I've been doing a lot of thinking about this topic recently, so it's nice to see a discussion on HN.
AdWords ad placement is determined by a mix of quality score and bid size. It's good that they're using quality of links to influence ad ranking, but here's what troubles me:
We're allowing money to influence information salience.
You could say this is how the world works, and I can't deny it. Money = power = eyeballs. But is this a good thing? Is this a dynamic we should be actively supporting? I honestly don't know.
Possible counterargument (because I can't help but play Devil's Advocate against myself):
Maybe the auction model is about determining the true "market price" of an ad position, in which case maybe this is a good thing?
Is there any hypothetical search model in which money doesn't influence information salience? High performers for competitive searches in organic search have usually invested heavily in SEO and/or brand-building too. Open reviews can be astroturfed and social likes can be astroturfed or incentivised. At least with "sponsored results" it's blatant, and declared.
Ironically, considering the original article starts off by complaining about its effect on search results, the most-free-from-financial-influence way of ranking information salience is probably the Zagat review model (selling aggregated secret shopper info)
I don't claim that advertising is the only vector of influence, and I realize it is possibly the least worst version (because of labeling), but that hardly seems like a reason to consider it a Good Thing.
Your argument seems to be that if we get rid of sponsored search results, this will push advertisers to invest more heavily in less visible forms of opinion manipulation. This is actually a very interesting viewpoint and possibly a valid argument, but it also feels like coercion in some way ("give us ad space or we'll reach you via less ethical methods").
I've been thinking about this too. IMHO, the only reason to advertise that is beneficial for both the consumer and the advertiser, is to provide information. Ie.: our product is objectively better than the competition for certain consumers, but the problem is, they don't know about us. So we create a ad campaign, that will be beneficial for both the consumers and our company.
The goal of connecting people with value-providing businesses is a noble one, but the problem is the difficulty in using advertisements as reliable indicators of a product's merit. Economists have written about the prominence of advertisements as signaling mechanisms, but the bottom line is that I would rather rely on customer reviews than ad placement when it comes to determining if I want to buy a product.
AdWords ad placement is determined by a mix of quality score and bid size. It's good that they're using quality of links to influence ad ranking, but here's what troubles me:
We're allowing money to influence information salience.
You could say this is how the world works, and I can't deny it. Money = power = eyeballs. But is this a good thing? Is this a dynamic we should be actively supporting? I honestly don't know.
Possible counterargument (because I can't help but play Devil's Advocate against myself):
Maybe the auction model is about determining the true "market price" of an ad position, in which case maybe this is a good thing?