Interesting assessment of the situation; the problem is that very few advertisers or agencies really look at AdWords in those terms, preferring instead to play the game, crooked rules and all. And ultimately (if they subscribe to the 'quantity over quality of the audience' view), they don't have a huge amount of choice. Yahoo is losing share; Live Search doesn't reach nearly as many, and the other players are even further behind. What is needed to improve the situation is more competition, but that competition relies on consumers knowing the difference between search engines, and seems a long way off.

I believe that ask jeeves is essentially a google adsense partner, type in "hosting" into their engine and the top 4 results are syndicated google ads - not sure how using ask jeeves is going to help google advertisers, although it certainly will help google!

does the ad revenue at ElReg come from.. do you give certain clients preference depending on what they'll pay you? ..you're probably very upright and correct and never shade the truth of hit returns from ads etc..

i know you everyone else doesn't call their sales process an Auction but... semantics aside.. is there much difference between what the GoogleMonsta does and what every other SalesLizard type does other than the scale of the operation?

'You give us this much and you'll get that much.. or thereabouts.' Standard sales proceedure writ large..

You pays your money and you take your chances.

Oh, and it has always been that way!

EVIL GOOGLE TAKING OVER THE INTERNET!

Drastic assumption IMO.

Maybe the advertisers actually get good results as compared to the money spent. In a market driven business, ask the market if they like google ad words, not a bunch of google-conspiracy-theorists.

Of course the news that all is well is not really news and the vulture would likely not report that.

Gord

'You give us this much and you'll get that much.. or thereabouts.' Standard sales proceedure writ large..

This is the point - they _aren't_ saying what you get for your money, and some people are getting better value than other for poorly defined reasons*

OK, normal advertisers do preferential treatment as well, but in a way that seems more logical

Only in the ElReg comments section can the dangers of Google AdWords be blamed on Microsoft.

"You sign up for something that you cannot verify, and when Google have a bad quarter you suddenly find yourself 50% more dollars out of pocket because they tweak some algorithm setting to prioritize higher value adds - that's bad."

If, in fact, that were happening, then I agree that would be a bad thing. However there is no evidence that indicates anything of that kind happens, and I've never seen anything like that happen in all the years I've been an AdWords advertiser. We spend over $100,000 per month with Google, and, believe me, we would notice if that suddenly went up to $150,000 just because Google was having a "bad quarter". (Has that even happened, yet?)

And it's not easy but it's definitely possible to verify what is happening with your AdWords spend. It's called "tracking". I wrote our company's program to do just that, and we can account for literally every penny we spend with Google. And I have never seen any of the behavior they are being accused of.

And let's ease off on the "monopoly" term, shall we? There are literally hundreds of competitors out there ... they just happen to suck at delivering relevant search results, so people CHOOSE to use Google.

Don't confuse the market share that Google has EARNED with other giganto-corp "monopolies" who use coercive contracts to keep competitors out of the shops. The current MS and the old AT&T come immediately to mind, and both are being/have been punished for their abusiveness.

Google is where they are because they make the best product of its kind on the planet. They do not and can not "police what people read on the internet". They simply provide their own vision of search results from their own web address, which is easy to NOT type into the address bar, and people choose to place advertisements with them. There's nothing wrong with that.

I'm sure someone at some time in the future will be able to gain market share, just as soon as they can figure out how to do better at providing more relevant search results. Lord knows Microsoft and Yahoo have been throwing lots and lots of money at the challenge, but ... their results STILL suck when compared to Google. And you'll note that they aren't jumping on this "monopoly" witch hunt bandwagon ... they KNOW Google has gotten to where they are because of hard work and fair play, and that's still not illegal.

If Google "become a monopoly with an agenda and suddenly decide to filter what people can see on the web", then I agree again ... it WOULD be a real problem. But that's just paranoia. They have never shown any signs of keeping people from discovering any manner of crap. It's just that most of the crap doesn't make it to Page One ... and that is the way a good search engine works.

Since when is Google ( or any other entity) entitled to rule what a "good" ad is?? A bad ad is reflected in resulting low clicks, purchases or whatever and ultimately lower income for the ad creator. This in turn will naturally eliminate those who offer either bad quality ads or services.

On the same note if this system is indeed as fair as stated, then we won't see a backlash by unhappy smaller advertisers shunning the services as they can't compete with the big advertising guys. Likewise an article stating the process could be deemed unfair will likewise be considered by those testing it's assertions. If Google is indeed being a little more evil than appropriate then the market will ultimately bring it to bare. I would suggest this is already taking place in established markets already, with growth being driven by geographic expansion. There is only one direction to head in the event of them reaching 90% market share …… and it’s not up!

It doesn't matter how many competitors you have, what defines a monopoly is how much market power you have. It doesn't matter how good your products are or how things came to be that way, 90% market share is a monopoly, pure and simple.

For a few pennies I managed to get my site www.aceruser.com (shameless plug) appear on the first page whenever someone searched for Acer Aspire One. And I only have to pay if someone clicks through. As this is a personal hobby site there is no way I could afford to advertise it any other way.

Can’t say fairer than that.

"I've been at the bottom of the results, but through learning how to write better ad copy and learning how to provide a more credible experience to those who have clicked on my ads, my ads are now at the top of the results, and I pay less for them, too."

"BTW, it's "black" because there is little value in letting ignorant or malicious advertisers know exactly how to game their system. Does even that part of it make sense to you?"

Is #1 not a more polite way of saying #2?

Market share of what? Ads distributed? Ads Purchased? Ad purchasers? I see the number floating around but not really defined. Market power is not just a function of how much market dominance you have, but the barriers to entry for other options. And there really isn't any barrier, as an advertiser, to setup affiliations for advertising and cross-linking with related websites.

Google Search doesn't exactly have a lock-in, either. If they are discovered to be censoring and we aren't happy about it, there isn't any need to keep using it to the exclusion of other search engines. And it is these eyes that Google ads depend on.

Even if Google is the only big player in town, there really is nothing explicitly requiring you to use the big player to get the job done that I can see. At least not yet. Sure the economies of scale work for Google in this case. But I find it difficult to believe that the only way to ever get your message out is to fork over cash to Google. No matter what narrowly defined marketshare they are said to possess. It isn't like legacy matters in this market, really. Divesting in Google doesn't mean you lose all the repeat customers you've already acquired.

"If you look at examples of Googles behaviour in china, I think you will easily stumble across the evidence that would contradict this statement."

Aside from them being the most open about the fact that they are censoring the point remains that Google cannot censor more than what is required by government and allowed by people.

If other searches exist that censor less of what people don't want censored, people will naturally move to include those searches because nothing binds them to use any one Search.

In the case of China, I don't think Google is dominant. I believe Baidu is. And they are all forced to censor results to the government's satisfactions. But Google actively tells you that results are censored. So in censoring it is one of the most open.

Apparently, quality now means "makes money for Google". So ads with better quality make more money for Google and thus get preferential treatment over those ads with lesser quality, i.e., make less money for Google.