
We Don't Want to Run This Ad but Forced To - Yuval_Halevi
https://www.seroundtable.com/basecamp-google-ad-28161.html
======
Yizahi
Went to my default search (DDG) - Basecamp is the first result on top and then
third result. Wikipedia page about them is also on top to the right side.
Disabled adblocker - surprise surprise, got same results :) .

Opened Google without adblocker - now that's pathetic - two ads on top from
Monday and Teamwork companies, then third result is Basecamp. Wikipedia result
is below the fold, 8th result.

This is one of the reasons why I dropped Google as main search engine two
years ago and opened it maybe five or ten times this year (for non-english
highly sepicific queries). Google search is simply not the top one now and
privacy concern too.

~~~
mrweasel
Try searching for building materials, The entire first page is pretty much
just ads. I did a local search for garden tiles, 9 actual search results,
somewhere between 7 and 22 ads (depending on what you count as "one" ads).

In many cases Google is just an online ad catalog, not a search engine.

~~~
beerandt
It's been this way ever since they delisted product pages, at the same time
they started charging for "shopping" tab listings.

Idk if it was a coincidence, but it seems like that exclusion filter was (and
is) overly aggressive.

IMHO, this spawned the era of fake reviews and crappy commission websites.
Google forced multiple layers of un-needed middle management, which of course
spawned multiple layers of advertising. (Search ads to find reviews site.
Banner ads on review site. Commission links to get to actual product page.
Instead of just search and click product page.)

The same perverse "layering" system seems to have happened for recipe sites,
although I'm not sure why. Search results list tons of home chefs, reviewers,
and the crappy sites that think adding 3 paragraphs of shitty narrative
improves the quality of their knock-off recipe.

------
satya71
Yeah, I had wondered why companies advertise on their own name. The other day
I was looking up ad word ideas, and the cheapest option was to run it against
a top player in the field. Search volume was as high as a generic search, but
only cost 1c instead of $4 for the generic keyword.

Couple that with how most people click the first link on the page (no accident
mind you), it’s just downright extortion by Google.

~~~
jefftk
Which brand did you check? If the disparity is really as high as 1¢ vs $4 then
my guess is the brand is sending cease-and-desist letters to people who
advertise on their trademark.

(Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on search ads. This is coming from my
experience _buying_ search ads pre-Google)

~~~
chrshawkes
that is wrong.
[https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/GEICO_v._Google](https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/GEICO_v._Google)
Google has been doing this since forever.

~~~
papln
Your comment does not contradict parent, it supports it.

------
DoubleGlazing
This is pretty normal, especially when their are lots of rival companies doing
the same thing. I used to work for a food ordering company and they felt they
had no choice but to advertise their own name as rivals were using their brand
name as a keyword. It wasn't cheap either, some weeks it could be as much as a
few hundred euro.

Personally, I feel it crosses am ethical line. As a customer if I search for
foo.bar and the first couple of result are for rival companies then Google
isn't providing me with the service it claims it would. And as a business I
would be forced to effectively double spend. Firstly, I would be spending time
and effort on SEO to get to the top of the rankings, and then spent again to
get to the top of the adverts that are obfuscating the real search results.

I know Google is a for-profit company operating in a free economy, but they
still have to be ethical in what they do.

~~~
jiveturkey
I'm not buying it. Why does Google "have to be" ethical?

If Google has to be ethical, doesn't Uber have to be ethical?

If Google and Uber have to be ethical, doesn't Blackwater/Xe/Academi have to
be ethical?

~~~
taborj
Since we're in a free market economy, we really _should_ be forcing companies
to be ethical by voting with our dollars (or, in today's online work, site
visits).

The problem is not enough people give it enough thought.

> If Google and Uber have to be ethical, doesn't Blackwater/Xe/Academi have to
> be ethical?

The problem with this argument is Blackwater/Xe/Academi serve a specific niche
that inherently straddles the line of ethicality. They're not akin to Google
or Uber; they don't have "general purpose" products that everyone needs/wants.
Ergo it's not as black and white as Google and Uber (which in itself isn't as
black and white as we'd like to think).

~~~
jiveturkey
Wait, do I hear you correctly?

Google and Uber have to be ethical because we expect them to be, and
Blackwater does not have to be ethical because we don't expect it of them?

~~~
taborj
> Wait, do I hear you correctly?

Not precisely. Mainly I'm saying we can more easily affect Google and Uber's
ethics than we can Blackwater, because we're generally not going after the
services that Blackwater provides. Add to the fact that Blackwater doesn't
always operate within societal norms, and the issue becomes complex.

Is it ethical to kill someone? What if that someone is killing other people?
Google and Uber don't have to worry about that. Blackwater does.

------
TekMol

        this site lets companies advertise
        against us using our brand
    

Well, to be fair the "site" lets anybody advertise for any search term.

Would it be better if some companies would be entitled to exlusively advertise
for certain terms?

I don't think so.

