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What to Avoid When Choosing a Google Ads Agency

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By Cillian Bracken Conway

If used correctly, Google AdWords can be an extremely profitable online advertising channel for your business. However, PPC advertising on the Google platform is quite technical; specialised knowledge and experience are required to generate consistent ROI.

You likely don’t have the time to learn nor run a Google advertising strategy. This is where a Google Ads agency comes into play.

Like any agency, a Google Ads agency will save you time and effort and potentially make you money. Outsourcing is crucial for any business; you can’t do everything yourself.

Finding the right agency for your organisation will require careful consideration. Below, we’ve listed six major red flags you must watch for when choosing a Google Ads agency.

  1. They “rent” the account to you because the bid strategies are their IP.

There are agencies out there that insist on ownership over bid strategies. When looking for a Google Ads agency, this is a scenario you’d want to avoid. Bid strategies shouldn’t be considered proprietary; look for an agency that’s transparent with your organisation.

2. They don’t provide you with full access or ownership of the account, or worse, they say that they “own” it.

You must have full access and ownership to your Google AdWords account. Agencies have an ethical obligation to give clients complete control. Some don’t, using it as a way to lock clients into their contracts.

Having full access to a Google AdWords account is essential for several reasons. Firstly, you’re able to see if the reported figures the agency gives you is accurate. Secondly, you can remove their access if you decide to terminate the contract.

It’s also important to mention that Google AdWords accounts with longer tenure are preferred. Your account history influences your performance and, ultimately, the ROI you generate from paid search. 

Because an existing account has more data than a new one, Google rewards better quality scores. All that data is also a guide for what hasn’t worked; you’ll be less likely to make the same mistakes.

It’s preferable to maintain control of a Google AdWords account because you don’t want to create new ones. You don’t have the time and effort to continually build a new account every time you change PPC agencies.

Be cautious when signing a contract with an agency; there could be terms and conditions regarding ownership. If you don’t have a Google AdWords account and the agency wants to make you one, ensure it’s done through their Google Ads manager account.

3. They won’t provide a detailed breakdown of how they optimised the account in a given time frame.

One of the most significant red flags to look out for regarding PPC agencies is if things are too stagnant. Successful, well-managed agencies will regularly implement changes and tweaks to optimise ad campaigns. 

This could be several things, for example.

  • Bid changes
  • New or refreshed ad copy
  • Bid adjustments

If an agency tends to run things on autopilot, they’re likely not utilising the ad spend effectively. More specifically, keyword bidding is probably done automatically, which leads to overbidding, resulting in wasted budget and inactive ads.   

4. They won’t provide a detailed breakdown of where your money was spent.

It’s concerning if an agency doesn’t provide a frequent report that tells you how your ad budget is being spent. Many businesses take a hands-off approach when it comes to their Google advertising strategy. They outsource the work to an agency and assume everything is good.

What these organisations don’t realise is that agencies often charge high management fees. It can be as high as 30-40% in some cases. This means less of the ad budget is being used for ads.

To avoid this, agencies should be able to present, at any moment, a budget breakdown to a client. It should become a frequent habit, one that’s expected every week, fortnight, or month. Transparency is the focus here.

5. They don’t focus on important metrics like, you know, conversions and return on investment.

You can only know if your Google Ads benefit your organisation by looking at the data. Metrics like conversions, clicks and return on investment give us insight into the effectiveness of campaigns on the Google Ads platform.

A Google ads agency should provide data-rich reports that detail whether or not ads are profitable. Unfortunately, some don’t; this is a major red flag. Consider bringing up the topic of metrics when you’re interviewing potential candidates.

A Google Analytics account that you can access should be linked to your Google AdWords account. Conversion tracking and event snippets are also a must.

6. They never asked for detailed information on your business, your USP and your industry.

An ad performing well and providing a positive Return on Ad Spend is dependent on more than just the amount that you bid. The context, relevance, and a solid quality score can determine how much you pay for that click. Even the performance of your post-click landing page affects your ad and the cost.

The agency that you hire must understand your business and its unique selling proposition. They must also have verifiable experience within your industry; Google ads is particular and contextual. What works for one field isn’t going to work for another.

When screening and interviewing potential candidates, question them on their industry knowledge. Ask if they have any tangible examples of success with prior clients similar to your organisation.

Conclusion

An effective Google ads strategy is one of the best ways to increase the revenue of your business. It is, unfortunately, something that requires time, effort, and expertise — things that you may not have right now. 

