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Google emails revealing disagreements b/w Product and Advertising teams about manipulating search to drive ad revenue (gizmodo.com.au)

submitted 1 year ago by restingboredface@sh.itjust.works to c/technology@lemmy.world

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tl/dr: email chains used as evidence in DOJ Google antitrust case show internal arguments about drops in # of searches, and how to increase them so that people see more ads. Search team wants to create better search results to keep people coming back.

Advertising team wants to find any way to make people search for as long and as often as possible ("increasing the journey length") even if it means delivering less relevant search results.

You can actually read many of the trial documents here -
https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-and-plaintiff-states-v-google-llc-2020-trial-exhibits

this file was particularly interesting. https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417557.pdf

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[-] Fades@lemmy.world 61 points 1 year ago

Advertising and marketing always get in the way of engineering

[-] stiephel@feddit.de 19 points 1 year ago

And legal/ compliance, too

[-] oce@jlai.lu 19 points 1 year ago

Legal getting in the way of engineering is usually a very good thing.

[-] lycanrising@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

software engineer in a medium-large public tech company, i agree. i can’t even imagine the amount of stress the legal team must be under to constantly be discovering what management and engineering have messed up this time…and discover the problem is 6 months old and if a regulator catches wind of it it’ll be painful.

[-] oce@jlai.lu 10 points 1 year ago

I was actually thinking about the goal of those laws, protecting society from unbridled capitalist tech companies. The fear of regulators is only an intermediate tool.

[-] lycanrising@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

i personally see them as different tools of the same end goal - wealth generation in a checked and sustainable manner. capitalist environments inspire innovation, but require boundaries set (regulators) and a political environment which is alert and aware of exploitation and can make the calls about what is or is not acceptable.

[-] Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Constant minefield and multi-shift alliances.

I lead web applications.

Last year, I + legal team was in a war with ad team because they were whining about tracking during the CCPA rollout.

This year, it's me + ad vs legal team over them wanting to slap compliance notices everywhere that affects user experience.

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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023

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