[dannysullivan]

What was tweeted isn't what the page says. I work for Google Search. That's about our Honest Results policy, which means we don't allow people to buy better rankings in non-paid Search results: https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/

Like many newspapers separate ads and editorial, Google has a strict separation between our Ads departments and our Search departments -- and our results. Buying ads will not gain you any better ability to rank in the non-paid Search results. Nor will it get you any special support.

That's what the page explains. It never says we don't have ads that show at the top of the page and, in fact, acknowledges that we do: "While advertisers can pay more to be displayed higher in the advertising area." Nor is it true that at the time, we only had ads that appeared on the right-side of the page. Google's first ads appeared at the top of the page way back in 1999.

In addition, we continue to keep ads separated from Search and labeled so they can be identified.

I totally get that some people would like to see fewer ads. I don't work on the Ad side of Google, but I know that feedback has been heard.

[runnerup]

> I totally get that some people would like to see fewer ads.

I'd like to be very clear: On the google Search property, it's less about the number of ads, and more about "ads look very, very, very similar to the actual search results". Therefore, selling ads above the results is becoming very, very close to "selling search results". In fact for many of your customers, that is already a distinction without a difference. If you want to be taken seriously on this it's best to respond to a steel-man of the public's argument, even if the actual line of argument from the public is somewhat weakly presented. After all, you are the professional in public communication, we are the amateurs.

Most readers on HN are already well aware of the narrow distinction between "selling search results" and "selling ads above search results that (to many users) look exactly like search results". Some people are here trying to bring this issue to the forefront of discourse in order to help Google take action to strengthen their Search property.

It's hard to take your word as an official "PR Liaison for Search" word at face value on this when it lacks sufficiently rigorous introspection. The primary revenue-generating division for a $2 trillion company should be able to afford real introspection!

[tofuahdude]

Google has a long history of making their ad placements look more like their search placements.

The ads used to be a clearly yellow block. Then it became more and more faded yellow-to-white. Today, the ads have literally the exact same CSS, except that they do say "Ad" at the start, the legally mandated minimum disclosure.

How do you reconcile this?

To me, "honest" is already dishonest, in that Google deliberately tries to make ads vs search results visually ambiguous and thus the ads at the top are barely different from paid search placement.

[sullivandanny]

The Honest Results policy is that we're not going to allow advertisers or partners or any one with a relationship to Google to have an advantage in our unpaid search results.

As for ad labeling, I don't work on the ad side. I work on the Search side. My understanding from those on the ad side is that the labels are visible and do work. And ads are always labeled.

[runnerup]

I'm going to be blunt here, because this is your job. You've agreed to take on a particular level of responsibility and competency and I believe it's fair to hold you up to that.

> And ads are always labeled.

Poorly these days, and you know it. Many, many people here are making the point that if you eventually shrink the word "Ad" down to a 2-point font we would still have a PR person here arguing "but we Label it as an ad." You have a lot of users now telling you that you're already reaching the point where ads are not considered distinguishable from results.

> As for ad labeling, I don't work on the ad side. I work on the Search side.

For customers, Ads are part of the Search product. On mobile, ads and ad-driven widgets often take up the first 1-3 screen scrolls before I scroll down to a "not-ad". For me, if this isn't part of your work, you're not working "my" Google Search. Your work may be to represent some subset of what Google Search is, but it's NOT the part of the "Google Search" product that is being discussed here.

We are not discussing DWIM search or paywalled results or even stack-overflow scrape spam that infests my actual Search results. We are discussing how ads that look a hell of a lot like search results infest the top 1-3 mobile screen-scrolls before I get to the results that are comprised of the same Stack Overflow page copied by 4 different scraper engines and reposted on multiple domains.

If the ads, which is the topic here, isn't part of the product you work on, then your professional experience carries no weight in this discussion -- though your personal experience is as welcome as anyone else's. 'jsnell pointed out what you did, but 5 hours earlier; his clarification was well received and there was already a discussion about the clarification.

I do understand the point you're making. Many here had harsh words for the linked twitter post. My favorite was [0], also several hours before your response. In fact in this discussion on HN there's actually so little confusion over the point you clarified that it almost seems that responding to the linked twitter post on HN, without responding to any of the HN discussion ... is very much a case of responding to a straw man.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30151320

[NelsonMinar]

Thank you for correcting this Danny.