When I joined Google in 2015, one of my work buddies / teammates was someone who had transferred in from having spent nearly ten years on the Ads side, from a GCAS (Global Clients & Agency Solutions). This org doesn't exist in the same form anymore, but at that time it was the pinnacle of Google's ad sales, with white glove treatment for the top xx global spenders (advertising agencies, who consumer products firms, a couple of travel aggregators -- you get the idea). We talked a lot, about a lot of things, and one tidbit I crisply remember was her noting that it was common knowledge that Ads had the ability to "turn the dials" on various things, including in Search, to affect business metrics.
Reading Ed's post reminded me of this, and whether (or to what extent) it's true, it certainly was conventional wisdom at the time.
> Ads had the ability to "turn the dials" on various things, including in Search, to affect business metrics
Around the ‘10s I had speculated to my company’s leadership that we should consider devoting a couple of positions for google banner advertising to our site for a while to see if it would improve search engine results. I always felt like the algorithm may have been tuned to give a little bump to sites participating in revenue streams for google. We never did it, but I bet we might have seen some small indications of result position improvements.
Calling something "baseless speculation" is just kind of meaningless lawyer-talk that sounds impressive, without having to actually provide any specifics.
I interpret Google's response as "you're not 100% correct in every way, but we don't want to tell you which 95% you're right about".
This sort of lawyer talk is depressingly common. Like, a social network tells you "you've violated our community standards" but won't say how you did it.
Calling something "inaccurate" is utter BS. In an actual legal proceeding, the parties are enjoined to speak "with specificity," meaning that kind of crap isn't tolerated. But in a public statement, anything goes, apparently.
You can see why they do it: if they did answer with specificity, people would just argue about the details. Calling it "inaccurate" is equivalent to, "sit down and shut up."
I am now conditioned to believe that any time a lawyer or a corporation crafts a statement, it has the bare minimum truth value required by the semantics of the statement.
In this case "baseless speculation" would mean "it's all true, but you can't prove it" and "inaccurate" means "one minor detail is a bit off."
It doesn't seem like "lawyer talk" to me. The original article really is "baseless" in that it utterly fails to establish, or even attempt to establish, any factual basis for its claims. Fatally it does not establish the key claim that search quality actually got worse.
Actually, this is a response to a response; it’s the author of the original article responding to an open letter from Google that challenged some of the points of his piece.
dang editorialised the previous headline into a Betteridge Law question - "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no" - when it in fact is not such a thing, and strongly makes its case.
But we checked directly with Ian Betteridge on Mastodon (in a local post) and he said "I love Ed's pieces so he gets a thumbs up from me." FWIW.
Mildly interesting that the author runs a media relations company in SF.
On the one hand, I am sympathetic to the general perspective of the original article.
On the other hand, that the same person is writing “hit pieces” and running a media relations company bears a certain resemblance to protection rackets of yore
The implication is that the writer is using their bona fides as a corporate media relations expert to craft a compelling narrative targeting a person with a lucrative corporate position. It just so happens that this position is reliant on their political skills rather than their technical qualifications because by all metrics they are terrible at doing what it is they position requires, so instead of watching their reputation blow up and their ability to keep pretending their skillset isn't limited to 'talk about the good old days at the management consulting firm we at together sucking blood from the productive parts of society' with the CEO, that person will pay some kind of protection fee or do whatever dance the writer wants them to do to get them to stop.
As fun as it is to outline such a scheme, it seems incredibly implausible, since a person who's entire income is reliant on corporate media relations wouldn't bite the hand that feeds them to make a few dollars from a corporate enshittifier. Also, the path from 'hit piece' to 'rolling in the dough' seems kind of long and windy, and there are a few steps in there that I don't really get how they would work.
This is why the OP just insinuated the whole thing instead of saying it -- because when you write it down fully it sounds ridiculous.
classic protection racket: a guy with a blog rolling up to a millionaire and breaking his kneecaps. You'll never work in this town again, buddy! I've got a blog! The millionaire calls the cops but they won't help because they're too busy chasing dogs with their cars, so he calls his other millionaire friends but they're too busy teaching LLMs how to sell banner ads or teaching self-driving cars how to hit dogs. The millionaire gnashes his teeth and rends his garments. But then he remembers! The law! He calls up a lawyer and says, "this guy with a blog is slandering me, and he broke my kneecaps! I've tried everything and nothing works!" The lawyer thinks for a moment and responds, "that sounds like libel to me, not slander." Crestfallen at the news that he mixed up two very similar concepts, the millionaire settles for having a highly-paid job ruining one of the world's foremost search engines, and accepts the reality that no one in San Francisco has more power than a guy with a blog.
In all seriousness, written defamation is a tort if you can prove that the allegations about you are both factually false (not just "opinions I don't like" or "not the full story" - even the statement "X is a Nazi" might not be defamatory) and materially damaging. It doesn't sound like either of those is the case.
If this guy loses a $10M/year job over these posts, his lawyer may well go through them to see if they are defamatory.
the organic results, which are there somewhere, you can eventually see them in Search under all the spam and ads if you can distinguish them on the page
Reading Ed's post reminded me of this, and whether (or to what extent) it's true, it certainly was conventional wisdom at the time.
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