
Is It Time To Break Up Google? - robg
http://executivesuite.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/is-it-time-to-break-up-google/
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Goronmon
Unfortunately this article uses a terrible example to "expose" Google's
practices. The site <http://www.sourcetool.com/> is trash. The whole point is
to force you to click through as many pages before getting a decent list of
results, and of course every page has a nice block of ads.

For instance, I picked a category at random. Eventually I got to a page to
choose between two sub-categories. One was "Brominated retardants"...so I
clicked it. The next page just had a single sub-category "brominated
retardant". There are plenty of examples like that including one where
clicking a sub-category just took you to the same page over and over. The
whole site seems to purposefully bury information in as many pages as possible
to force you to view as many ads as possible.

I'm not saying that people should give Google a free pass, but honestly, I'm
glad to see they are giving that site a hard time.

~~~
josefresco
Your analysis is flawed, ST doesn't make money when you 'view' ads, but rather
when you click them. The many layers of pages are probably meant to inflate
the sites overall size/page count. If ST was interested in making the most
money from ads they wouldn't force the user to keep clicking but would instead
trick them into click ads that looked like 'categories'. I've seen much worse
out there, example; business.com which is a Google partner, check out how many
'sponsored ads' appear above the 'real' results, it's waaaay worse than what
ST does.

But agreed, ST is not a perfect example of Google's bad behavior.

~~~
Goronmon
_check out how many 'sponsored ads' appear above the 'real' results, it's
waaaay worse than what ST does._

Actually, ST does the same thing. Once you finally click through a dozen sub-
categories, there is a nice block of ad-words right above the results
positioned in the same place the sub-category lists were.

And I wasn't really making the argument that such a site design is effective.
I was just pointing out that from the way the site is designed, it seems they
are going for as many ad-views as possible by making as many redundant sub-
category pages as possible.

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scott_s
The examples in the comments and the example in the article have something in
common: they almost completely depend on Google's AdWords to drive traffic.

What I derive from that is their service isn't good enough to get traffic on
its own merits. And if that's the case, then perhaps they deserve a low
landing score. (The metric used to determine how much they are charged for ad
placement.)

~~~
Goronmon
Yeah, and given the huge share of the market that Google has with ads, I'm not
surprised to see complaints. I mean, the way the internet reacts to "slights"
in the type of manner that Google is accused is usually met with vitriol
orders of magnitudes greater than necessary. The fact that stories about this
seem rather subdued is interesting.

They just have so many customers that it's pretty much a given that there are
a decent group of people pissed off about how things are handled.

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mdasen
Ideally, it's time for some competitors. If Google had, say, 10% of the search
ad market, their power would (mostly) be in check. However, at 70% Google has
market power that should run afoul of anti-trust regulations. I don't like the
idea of the government breaking up companies, but I also don't like companies
creating barriers to entry and winner-take-all markets.

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hugh
Is it time to break up the New York Times?