~~~
otherme123
Google knows what they're doing. Being a private enterprise, they can block
you from "buying" the competence name (TM) to put your own product.

Just try to buy "Google" term to advertise your business (let's say you are
Dropbox and want to buy "Google" and "Drive")... Yeah, they had it blocked.
But you can buy "one drive", which is unfair albeit legal. It's not as the
terms in dispute were "project", "management", "time", "team". It's the brand
name, which incidentally in the case of Basecamp has zero relation with what
they're selling.

If Google wanted a fair play they would come with something akin to the Trade
Mark laws built in house.

~~~
jayalpha
"If Google wanted a fair play they would come with something akin to the Trade
Mark laws built in house."

Said by someone who has no idea about trademarks. Trademark. For what class?
For what country?

Most trademarks have only a few classes. So you may be allowed to sell stuff
because trademark XYZ only covers shoes. You can't sell computers with "Apple"
brand but nobody can forbid you to sell apple (to eat). Who owns a brand?
Budweiser beer is owned by Budweiser USA but they don't have the trademark in
most European countries. This would get extraordinary complex very quickly.

------
lordnacho
Another interesting one is trustpilot. According to web shop people I know,
it's well known that people who complain require less motivation to write than
satisfied customers. So the model is basically that you're forced to pay them
to motivate positive reviews to compensate for the negatives.

~~~
TrickyRick
Or it's just that most interactions with stores are really mediocre. If I buy
something in a store, it was reasonably priced, it gets delivered within the
promised time frame and is not damaged then that's very much par for the
course in terms of what I expect from a webshop. It's not "5/5 AMAZING store,
will always buy things from here!", it's just so much easier to slide
downwards on that scale than move up.

~~~
lordnacho
Exactly. It's just that in the internet era you can have a restaurant with a
queue of everyone who's ever gotten food poisoned, or served late, or served
the wrong food, standing outside forever. The thousands of satisfied customers
aren't visible.

And TP's business model is to build that queue of dissatisfied people so that
you have to pay to compensate for it.

~~~
fouc
That's a good point, perhaps ratings need a way to indicate the the number of
satisfied customers instead of keeping them invisible.

We are already used to seeing the number of reviews next to a rating score,
but maybe we can add an additional "total number of customers" or a percentage
of reviews-to-customers.

------
lordnacho
This article motivated me to figure out why I see those ads in the first
place. If you're on uBlock Origin, go to the dashboard and look for a filter
list under "annoyances". Mine was switched off.

------
rahkiin
When I search in the Dutch App Store for 'Coolblue', a big online retailer
here, the first thing I see is an ad for the 'Bol.com' app, the biggest online
retailer here (our Amazon-like website, with the same shady partner
practices). Below that is the actual Coolblue app.

So this is what happens when the competitor pays more for ads on your own name
than you do.

~~~
Shivetya
however in this came, basecamp, is close to generic and easily associated with
products and activities.

~~~
oarsinsync
From [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/base-
camp](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/base-camp):

> base camp, noun, a main encampment providing supplies, shelter, and
> communications for persons engaged in wide-ranging activities, as exploring,
> reconnaissance, hunting, or mountain climbing.

Meanwhile from [https://basecamp.com/features](https://basecamp.com/features):

> Basecamp combines all the tools teams need to get work done in a single,
> streamlined package. With everything in one place, your team will know what
> to do, where things stand, and where to find things they need.

I'm not sure 'basecamp' as a generic word has anything to do with project
management, or any of the other things that basecamp.com product offers.