A Google ads agency is a fantastic solution to these concerns.

In this article, we outlined six different red flags that you must consider when choosing an agency. Hopefully, the information detailed provides some value to you and your organisation. 

Are you looking for an agency that can help you grow your business with Google AdWords? Please contact our PPC advertising team today to learn how Vine Digital can help you get more from your advertising spend. 

Glossary

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Pay-per-click (PPC) is an advertising model where advertisers pay a publisher every time their ad is clicked. A publisher could be a search engine, like Google, a website owner, or a network of websites. The publisher hosts the advertiser’s ad to an audience.

Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

A unique selling proposition (USP) is a marketing strategy that informs potential customers how a brand’s product or service is superior to competitors. USPs are used as a tactic to differentiate a brand from the rest of the marketplace. 

Conversion

A conversion is a desired action taken by an individual who has seen an ad or marketing material. It’s a nonspecific umbrella term for any intended goal that a business is hoping to achieve. Conversions can be measured and tracked with analytics and reporting features.

This could be signing up for an email list via a landing page or purchasing a product or service. Other examples include clicking on an ad, visiting a webpage, or watching a video.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Return on investment (ROI) is a financial metric that evaluates the efficiency of an asset, such as an advertising budget. It determines whether something is profitable for a business.

Bid

A bid is the amount of money you’ve committed to an auction for a specific ad space opportunity. In the context of Google ads, every keyword/search term provides an opportunity for you to advertise your business.

Bid Strategy

A bid strategy is a uniquely tailored campaign offered via the Google AdWords platform. Each of these campaigns has a specific goal in mind, such as clicks, impressions, conversions, or views. Businesses will choose the bid strategy that best aligns with their current ad goals.

Negative Keyword

A negative keyword is a keyword that stops your ad from being activated by a specific word or phrase. Negative keywords prevent your ads from being shown to users searching for that particular phrase.

Conversion Tags

Conversion Tags are snippets of code that help with conversion tracking on a website.

By Cillian Bracken Conway

Cillian Bracken Conway is Managing Director at Vine Digital with 15 years of experience working in SEO & PPC. https://www.vinedigital.ie/

 

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Android Phone Sending To Many Ads? How To Get Rid Of Ads On Any Android Device

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Sourced from News18

One of the many reasons why some smartphone users prefer iOS over Android is the clutter-free experience that Apple offers. Android users have often complained about being bombarded with unwarranted ads while using the phone. These ads at times pop on the lock screen of the device even it’s not being used – most common in Android-based skin from manufacturers like Samsung, Xiaomi, Realme, Oppo, and the likes. While some smartphone manufacturers promote ads from their end, this problem is prevalent even in brands like Samsung where the company does not send out ads from their end. If you are an Android user and have faced similar issues with your device, this could probably be caused by the downloaded apps on your phone.

How to remove ads from the lock screen?

Uninstall app sending out lock screen ads- If you have recently started using lock screens on your phones, chances are that the unwarranted ads are being sent by an app on your device. You can easily check the recently downloaded apps on your device and uninstall them to remove the problem.

– Open the Google Play Store on your smartphone

– Tap on ‘Menu’ and then on ‘My apps & Games’

– Tap on ‘Installed’

– Sort the list on basis of the last used app

– Among the most recently used apps, select the app that has been sending unwarranted ads on your device, and uninstall it.

Additionally, you can the following things in mind to get rid of unwarranted ads

– Always download apps from reputable sources based on the ratings and reviews.

– Make sure that you never give administrator’s right to any app especially.

– Update your device regularly with Android security patches. Keeping tracking for new updates

– Do not download apps that you don’t trust or are published by unknown publishers

As per the Google Play policy, apps listed on Google Play Store must not send any fraudulent ads to the device. Further, ads can only be sent when that particular application is being used. Ads appearing on the apps are considered part of the app and hence they have to adhere to the Google play Policy.

In case you spot any app with inappropriate ads violating the policies, you can report it to the Google Play store

– Go to the Google Play Store on your device

– Go to the Install page of the app

– Tap on ‘More Option’ (three vertical dots) on the top right corner of the screen

– Tap on Flash as inappropriate to report any fraudulent ads sent out by the app

Sourced from News18

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Google’s browser cookies plan anti-competitive, advertisers tell EU

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Sourced from TIMESNOWNEWS.COM

Brussels: Google’s plan to block a popular web tracking tool called “cookies” is anti-competitive, a group of advertisers, publishers and tech companies said in a complaint to EU antitrust regulators.

