without being punished, the rest of the world should do the obvious thing.
Interestingly enough, that list doesn't include misleading ads. That probably explains some of the ads that are designed to prey on less computer savvy users like "download PDF" button ads that are served by Google's display network.
Document retention policies are complicated in how they deal with legal issues, but ignoring about a million subtleties and complications, you can delete whatever you want if there is no reason to believe it is associated with a crime, and are not doing it to possibly hide evidence.
In the days when everything was on paper, keeping everything around was expensive. Do you really need that memo from 10 years ago? How would you even archive and store it? Deleting it makes sense, but you need to be sure you aren't hiding criminal activity. Or at least don't have the intent to hide criminal activity.
So companies have rules like "delete everything after a year"--there is no intent to cover up a crime. But as soon as you become involved in legal proceeding, you have to start saving stuff.
It gets complicated fast, but that is the basic rule.
Not a lawyer, but I'd expect it to be illegal if it happens while they're under investigation or trial. Could be tempering with evidence? But in "normal" days, it would be strange to be illegal to delete anything.
Pretty fun to finally see direct evidence and testimony that all decisions are related around search ads revenue. While I have no concern about my data being used for ads, I do think Google has started crossing the boundaries where their practices have become more hostile for the user for the pure goal of increasing search revenue.
These 2008 slides talking about "Ads Quality" really sound weird compared to today.
The screenshots, with the ads being clearly visible, surrounded by yellow boxes, and not taking too much screen real estate, are quite striking compared to the Search Result page now days (which feels a lot more blurry and sneaky).
At the same time, we now get mandatory ads on Youtube, and personally, I was quite chocked by how low quality these can be. Best case, it's your traditional sugary food ads, worst case, it's propaganda or border line scam promo.
Maybe Youtube always was that bad for the ~2/3 of people not using ad-blockers and I was blind to it.
However, with the recent layoffs, the end of free money, the slow death of Twitter/X and the push for more monetization (ads on Youtube, API monetization on Reddit, etc), it feels we are reaching the end of an era.
Could someone let me know how I could see all the exhibits released in relation to US v. Google? I am aware of Courtlistener[1], but the actual documents are nowhere to be found.
Though redacted, having a list of all exhibits may make for some good reading.
I don't know about anyone else, but ads on google don't even concern me as a consumer anymore since search results have more or less become useless click-farms. I use google almost exclusively to search either reddit or stack overflow, and even the results don't seem to hit the way they used to.
A pretty insightful look at how Google thinks about its ads - I was surprised by the System Challenges slide - it looks as if they’re having hardware concerns about the Ads fleet? I wonder if the Ads software inflicts more “stress” on its machines than a regular workload such as gmail, search, etc.
My understanding is that everything ads related has a completely different standard for performance because so much of it happens with real time bidding for ad space in the same window of time that a user is being served a (likely cached) webpage.
It's a neglected story that "Ad Quality" is an important issue in other markets, particularly, Television. Apologists for the ad industry repeat, without a pause, that advertisers crave a young audience, but look at the ads on TV since 2000 and you'd think "I want to die before I get old" and it comes from the American condition of election campaigns, prescription drugs, lawsuits and financial services for a few whales being on a different planet than anything else in terms of dollars at stake.
From time to time they have woken up, realized it drives away viewers, and put a little effort into "Ad Quality" but it has been too little too late.