------
3xblah
There was a time, before Google existed, when the "top result" was not assumed
to be the "best" result. The researcher was expected to examine more than just
the first entry in a list of citations. Google advertising targets users who
place considerable confidence in the ordering of results, despite not knowing
the details of the algorithm used.

~~~
SamBam
Google was always extremely proud of the fact that, unlike Yahoo, Altavista,
etc., you couldn't buy the top spots. The organic results looked very
different from the couple one-line ads at the top or side.

Now, if I search without an ad block for something like "screws" I get

1\. Two ads that look like search results (same 3-4 line excerpt, same links
into internal results, same "more" dropdown), except for a little box that
says "Ad". This takes up 1/2 of my screen.

2\. A full-screen height worth of map and links to physical stores (have no
idea if they're paid for or not)

3\. My results

------
philshem
previous posts:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20871677](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20871677)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874268](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874268)

and direct link to twitter thread:

[https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016](https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016)

------
Brendinooo
I think the only thing at fault here is Google's UI. I don't have a problem
with companies having two tracks to the front page of Google (organic and paid
placement), but the ads take up so much space at the top, and they are so
poorly differentiated from organic results.

My analogy is the yellow pages, which is two things: A vehicle for ads, and a
reference list of phone numbers. The sections are distinguished, by
white/yellow pages for business/personal numbers, and with ads standing apart
and looking different on the page. And YP never screwed with alpha order. They
can make their money on ads and you can use the phone book for its raison
d'être: a list of businesses/people.

------
diffeomorphism
> this site lets companies advertise against us using our brand

As they should. If your product is an alternative to $bigbrand then this gives
you the best visibility.

> When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own
> brand name, you’re forced to pay up if you want to be found. It’s a
> shakedown. It’s ransom.

No. Your brand is the first actual result. You might argue that four is a bit
much or that it should be clearer that these are adds (can you even see those
when running an ad blocker?), but "our competitors are running advertisements"
is definitely not a shakedown or ransom.

~~~
saagarjha
Advertisements look like real search results, though, and being able to bury a
company just because you're paying money to run ads using their name ( _not_ a
generic search term) is just bad behavior.

~~~
diffeomorphism
Last paragraph. If 4 ads is "burying", what about 3? 2? 1?

------
sm4rk0
Why do people still use Google?
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=basecamp](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=basecamp)

~~~
The_rationalist
Why should I use an inferior product (duck) on so many metrics? If you really
want to disable ads and tracking uBlock Origin fixe the issue.

~~~
theshrike79
80% of the time DDG results are "good enough" and I'm contributing zero data
to the Alphabet Empire.

If the first page of DDG doesn't yield results it's about a second's work to
do the same search, but with !g appended anywhere in the query.

~~~
torstenvl
A process which is unnecessarily cumbersome. If DDG wanted people to use it,
they'd make the top five or so bang switches clickable. Click and it redoes
the current search pretended by a bang.

~~~
StavrosK
Ooh, seeing "if they wanted people to use it" and "clickable" in the same
sentence gave me feelings. To me, having to take my hands off the keyboard is
the exact opposite of usable.

~~~
torstenvl
Okay...

If you scroll with your keyboard, how do you get back to the search field more
quickly than with the mouse?

If you scroll with the mouse, how is a one-click solution _with the device you
already have in your hand_ not more efficient?

BL: DDG makes bang switches unwieldy. They should fix that.

EDIT: The / key is DDG's shortcut for going back to the search box. That helps
a little. Doesn't mean that a clickable button wouldn't help usability a ton.
Additionally, since editing a search is probably the most common use case
(rather than replacing the search terms entirely), going to the search box
should start with the cursor at the beginning or end of the box, rather than
with the whole field highlighted.

~~~
StavrosK
I use Vimium, I don't scroll, I just press the letter of the field I want to
get to. However, pressing the / key will take you back to the search box no
matter where on the page you are.

~~~
bussierem
So because you use Vim to navigate the web, you think DDG shouldn't add better
mouse UX that will most likely increase their conversion rate and make the
site better for everyone else?

~~~
StavrosK
No, because I use Vim to navigate the web I think the mouse is less usable. I
think DDG shouldn't add clickable Google redirects because they aren't that
necessary and are an antipattern.

------
asah
Could adblockers disable/filter these specific types of ads ("brand ransom"),
including competitors?

Naive algorithm: if (search term exactly matches the domain of one of the ads)
{ disable_all_search_ads(); }

(Extend to handle partial matches, alternate spellings, etc)

------
chrischen
The Google tax is real. Merchants see it as a cost of business, consumers are
insulated from it to the point where all they see is a wonderful “ _free_ ”
product from Google.

The reality is if we didn’t have to do defensive ads on our organic results my
company could probably offer 30% lower pricing. But because there’s no easy
way to discriminate against google ad clickers we have to charge the Google
tax to everyone, as most businesses do.

The end result is that nobody cries foul to the search monopoly and its cost
to society. Google gets to charge monopolistic pricing without anyone
noticing.

------
PostOnce
And they wonder why we block ads.

If I search for medicine, maybe they'll show me an ad for homeopathy. Maybe
I'm gullible.

If I search Reliable Product X and I get an ad for Garbage Product Y...

Eventually, doesn't this de-value Google's own brand as being the place where
you go to find... what you typed into the search bar?