The grievance could boost the European Commission’s investigation opened in June into Alphabet unit Google’s Privacy Sandbox which the company said could allow businesses to target clusters of consumers without identifying individuals.

Google said a year ago that it would ban some cookies in its Chrome browser to increase user privacy and offer the Privacy Sandbox as an alternative.

The Movement for an Open Web (MOW) said the proposal would give Google the power to decide what data can be shared on the web and with whom.

“Google says they’re strengthening ‘privacy’ for end users but they’re not, what they’re really proposing is a creepy data mining party,” MOW lawyer Tim Cowen said in a statement.

The Commission confirmed receipt of the complaint, saying it would assess it under the standard procedures. In June, it kicked off an investigation into Google’s online display advertising technology services.

Google has offered to settle the case in a bid to avoid a possible fine and a disruptive prolonged probe, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters last week.

Google declined to comment on the MOW complaint and referred to its previous statement released when it offered concessions to the UK competition watchdog, which described the Privacy Sandbox as an open initiative to provide strong privacy for users while also supporting publishers.

The US Justice Department is also examining the issue, people familiar with the matter have told Reuters.

The group’s complaint to the UK regulator prompted its investigation which subsequently led Google to offer concessions.

Sourced from TIMESNOWNEWS.COM

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After Getting Banned From Google and Facebook, I Learned Why Every Ecommerce Store Should Focus on SEO

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By

Good SEO and content strategy can help ecommerce store owners be less reliant on paid traffic.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a buzz word over the last few years. Many areas of online business have been implementing solid SEO strategies for a while, but ecommerce is still slow to join the rest. Ecommerce stores have been trained to use paid methods, like Google Shopping Ads, Facebook Ads and other social media ads to get people to click through to their store. However, with the ever-increasing cost it takes to acquire new customers, ecommerce store owners should get on board with SEO and develop a solid content strategy for long-term growth and reduce their cost to acquire new potential customers.

The one-legged stool

As I mentioned earlier, the cost of bringing new customers to your ecommerce store is going to keep increasing. If your store is solely reliant on paid traffic, let’s say from Google Shopping, and Google decides you violated one of the many advertising policies, all your traffic dries up and you’re out of business. No traffic means no sales and no sales means you’re out of business by the end of the month.

Relying solely on paid traffic channels is like having a one-legged stool. It’s a lot more secure for the health and longevity of your business to have more legs under the stool, in case one leg gets taken away from you. SEO is one of those legs you need to apply. Not only is it free traffic, but as long as you provide valuable information for the readers, there’s no risk of being removed in the same way paid channels can shut you out.

The results of a well-executed SEO and content strategy take time. Often, an ecommerce store won’t see significant organic traffic for 6 to 12 months after publishing those first pieces of content. But if you keep implementing and producing solid, helpful content, the effects compound over time.

I got banned from Google and Facebook

I share all this from my own experience as an ecommerce store owner. I relied solely on Google and Facebook ads to get traffic and for some unknown reason back in early 2019 both platforms decided I had violated a policy. After that point, I couldn’t get back in their good books.

I went down the SEO rabbit hole out of desperation to get some traffic and started producing content that shoppers in the research phase would find helpful. I put out other content about the best products by category to help customers choose wisely, and when those pieces of content started ranking, I was getting more traffic than ever. To give you an idea of the timeline, I started publishing content in February 2019, and by June I was already getting traffic and sales. Over time, the traffic kept growing and I kept producing helpful content. In 2020, I generated over $2 million in sales from that organic strategy from only one ecommerce store.

If I hadn’t gotten started with SEO I’d be out of business today.

Get started before you need to

Don’t do what I did and wait for the wheels to fall off after one or more paid channels drop the ban hammer. Start by writing a couple of pieces of content to get started. You don’t need a five-year content strategy on day one.

For ideas on what to write, you can write a guide to your niche and what to look out for when choosing the right product. You can answer the most frequently asked questions you receive. When people type that question into the search engine and your post helps them out, you will be recognized over time as the go-to place for research and answers. Then people will grow to trust your store and will prefer to purchase from you.

There are literally thousands of blog topics that you can produce to get more traffic, but the important thing is to get started. Over time, you will learn some more advanced content strategies that you can apply to create a better ranking chance. If you can implement some semblance of a content plan into your ecommerce store and stick to it, you’ll look back in a year and wonder why you paid so much for visitors in the first place.

