

Oh the Irony  - transburgh

"We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." -- Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 1998<p>
<a href="http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html" rel="nofollow">http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html</a>

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yubrew
You are misinterpreting that statement. What they are referring to in the
above quotation is when search results are altered due to change in advertiser
dollars. Kind of like when Yahoo used to have top advertiser links above the
normal search results, and undifferentiated from the content.

Google, as a result, made a separate, distinct location for advertisement
links. Because they separated the location of advertisements from the search
results, they preserved the integrity of the search results.

This structure has not changed, as you can clearly see sponsored links are
separated from search results:
[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pizza](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pizza)

~~~
webwright
FWIW, there are plenty of people who don't grok that the top-of-results ad
placements are ads.

~~~
asdflkj
They are labeled as ads. Is "grok" really the world you were looking for?

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transburgh
"For me, search and ads are almost the same." -- Google executive Marissa
Mayer, 2007.

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jgamman
a case can be made that advertising at the correct moment in time for a
particular individual is information. you want a new mattress, open the pipe,
mattresses galore, buy, close pipe. the key is to figure out the when and the
personalisation, search is the first to get close to it (and it's still not
perfect - the next thing i'd like to see is trimming but i assume that'll take
that semantic web thing i keep hearing about)

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wschroter
Followed by:

"Hey Sergey, take a look at what these guys at Overture are doing..." - Larry
Page

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brlewis
The quote is from appendix A:

<http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#a>