~~~
buboard
It does! But adblockers work in google's favor here: they make it impossible
for competing ad agencies to grow

Google doesn't have an awesome ads platform at this time. They just have no
competition

------
Angostura
Might trademark law have something to say about this practice?

~~~
howard941
In the US the only things that matter in trademark are Lanham Act matters,
specifically whether there's a likelihood of confusion (ignoring for the
moment active use in commerce and other infringement elements). Simply
returning a competitor's ad when searching someone else's trade name isn't
enough (citation needed).

You might ask whether state bar ethics rules have a different take? And the
answer is yes, with results all over the place. This DDG search may be of
interest:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22bar%22+buying+competitors+keywo...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22bar%22+buying+competitors+keyword&t=ffab&ia=web)

------
carty76ers
It’s true. When I searched for a Tier 1, popular university by their acronym
(XYZ), 2-3 other unrelated Tier 2 results were in the top above it.

------
tokai
I tried to find garmin basecamp, but this IT company is squatting the results
with an add. How could google let some no-name steal from garmin?

~~~
laputan_machine
I get [https://www.garmin.com/en-
US/software/basecamp/](https://www.garmin.com/en-US/software/basecamp/) as the
first result when I search for 'Garmin Basecamp', so I'm not sure what your
point is.

I'd also argue that Basecamp (the service) is more known than Garmin Basecamp,
_especially_ in these circles, DHH is definitely not some 'no-name' :)

~~~
tokai
My point is that Basecamp does not have a just claim to be no. 1 when you
search for the term basecamp.

~~~
laputan_machine
Which isn't the point of the initial complaint from Basecamp, their point is
that they _are_ the number 1 search, but even being the number 1 search places
them below several spaces advertising for 'Basecamp'. If Garmin were the
number 1 space, perhaps the argument would hold less weight, sure :)

~~~
tokai
They are not number one for me. Nor is Garmin. A nonprofit organisation
working with student living spaces are no. 1 for me. No one is owed any
position on google results, as they are not universal.

~~~
m45t3r
The point is, when they're the no. 1 result, they're kind not because there is
two or three competitors that shows up as ads above the search results.

------
chrischen
In my case a competitor used almost the same name us, ran ads against our
brand, and google wouldn’t do anything about it.

------
rdlecler1
What do you expect? Big companies like this don’t exactly have slogans
proclaiming “don’t be evil”

------
dwild
I have seen worse, in the escape room industry, some even use the name of the
competitor in the title. I'm pretty sure they were able to get them down the
few times I saw it happens, but it was certainly not quick nor easy.

------
macinjosh
I can't find my tiny violin for Jason anywhere; too bad. :(

This is the most entitled blog post I have ever seen. As much as I personally
dislike Google et al. I don't believe the ownership of a trademark or even
just a brand entitles you to be the top of page for that word.

Also... if someone is searching for Basecamp specifically (i.e. using the
search team "basecamp") they likely aren't going to click an ad for something
they aren't looking for.

I have a very hard time feeling bad for Basecamp in this situation.

------
Porthos9K
Can't Basecamp trademark their name and then pursue a trademark claim against
Google, or is it too late for that?

------
sulam
FWIW Amazon does exactly the same thing. If we want the buy box for our own
brand, we have to advertise.

------
ShrinkingWild
There's no force involved here, this is just Basecamp being upset they now
have to pay Google for what they do.

Basecamp made a value judgement that the value google provides through its
search results is worth the price of paying for ads. This is revealed
preference in action, Google has done nothing wrong here other than be the
best at what they do.

------
ddtaylor
They were not forced.

~~~
jstummbillig
Of course they were forced, if being forced means "having force applied to".
Did they HAVE to do it? No. Were they forced to? Yes, of course.

Much in the same way that you don't _have_ to work but are very much forced
to.

~~~
eloisant
Their choice is either do it, or lose a significant portion of their business.
For some business, maybe not Basecamp, it would mean going out of business if
you don't have enough visibility on Google.

Because Google has a quasi-monopoly on Internet search, something that ideally
should be a neutral infrastructure service.

~~~
makomk
Google also use their near-monopoly in web browsing, obtained by leveraging
their search monopoly, to hide and downplay direct URLs to sites so that
people don't know any other way to get there than via their search.

------
ncmncm
This is not ransom, it's protection money, or monopoly rent in economics
jargon.

For an amusing experience, look up "programming questions answered" on Google
and Bing and see where Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange show up. If they do.
Google serves up a "hongkiat" site that mentions them, but you would need to
step deeper that I did to actually find either.

Does this mean that SO and SE are refusing to be coerced?

