
Google Uses Its Search Engine to Hawk Its Products - chandanrai
http://www.wsj.com/articles/google-uses-its-search-engine-to-hawk-its-products-1484827203
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mattnewton
I'm wary of the methodology here. If a reporter typically on the google beat
is doing searches from their account on "phones" after using the same device
or account as the one they used to research for their last article on the
pixel, it stands to reason google might put a pixel ad in there. I really do
feel like this is being overstated; for example, I searched "watch" and
received no ads for android wear at all, (mostly watches for women actually,
which I recently bought as a gift).

That being said, the fact that this can happen at all is worth talking about.
The magazine and newspaper companies didn't run hardware buisinesses on the
side like this.

Edit: It seems like the third party SEMrush was used for the analytics, so
that's certainly better than just typing it into google a bunch of times. I
was being unfair to the WSJ. However I still can't reproduce the watch
findings on their site
[https://www.semrush.com/info/Watch](https://www.semrush.com/info/Watch)

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stockliasteroid
Just a note that the article does say that once the WSJ brought this to
Google's attention the ad results changed dramatically. So checking now is
probably not representative of the state of things when SEMrush did the
initial research.

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mattnewton
That's probably the most interesting bit.

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kyleschiller

      While Google pays itself for the ads, the strategy does have a cost: Google forgoes potential revenue from ads it displaces.
    

I'm worried about the Google monopoly, but this in particular feels pretty
reasonable to me. I don't see how it's disanalogous to a tv network buying ads
on it's own channel.

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mutatio
I wonder what the effect is on AdWords bids for keywords Google is targeting.
Does the average bid cost increase, effectively negating the cost of Google
advertising on Google? (Thus due to economics, the ads become free, or reduced
in cost).

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lnanek2
Google has always shoved its own items above the real results before. Search
for a stock quote and you'll get Google Finance and not the top result right
under your search bar. The real top sites like Yahoo Finance, MarketWatch,
etc. must hate that. Not that odd to see them displacing ads as well now since
they already displace search results in their favor.

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menacingly
It's funny, I've switched to Bing as my daily driver, and I can't shake the
feeling that there's a pro-MS slant to the results.

I feel like a programming search is slightly more likely to return .net
results, or a charting question is going to have an Excel reference in the
first few pages.

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coolspot
Wow, such a shocker! Who would think that a company would integrate their
services into each other?

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wheelerwj
Everyone, thats why antitrust laws exist.