By

John Murphy is the founder of Survivalist, a seven-figure ecommerce business that’s growing fast.

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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The Most Helpful Google Search Modifiers Everyone Should Be Using

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By Khamosh Pathak
You can use hidden search modifiers to find better results a lot faster.

You likely use Google multiple times a day, from searching for restaurants nearby, to looking up answers to everyday questions. And usually, Google is pretty good at giving you what you want, even if you didn’t type in the right phrase. But when it comes to using Google for research purposes, especially for work, there’s probably some room for improvement…and that’s where a few hidden tricks can help you out.

Use Quotation marks when you can

Looking for something specific, like an author’s name, a long phrase, lyrics, or an idiom? Sometimes Google will show you results that match with a couple of words, but not the entire phrase. Use quotation marks around the phrase to force Google to only show results matching that phrase.

For example: iPad Air “4th generation”

Use dashes to exclude misleading words

Sometimes a particular word messes up your search results. If you don’t want results for a particular word, you can literally subtract it out by using a dash.

The Most Common Email Keywords That Everyone Should Know to Avoid Phishing Scams

For example: canyon -grand

Use Google’s tabs for the best search tool

It’s easy to forget, but Google is a lot more than just text search. There’s Google Images, Maps, and Google Books. Use the tabs at the top to switch between these modes.

Use a tilde to include common synonyms

Looking to expand your search results? Use a tilde symbol before a word to find results related to the term.

For example: coding ~class (That way, you’ll also see results for coding colleges, classes, courses, and so on.)

Search for the particular file type you’re looking for

This is especially useful when you’re looking for documents online: Type in the search phrase, and then just add “filetype:pdf” at the end to look for PDFs. You can also find PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and Excel sheets using this format.

For example: climate change report filetype:ppt

Find citations that link to a certain page

This is an obscure tip, but it can help you find pages that link to a specific page. If you’re looking for citations for a college essay, for example, just use the “link:(insert link here) format to find the links.

For example: link:lifehacker.com

Use an asterisk for words you can’t remember

Sometimes you’re looking for lyrics to a song and you can’t remember a couple of words. This is where an asterisk comes in. Google treats this as a wildcard or a blank, and it’ll give you search results considering the gaps in your knowledge.

For example: strawberry * forever

Find related websites to what you’re searching for

This is a search trick everyone should know about: Let’s say you found a website you liked and want to find more websites like it—you can just ask Google to do the hard work for you using the “related:(site address)” search term.

For example: related:boardgamegeek.com

Do site-specific searches directly from Google

Usually, the search feature in websites isn’t great. But because Google indexes web content anyway, you can use Google to search through websites reliably. Use the “site:(website link)” term the next time you want to search a site.

For example: site:lifehacker.com

Find results from two specific places

Looking to find results from two terms? For example, maybe you’re looking for TV shows from Netflix or Amazon Prime. You can do that using the pipe symbol (that vertical bar), with basically tells Google to choose between this “or” that.

For example: Netflix | Prime

Search within a number range

When you’re using Google for online research, narrowing down results in a particular timeframe can help. You can use two dots to search between a range of two numbers.

For example: academic studies 1920..1935

Feature Image Credit: Thaspol Sangsee (Shutterstock)

By Khamosh Pathak

Sourced from lifehacker

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Google updates Search to generate and show ‘more readable’ page titles

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By Abner Li

Google’s latest Search improvement is a “new system of generating titles for web pages” that better describes what a result is about.

One of the primary ways people determine which search results might be relevant to their query is by reviewing the titles of listed web pages. That’s why Google Search works hard to provide the best titles for documents in our results…

Google wants the main part of a search result — in between the domain/URL and summary — to be “more readable and accessible.” Introduced last week, the company says testing has shown that this new system is “preferred by searchers.”

The previous approach saw page titles possibly change based on the search query entered by users. This new system produces “titles that work better for documents overall.” As such, different page names will “generally” no longer occur.

Another aspect of this updated page title system sees Google place emphasis on text that “humans can visually see when they arrive at a web page.” Other page text and “text within links that point at pages” might also be factored.

We consider the main visual title or headline shown on a page, content that site owners often place within <H1> tags, within other header tags, or which is made large and prominent through the use of style treatments.

When Search encounters an “extremely long title,” Google will just use the “most relevant portion” and truncate the “more useful parts.” The company might also show site names alongside page titles when helpful.

