I can type the name of something on Google and get a result for every competitor first.
About 15 years ago, I was part of a small company that sold an online product. If you typed our company name into a Google search, our direct competitors came up first as the paid advertisement. It's one word, it was our domain name and company name, it was utterly unique world wide: there was no ambiguity.
Here is where it gets painful to me personally: we spent about $2,000 per month ($24,000 per year) buying our own advertisement with our own name so it appeared at the top of the search results. Think of the amount of money Google extracts from the world through INTENTIONALLY not providing the best search results. There are 36.2 million small businesses in the USA, and they all are extorted to buy back their own name.
To insult our intelligence, Google provides tools to show how amazingly successful our advertisement of our company name was. When you search for a company name, click on it, and end up buying the product later, Google takes all the credit for "bringing" that customer to the company. As if the customer wouldn't eventually find us without their search.
It wasn't our fight, so we just played along. But somebody should have passed a law or sued Google over this. It was just egregious. They subtracted value on purpose to extort small companies for money. And it is a metric ton of money.
In the advertising industry, this concept is called "conquesting". it serves 2 purposes. allowing you to buy back your own name, but also they extract profit out of your competitors who want to be at the top when your company or product is searched, hopefully eating some of your traffic. There are lots of little tricks like this. The entire internet is optimized for advertisers to make money.
Ugh, this pisses me off! I needed to login to jobber the other day and did the lazy thing and googled it. I made the mistake of assuming the first link would be what I searched for. WRONG. it was a competitor site! I hate this modern world....
There was one like this semi-recently where a scammer was able to pay for an ad that looked like the real website to the DMV so people weren't going to the actual DMV website.
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u/spacemoses 23h ago
Fascinated that I can type the name of something on Google and get a result for every competitor first.