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by orijing 5325 days ago
If that were truly their goal, their ads would never be the useful, because if they were the best results, they would be duplicates of the organic search results (hence useless). Or, if they weren't the best results, then the best results are in the organic search.

Clearly that's not the case, as advertising makes 99% of their revenues.
2 comments
tonfa 5325 days ago
If you're looking to buy shoes, why should the organic results for [your favorite model] (likely wikipedia, the brand website, etc.) be better than ads?
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orijing 5325 days ago
That's exactly my point. I was responding to the parent's suggestion that "Google should simply deliver the best results, no matter what algorithm they use to do so." In the scenario you describe, the best results would be the stores (for example) where you would buy those shoes.

Remember, organic doesn't have to mean non-commercial. In fact, if I search for best buy, the first organic result is bestbuy.com

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tonfa 5324 days ago
It is obvious that the best organic result for a nav query like [best buy] is bestbuy.com. The issue is with queries like [some product], should it show amazon first? or bestbuy? or some local reseller?
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zem 5325 days ago
the point of ads is not to be maximally useful, it's to maximise some function of (usefulness to you, profitability to the advertiser).
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orijing 5325 days ago
Of course that's the point. Again, I was responding to the parent ("Google should simply deliver the best results, no matter what algorithm they use to do so"), which I understood to be what results Google should choose to show. Perhaps I misunderstood his meaning for "best", but "best" in this context to me means the result that's most likely to satisfy the user.

I'm not disagreeing with the fact that ads are subject to a whole different objective function. I'm saying that if the best results were already in the organic, then the ads would either be redundant (for the user) or otherwise less useful than the organic (by definition, really).

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zem 5325 days ago
yep, i was just pointing out that the ads being less useful than the organic result was pretty much by definition.
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