For website owners, Google will soon release updated guidance:

However, our main advice on that page to site owners remains the same. Focus on creating great HTML title tags. Of all the ways we generate titles, content from HTML title tags is still by far the most likely used, more than 80% of the time.

By Abner Li

Sourced from 9 TO 5 Google

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Google is doubling down on a powerful new AI tool for Search

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By Hayden Field

But the technology has drawn criticism from the AI community

Google wants your search queries to look less like a Jeopardy! answer and more like a chat with your friend—filled with the kind of slang and shorthand only a human would understand.

To get there, the tech giant is enlisting a powerful AI tool you all might remember: a large language model, specifically one called MUM (multitask unified model).

  • Large language models, which are trained on datasets as large as one trillion words, help computers process and produce human-like language.

But, but, but: The tech has drawn criticism from parts of the AI community. In the past year, Google fired both co-leads of its AI ethics team after a dispute over their research on the dangers of large language models.

  • One of experts’ top concerns? Models trained via internet data will naturally learn biases—then can easily replicate those patterns and multiply the resulting harms.

Case study

Google hasn’t yet announced a timeline for when it’ll incorporate MUM into live search, but it’s already experimenting with one-off projects.

Then vs. now: In 2020, Google team members spent hundreds of hours compiling the different ways people could refer to Covid in order to accurately route pandemic queries. This year, they wanted to do the same thing for queries about the Covid vaccine—so they used MUM to “generate over 800 names for 17 different vaccines in 50 different languages” within seconds, Pandu Nayak, Google’s VP of search, told Popular Science.

Big picture: Google announced MUM at its developer conference in May alongside other language model initiatives, and now it seems to be doubling down on how important the tech is to its future business model. More sophisticated searches and answers will likely lead to more valuable targeted ads, which could mean big changes for the ad pricing model, reports the FT.—HF

Feature Image Credit: Francis Scialabba

By Hayden Field

Sourced from Morning Brew

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Will Google ever lose its throne as king of search? Here are its main contenders

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By Shubham Agarwal

“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results,” Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, argued in a research paper when they were still working out of their Stanford dorm rooms.

Today, Google is synonymous with the web — but it’s also far from the sort of “competitive and transparent” search engine Brin and Page set out to develop decades ago. Google’s journey into the dictionary and becoming a trillion-dollar empire demanded a slate of fatal modifications to its original blueprint. The result is a search engine that buries organic links under an avalanche of ads, keeps tabs on its visitors’ every move and click, and manipulates results by tapping into the giant pool of data Google harvests from the rest of its services.

An emerging roster of competitors thinks it can offer you a better deal. Their search engines vow not to track you or even show ads if you’re willing to shell out a couple of bucks. Can they save us from Google’s invasive and monopolistic rule, or are they doomed to fizzle out after fighting fruitlessly against an unstoppable behemoth?

The rise of private search engines

Josep Pujol, the chief of search at Brave browser, calls Google the web’s “toll-booth” where “producers of information have to abide by certain rules or directly pay to be reachable.”

Screenshot of Brave Browser on mobile and desktop.
Brave Browser

Google may appear simply as one cog in the larger internet machine, but it has more sway than you’d think. For most people, it’s the main avenue through which they access information online, and if something can’t be found via Google, it practically doesn’t exist. Therefore, having only one (or two) ways to access the web is very problematic, Pujol adds.

The startup behind Brave browser, which now hosts about 34 million users, rolled out its search engine a few weeks ago. Unlike Google, it doesn’t profile users and claims it won’t use any “secret methods or algorithms to bias results.”

Brave is indexing the web’s trenches from scratch, which means it ultimately won’t rely on aggregators like Bing and attempts to be everything Google is not. It’s private, offers you more control over how anonymous you want to be while searching, and most importantly, it doesn’t have a vested interest in showing you ads.

Would you pay for a private search engine?

While Brave plans to offer both ad-supported and ad-free premium subscriptions, Neeva, a new private search engine from a pair of ex-Googlers, believes as soon as advertisements enter the picture, the focus shifts away from the user and to figuring out how to “squeeze an additional dollar out of another click” for advertisers.

iPhone screens comparing what it's like without Neeva versus with Neeva.
Without Neeva versus with Neeva Neeva

Neeva’s CEO and co-founder, Sridhar Ramaswamy, who previously spearheaded Google’s crown jewel (its $115 billion advertising arm) for over a decade, says, in a way, people are already paying for search engines like Google — by letting them siphon up their personal data, settling for a “bad user experience with wall-to-wall ads, and substandard content.”

