[magikbum]

"In their seminal 1998 academic paper introducing the idea of Google, Page and Brin criticized advertising-funded search engines as “inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”"

-- The times have changed.

[larrys]

The whole idea of why the print yellow pages was good was that it was biased toward people who believed enough in what they were selling to pay for an ad to sell the product or service. [1]

Everyone gets a free listing but if you want (typically) additional headings and (definitely) a big or bigger display ad you pay.

As a result if you are a general contractor that does kitchens and bathrooms and also sells plumbing fixtures as well you would have to spend the money to be listed in ads in all those categories.

Without having to spend money it ends up being confusing for consumers because it's like craigslist and inevitably results in people not being able to find what they want.

The "advertising funded" is actually a benefit not a detriment.

[1] I used the yellow pages to build a business from scratch that I actually sold. At the time I started I had no employees and there were established competitors (that didn't advertise) that did the exact same thing. The advertising is what made the business pretty much (in addition to price, quality service and all of that).

[cousin_it]

> The whole idea of why the print yellow pages was good was that it was biased toward people who believed enough in what they were selling to pay for an ad to sell the product or service.

Note that this benefit disappears online, because of targeting. If you see an ad in print, you know the company had enough money to put that ad in front of thousands of people. If you see an ad online, it might have been targeted precisely to you, so the company might well be a scam. I wonder if there's a business idea in making online advertising into a more costly/believable signal.

[bsullivan01]

wrong comparison Larry. Now a few entrenched players (not always the best choice or cheapest) can outbid you and hide your ads AND free listing. Not many people scroll down and on top is all ads. Small business is going broke thanks to Google, as Google's earnings keep going up.

Without having to spend money it ends up being confusing for consumers because it's like craigslist and inevitably results in people not being able to find what they want.

So Google without ads, when it first started, was worse than other search engines? Nope. The advertiser that bids the highest might not be the best option for the user at all

[vdaniuk]

Weren't they talking about the search engines that allowed to buy organic placements in the results?

[judk]

Yes, but it is fun to trot out that old canard that Google was anti-ads, when really they were anti-unethical secret ads.

But there are some shades of Google leaning back that way, with "monitor-yellow" backgrounds, closing access to retail product search indexing, etc