It's a well known fact that in Las Vegas casinos, the odds favor the "house" (i.e., the dealer versus the gambler) in a sufficiently big way that every few years casino operators can afford to literally blow up a multi-block property to build a new theme park based casino.
In an interesting article by Robert X. Cringely, a great story teller, and the same guy who wrote one of my favorite books, 'Accidental Empires,' Cringely compares Google to the Vegas house, in the process showing how Google's AdWords program MAY border on violating the "do no evil" credo of the company. I say may because Google provides little transparency on how their algorithms work, leaving users to speculate based on what they observe.
In this particular case, a very successful user of the service ran a little experiment that set off all sorts of alarm bells for the user (and me, as I have had a fair bit of experience with Google AdWords from a campaign creation and management perspective).
Two comments before sharing an excerpt. One, read the article, if for no other reason than it raises some interesting questions about what level of transparency and/or disclosure users can and should expect from commerce oriented web services and where users should assume, "buyer beware."
Two, this article is yet another indicator of our cultural pattern of building up heroes and then taking them down once they get too successful. Not editorializing on whether Google merits the attacks, more on the nature of things, as Google has gotten tarred an feathered a bit in the public's eyes of late.
Here is the excerpt:
I have no idea what the heck is happening here, but my friendly reader, who makes his living from this stuff, has a theory. He believes the Google AdWords algorithm tries to do many things and one of those is to encourage advertisers to pay more for words. By modifying something that in turn modifies the results, Google is effectively encouraging advertisers to change their behavior.
So increasing the amount per word DID increase sales, though not enough to justify the additional cost. Google's revenue per word, of course, went up by 10X. But dropping the price by more than half was greeted by a huge decrease in clicks-through that could only have resulted from some unknown resultant change in GOOGLE's behavior, given that all other variables were constant.
If that's indeed what's happening, it isn't illegal and to some might not even be unethical (I guess) but it feels just a little bit EVIL.