Neeva, therefore, has an upfront $5 monthly fee, and in exchange, it gets you a private, ad-free search engine that can also surface your information from third-party apps like Gmail, Dropbox, and Microsoft Office 365.

Although Neeva could potentially shape up to be a compelling, ad-free alternative for those who can afford it, experts say its success and the underlying pay-for-privacy model, in general, present a difficult socioeconomic problem.

“If it’s necessary to pay for privacy,” Dr. Shomir Wilson, the director of the Human Language Technologies Lab at Penn State, said to Digital Trends, “then it becomes a luxury that not everyone can afford.”

Not a level playing field

Neeva and Brave aren’t the first ones to challenge Google, however, and there’s a good reason why it’s been nearly impossible for competitors like Bing to even put a dent in its monopoly. Google controls over 90% of the search engine market, and going up against its swathes of resources has been an uphill battle for newcomers offering alternatives. It has accomplished that by practically starving its opponents of any room to grow.

Google pays platform owners such as Apple, Mozilla, and others billions of dollars to be the default search engine on the most popular operating systems and browsers, including Macs, iPhones, Android phones, and Google Chrome. And there’s little chance users of these platforms will go out of their way to switch search engines, let alone be even aware of choices.

“We build durable habits around search engines,” Dr. Wilson said. “Once a search engine is familiar and useful, going back to the one we like can be kind of reflexive.”

But as awareness for privacy-first products soars among people and Big Tech faces its greatest antitrust battle, Kamyl Bazbaz, vice president of communications at DuckDuckGo, a private search engine that has been up at arms with Google since 2008, is hopeful that the tides are turning.

DuckDuckGo has witnessed unprecedented growth over the past year, and its active users have doubled from 50 million to 100 million. It’s also now the second most used search engine on phones in several countries, including the United States. In addition to a search engine, DuckDuckGo offers tools to protect your identity from third-party trackers and other malicious online practices.

Fighting for a future without Google defaults

Cooper Quintin, a senior security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agrees breaking Google’s default power is key for competitors to thrive, but it would take “strong action on behalf of the government to actually enforce such antitrust laws.”

Luckily for Neeva, Brave, DuckDuckGo, and rest, the Justice Department — along with eleven state Attorneys General — has sued Google on those exact grounds.

“Google’s control of search access points,” the antitrust lawsuit says, “means that new search models are denied the tools to become true rivals: Effective paths to market and access, at scale, to consumers, advertisers, or data.”

If history is any indication, the odds are against Google. Last year, the search engine giant lost a similar suit in Europe and now allows Android users to pick their default search engine at startup instead of making that choice for them.

Whatever the outcome of these lawsuits may be, Google’s rivals have a long way ahead of them before they even have a chance at threatening its search engine monopoly, and they realize that.

In the meantime, though, Pujol says Brave is focusing on what it can do, which is building an alternative. “We are crazy or bold enough to try because we know there’s a demand out there.”

Editors’ Recommendations

By Shubham Agarwal

Sourced from digitaltrends

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Will Google ever lose its throne as king of search? Here are its main contenders

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By Shubham Agarwal

“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results,” Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, argued in a research paper when they were still working out of their Stanford dorm rooms.

Today, Google is synonymous with the web — but it’s also far from the sort of “competitive and transparent” search engine Brin and Page set out to develop decades ago. Google’s journey into the dictionary and becoming a trillion-dollar empire demanded a slate of fatal modifications to its original blueprint. The result is a search engine that buries organic links under an avalanche of ads, keeps tabs on its visitors’ every move and click, and manipulates results by tapping into the giant pool of data Google harvests from the rest of its services.

An emerging roster of competitors thinks it can offer you a better deal. Their search engines vow not to track you or even show ads if you’re willing to shell out a couple of bucks. Can they save us from Google’s invasive and monopolistic rule, or are they doomed to fizzle out after fighting fruitlessly against an unstoppable behemoth?

The rise of private search engines

Josep Pujol, the chief of search at Brave browser, calls Google the web’s “toll-booth” where “producers of information have to abide by certain rules or directly pay to be reachable.”

Screenshot of Brave Browser on mobile and desktop.
Brave Browser

Google may appear simply as one cog in the larger internet machine, but it has more sway than you’d think. For most people, it’s the main avenue through which they access information online, and if something can’t be found via Google, it practically doesn’t exist. Therefore, having only one (or two) ways to access the web is very problematic, Pujol adds.

