Google and its parent company Alphabet are caught in the conundrum that faces all businesses reliant on digital ads. Put ads up high and watch as revenues rise while user experience falls.
A NOTICEABLE RISE IN COMPLAINTS
In the last set of quarterly results, paid Google Search revenue was 2 per cent better than expected. But there has been a noticeable rise in complaints. In November, the Freakonomics podcast called the search engine a set of cheap tricks. A few months earlier, The Atlantic magazine asked whether it was dying.
Moaning about a free service may seem fruitless. Google Search is part of a trillion dollar company powered by digital advertising. Never mind the moonshot business ideas such as storing electricity in salt, Google advertising accounted for almost four-fifths of Alphabet’s revenue in the last quarter.
The company says that its goal is always to provide “ads that are useful”. It points out that not every search result has ads, either. But advert crowding would be more palatable if the basic service was noticeably improving at the same pace.
Google’s example of one enhancement is the fact that search results come with more images now. Of course, this just so happens to be good for advertisers too.
Other improvements have been slower to appear. Content behind paywalls is still not marked as such, for example. Nor is it possible to search for words spoken in a video without a transcript – though a trial is under way in India.
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