I usually shake my head at these rants, but<p>The real problem here is not the ads per se. It's that they are not marked well, so users are tricked into clicking them. I've seen the ads degrade over all these years from clearly obvious, to plausible-deniability obvious. This is actively harmful to users.<p>I find basecamp to be pretty mediocre but I'm glad they've raised this issue in a public enough way that Google was forced to respond. Too bad their response just cemented the notion that they don't care about users anymore. You do have to laugh when they say with a straight face, "it's for the users".<p>Basecamp:<p>> 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. But at least we can have fun with it. Search for Basecamp and you may see this attached ad.<p>Google:<p>> To provide users with the most relevant ads, ...<p>implying that ads are a service for the users. lol. It's official, Google sucks.
Can anyone see if you can put an ad for DuckDuckGo for looking up "Google"?<p>If not, this is Google not playing by their own rules.<p>Edit: looking up DuckDuckGo on Google, it's weird to see a DDG ad top result and DDG organic as second result on Google. There's no competition but money will still go to Google.
It's incredible how entitled people are. Explaining why your product is better then basecamp is a perfectly legitimate use of an ad. It's something that people who google "basecamp" rather then typing in the URL might be interested in.
This is a Good Thing. Competitors with more money are going to do everything they can to get their product info in front of curious eyeballs. You <i>want</i> them to do it via obvious paid advertising rather than black hat SEO.<p>And contrary to Jason Fried, I think the ads are well differentiated, and it's easy to skim past them to the first organic search result. Though you could argue that there are too many of them. Two or three seems more reasonable than four, which pushes the organic results pretty low on the page.
Keyword advertising's entire premise is based on advertising against keywords, the system is working as designed, and I do not believe Basecamp needs to buy an ad if someone is already searching for "basecamp".<p>On the other hand, if the ad looked like an organic search result, that is something I'd totally object to. If the ad is clearly marked, doesn't confuse the user and works as designed, especially without maligning or baselessly smearing the targeted keyword, is it really a shakedown?
I think part of the problem is that folks didn't notice when Google transitioned from a search engine to an ad engine. For a long time we collectively thought of Google as a search engine, and a damned fine one it was. But we missed the switcheroo, and now we get pissed off when we try to treat an ad engine as if it is the old Google search engine.
I hate how the ads people confuse as actual results... Stuff like this happens on other search engines too, not just a Google problem.<p>someone I know was looking for a open source office suite and downloaded one that had adware installed. Same software, but with bundled extra junk, so they just made a new installer and splash page for it. So people don’t realize it’s not the official site but see it as the first result.<p>Then someone was running keywords for a broker for retirement accounts but when you clicked it you got a fake anti-virus wanting you to call a boiler room in India pretending they are from Microsoft. Non tech savvy people including the elderly falls for this stuff mistakenly. I see it as a form of elder abuse. I had to help a relative clean up after that and they had to also contact their bank.<p>I understand advertising is so they can provide free services but I wish advertising was done more ethical. However with ad blockers some news sites want you to pay too, which I don’t really want a subscription for every news site I might see a link to a article for. I used to be against ad blockers but with all this shady stuff I don’t blame people anymore for using them. So don’t really want to pay for things, but wish the ads would more transparent and sites could offer a reasonable priced premium option to remove ads and some extra features.<p>I know people like to hate on Google lately and other big tech, but I feel they have contributed a lot to society and even open sourced a lot of great stuff such as the V8 Engine used by Chrome and Node. I just wish advertising was better and if anything goes wrong actually being able to get ahold of someone for help would be great, especially when paying for stuff. I think at one point the advertisements used to have a yellow background instead of blending in with search results, but that was probably like a decade ago if my memory is right.<p>Seems like every few weeks there's some support horror story with Google, someone had issues with their Google Fi, their Android app on the market, someone recently claimed they were banned from Adwords for using the Apple Card, etc... So I'm a bit conflicted when it comes to companies as I like some things they do but not a fan of others. Same with Microsoft, but they have opened up more as a company supporting open source and Windows 10 looks really great even though I wish it had a *nix foundation under the hood. So personally not a huge fan of Windows, but I sure like Xbox and TypeScript. Even Microsoft Office on a Mac is popular.<p>So I guess I just pick and chose and not really loyal to any tech company. Also I have the React Chrome extension which lights up blue for sites using it, and so ironic Twitter uses React, a technology built by Facebook which I see them as competitors. Tech seems like a weird industry sometimes. But then again the iPhone has parts made by Samsung in it. I guess the same happens in the car industry, where some companies use each others parts. Netflix uses AWS, while Amazon is also offering it's own competing video service.
We had a competition using our name in ads, we sent complain to google legal team as we have trademark on our company name. It fixed the issue of competitors not using our name in the content of ads but they still show ads when our name is googled. At one point we just gave up to fight with it.
Isn't this trademark infringement? Or perhaps it's time we extended some IP law to protect smaller companies against bigger ones for a change.
Maybe I'm just not in a targeted locale, but the "basecamp" serp on Google for me looks totally reasonable:<p><a href="https://imgur.com/AVRTl60" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/AVRTl60</a><p>If anything, this is an over-commitment to a single interpretation of that query, which could also be about a variety of different topics, including climbing, an Airstream trailer, and others which appear farther down the page.
<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=basecamp" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/?q=basecamp</a><p>Yields Basecamp's website as first result on desktop[1] and, hell, even gives a Wikipedia snippet when on mobile[2]!<p>Thanks, DuckDuckGo!<p>[1] <a href="https://i.imgur.com/XBI4Wxs.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/XBI4Wxs.jpg</a><p>[2] <a href="https://i.imgur.com/BaPuiUO.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/BaPuiUO.png</a><p>DuckDuckGo > Google