The startup behind Brave browser, which now hosts about 34 million users, rolled out its search engine a few weeks ago. Unlike Google, it doesn’t profile users and claims it won’t use any “secret methods or algorithms to bias results.”

Brave is indexing the web’s trenches from scratch, which means it ultimately won’t rely on aggregators like Bing and attempts to be everything Google is not. It’s private, offers you more control over how anonymous you want to be while searching, and most importantly, it doesn’t have a vested interest in showing you ads.

Would you pay for a private search engine?

While Brave plans to offer both ad-supported and ad-free premium subscriptions, Neeva, a new private search engine from a pair of ex-Googlers, believes as soon as advertisements enter the picture, the focus shifts away from the user and to figuring out how to “squeeze an additional dollar out of another click” for advertisers.

iPhone screens comparing what it's like without Neeva versus with Neeva.
Without Neeva versus with Neeva Neeva

Neeva’s CEO and co-founder, Sridhar Ramaswamy, who previously spearheaded Google’s crown jewel (its $115 billion advertising arm) for over a decade, says, in a way, people are already paying for search engines like Google — by letting them siphon up their personal data, settling for a “bad user experience with wall-to-wall ads, and substandard content.”

Neeva, therefore, has an upfront $5 monthly fee, and in exchange, it gets you a private, ad-free search engine that can also surface your information from third-party apps like Gmail, Dropbox, and Microsoft Office 365.

Although Neeva could potentially shape up to be a compelling, ad-free alternative for those who can afford it, experts say its success and the underlying pay-for-privacy model, in general, present a difficult socioeconomic problem.

“If it’s necessary to pay for privacy,” Dr. Shomir Wilson, the director of the Human Language Technologies Lab at Penn State, said to Digital Trends, “then it becomes a luxury that not everyone can afford.”

Not a level playing field

Neeva and Brave aren’t the first ones to challenge Google, however, and there’s a good reason why it’s been nearly impossible for competitors like Bing to even put a dent in its monopoly. Google controls over 90% of the search engine market, and going up against its swathes of resources has been an uphill battle for newcomers offering alternatives. It has accomplished that by practically starving its opponents of any room to grow.

Google pays platform owners such as Apple, Mozilla, and others billions of dollars to be the default search engine on the most popular operating systems and browsers, including Macs, iPhones, Android phones, and Google Chrome. And there’s little chance users of these platforms will go out of their way to switch search engines, let alone be even aware of choices.

“We build durable habits around search engines,” Dr. Wilson said. “Once a search engine is familiar and useful, going back to the one we like can be kind of reflexive.”

But as awareness for privacy-first products soars among people and Big Tech faces its greatest antitrust battle, Kamyl Bazbaz, vice president of communications at DuckDuckGo, a private search engine that has been up at arms with Google since 2008, is hopeful that the tides are turning.

DuckDuckGo has witnessed unprecedented growth over the past year, and its active users have doubled from 50 million to 100 million. It’s also now the second most used search engine on phones in several countries, including the United States. In addition to a search engine, DuckDuckGo offers tools to protect your identity from third-party trackers and other malicious online practices.

Fighting for a future without Google defaults

Cooper Quintin, a senior security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agrees breaking Google’s default power is key for competitors to thrive, but it would take “strong action on behalf of the government to actually enforce such antitrust laws.”

Luckily for Neeva, Brave, DuckDuckGo, and rest, the Justice Department — along with eleven state Attorneys General — has sued Google on those exact grounds.

“Google’s control of search access points,” the antitrust lawsuit says, “means that new search models are denied the tools to become true rivals: Effective paths to market and access, at scale, to consumers, advertisers, or data.”

If history is any indication, the odds are against Google. Last year, the search engine giant lost a similar suit in Europe and now allows Android users to pick their default search engine at startup instead of making that choice for them.

Whatever the outcome of these lawsuits may be, Google’s rivals have a long way ahead of them before they even have a chance at threatening its search engine monopoly, and they realize that.

In the meantime, though, Pujol says Brave is focusing on what it can do, which is building an alternative. “We are crazy or bold enough to try because we know there’s a demand out there.”

By Shubham Agarwal

Sourced from digitaltrends

 

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Google is quietly meeting with a select group of publishers each month to talk Privacy Sandbox tech

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By Kate Kaye

Google engineers and staff on its ads and Chrome teams have a new monthly meeting on their calendars — with digital publishers.

Representatives from around 20 publishers, many from large Comscore 50 media properties, have convened monthly since March with Google ads and Chrome execs and engineers to conduct focused conversations about technologies Google is developing as part of its Privacy Sandbox initiative.

In general, though some publishers have shown interest in testing Google’s emerging tech, many of them have believed the platform’s timeline for development and implementation of it has been “too aggressive,” said Rob Beeler, the de facto leader of the fledgling publisher collective and founder of Beeler.Tech, who helps publishers navigate the complex world of ad tech.

“It’s been clear in these meetings that publishers have had a lot of things to answer before they were on board with any of these solutions,” he told Digiday.

Publishers have in many ways been left out of Google’s efforts to redesign how digital ads work without third-party cookies. This is despite the fact that they produce and distribute the content that comprises the open web, which Google and others say they aim to preserve when the great shift away from today’s tracking technologies goes into effect. Now, the regular meetings between a small group of top-tier publishing execs and Googlers are intended to give publishers a louder voice in the discussion.

Neither Google nor Beeler would name publishers involved and two group participants Digiday spoke with for this story asked not to be named. Google and the publisher participants have made a point of keeping the meetings hush-hush, in part because none wants to alienate smaller publishers who might feel left out of a process that already has most of them feeling sidelined. Beeler said participants of the new group were selected because they are “in a position to have some influence as things get rolled out.” He also said meetings with a larger group of people might become too unwieldy to be productive.

“We are committed to open dialogue with publishers of all sizes as they develop strategies for the transition to a more privacy-centric web,” said a Google spokesperson. “We take every opportunity to engage with publishers and to listen, share information and solicit feedback on how we can build for a better future.”

A more accessible forum than the wonky W3C

Many industry players criticize Google for wielding too much power in the transition away from third-party cookies and development of new tech intended to replace them in a more privacy-preserving way. The aspects of that work that Google has made public have happened inside the W3C, or Worldwide Web Consortium. The international web standards body serves as host for engineers from companies including Google, Facebook and other ad tech firms hashing out complex elements of Privacy Sandbox tech development through jargon-laden web forums.

Although some bigger publishers such as The New York Times and Hearst have dispatched staff to W3C meetings and forums, many publishers find the environment an impenetrable labyrinth, keeping them away despite handwringing over how the tech developed by W3C participants will affect their businesses.

“The W3C is very technical,” said a participant of the recently-formed publisher group who represents smaller media outlets and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Rather than circumventing the W3C process, insiders said Google’s recent monthly meetings with publishers (which, of course, take place on Google Meet) are intended to provide a more accessible setting for publishing execs to learn about what’s in development, voice concerns and perhaps eventually acclimate to the idea of having their own representatives play more active roles in Privacy Sandbox efforts at the W3C.

Google itself has lamented a lack of engagement from publishers in its Privacy Sandbox development. Chetna Bindra, Google’s group product manager in user privacy and trust in its Ads division, told this reporter for The Drum in November 2020 the company was “hoping for more participation” from publishers “as we come up with a workable solution for everyone that is privacy-forward.”

What’s on the agenda — and what isn’t

Thus far, meetings have entailed discussions of technologies such as FLoC — Google’s recently-tested but evolving cookieless ad targeting method and how it might affect publishers, for instance in relation to creating inventory packages. First-party sets — which would affect how domains owned by the same publisher are defined in context of data collection and use via web browsers like Google Chrome — were a topic on the agenda at the July meeting. But the first half-hour was devoted to discussion of Google’s morphing timeline for rollout of Privacy Sandbox tech.

“A lot of these conversations are just like level-setting,” said the unnamed smaller publisher representative.

Beeler, who also helps run a similar recently-formed group of EU-based publishers meeting with Google to discuss the same sorts of issues, said he and other publisher reps help determine the meeting agendas.

Still, some topics that could have significant impacts for publishers continue to be relegated to engineer-centric spaces. For instance, participants in the new meetups said changes to FLoC which Google is mulling and were recently presented at an engineering research event have yet to make the publisher meeting agenda.

“It always amazes me how these things get reported in random tweets, blog posts or non-endemic conferences like an engineering research event,” said another exec participating in the new publisher meetings with Google who asked not to be named.

Correction: This story originally incorrectly reported that Chetna Bindra leads Google’s product development for third-party cookie replacement in its Chrome browser division.

Feature Image Credit: Ivy Liu 

By Kate Kaye

Sourced from DIGIDAY

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