austincheney (u/austincheney)

austincheney commented on How can we know if paid search advertising works? causalinf.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/ubac

xenomachina · 4 years ago

> The primary revenue model for search is micro auctions to determine ranking of product placement on search results.

Google monetizes search with ads. The micro auctions are for those ads. They even say "Ad" on each of them.

If you have evidence that they're doing paid placement in the actual search results, I'd love to see it.

FWIW, I do wish Google's ads were more obviously visually distinct from search results (and fewer in number).

austincheney · 4 years ago

> Google monetizes search with ads.

Google monetizes search but not with Google ads. This is the primary distinguisher. Its an auction selling space on page for a supplier to provide their own textual content. Google's online advertisement businesses don't sell space on Google pages, but online ad products for other peoples' pages.

Google considers all of this as ad revenue, but distinguishes search from their advertisement products in their revenue filings.

austincheney commented on How can we know if paid search advertising works? causalinf.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/ubac

yjftsjthsd-h · 4 years ago

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/030416/googles... and https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-money-a... (first results I could find) both say 80% of Alphabet’s revenue comes from Google ads; unless you have numbers to say otherwise, I think it's pretty reasonable to call that their primary business

austincheney · 4 years ago

> Search is Google’s most lucrative unit. In 2020, the company generated $104 billion in “search and other” revenues, making up 71% of Google’s ad revenue and 57% of Alphabet’s total revenue.

From your second source. I guess you were conflating ad revenue to online advertisements. Its all ad revenue, but its not all online advertisements.

austincheney commented on How can we know if paid search advertising works? causalinf.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/ubac

austincheney · 4 years ago

Google does make money from ads, but that is not their primary business. Yes they have AdWords and they bought DoubleClick around 2007. They also have YouTube that took them forever to figure out how to monetize. They bought Urchin (Google Analytics) specifically to monetize AdWords.

Google’s primary business is search. They monetize search in a couple different ways. The primary revenue model for search is micro auctions to determine ranking of product placement on search results.

I don’t have numbers but I suspect Google ads get far more eyeballs than do their search results. The distinction though is margin not quantity. Ads aren’t worth very much. Google ads generate a higher margin than Facebook ads but still tiny, like maybe fractions of a penny. When I was at Travelocity a million years ago I remember hotels bidding up to $18 per click for placement on searches related to Las Vegas. Not only is that click-through worth a fortune it is also relevant and thus far more likely to be clicked.

EDIT

Death by a thousand paper cuts.

Somebody provided a source below, they clearly did not read, which explains all of this:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-money-a...

> Search is Google’s most lucrative unit. In 2020, the company generated $104 billion in “search and other” revenues, making up 71% of Google’s ad revenue and 57% of Alphabet’s total revenue.

This section of the article further details how the auctions differ from online advertisement products.

I don't have the source but Google's chief economist has been very clear about how the micro auctions work and generate revenue separately from display ads.

austincheney commented on A new speed milestone for Chrome blog.chromium.org/2022/03... · Posted by u/twapi

chockchocschoir · 4 years ago

> In doesn’t matter what they want if they are actively working in opposition. This is performance is a massive incompatibility to hiring.

No one is working towards degrading performance on purpose, and caring about performance is not "a massive incompatibility to hiring". But the fact that you keep stating this makes it clear that there seems to be plenty of other reasons organizations are not hiring you.

austincheney · 4 years ago

> No one is working towards degrading performance on purpose

You are not participating in the same interviews that I am then. Most developers know querySelectors, for example, are super slow. They will fight to death to retain them and anybody who suggests any alternative is not compatible for hiring. If they know its slow and deliberately choose to avoid faster alternatives how is that not degrading performance on purpose? How is that not common?

austincheney commented on A new speed milestone for Chrome blog.chromium.org/2022/03... · Posted by u/twapi

gavinray · 4 years ago

  > "I was recently interviewing with a search engine company, one of the big ones, where I could demonstrate that JavaScript tool can execute file system search much faster than the OS and produce better results. They seemed really impressed."

How is this possible? OS should be using direct syscalls, any additional code you write should be pure overhead in theory, right?

austincheney · 4 years ago

No, its a common misunderstanding of search and tree models. The OS is faster, by a tiny bit, at traversing the file system than my JavaScript application. It is only search that is slower, and dramatically so. I don't have visibility of the OS code so I cannot be certain why that is. I speculate its because the OS is doing too much.

With the DOM querySelectors are dramatically slower than using static methods with arbitrary strings as arguments. This is likely because a query string must be parsed against each child node to determine if the child node is a match to the supplied query. Likewise, modern OSs use ancient conventions to search the file system, such as wildcards, along with more modern advanced search syntax. These are rules that must be parsed against each child artifact from a tree segment. My application deliberately doesn't do that.

To compound matters Windows, don't know about OSX, caches search results so that subsequent searches are a little less slow, which incurs a greater performance penalty on first search. My application doesn't do that either. Each search triggers tree traversal, so its always as fast reading from the file system.

Mentioning any of this during a job interview makes for intriguing conversation with the interviewer. I do detect genuine interest and curiosity from the interviewer. At the same time they know their team will fight to the death at many mention of alternatives to querySelectors and/or JSX, so you have just effectively terminated the interview. Anything there after is purely for the interviewer's personal interests.

austincheney commented on A new speed milestone for Chrome blog.chromium.org/2022/03... · Posted by u/twapi

chockchocschoir · 4 years ago

> Despite all of this my biggest learning about performance is that mentioning performance during job interviews shows that you are incompatible with other JavaScript developers and will not be hired.

As someone who done plenty of JS, cares about performance and also has handled hiring for JS positions in the past, I can tell you that this is generally not true. Caring about performance is not a reason to not get hired.

But it is possible to be "technically superior" in every conceivable way, but still not be a good hire. Why? Because the candidate might be missing vital soft skills or even not be very good at describing their thoughts, something that can slow down an entire team.

"Learning the wrong lesson" when things go wrong would also be something I'd consider high up for reasons to reject a candidate.

austincheney · 4 years ago

I have been doing web work for over 20 years. Everybody claims to care about performance, training, security, and so forth. The only thing that really matters in practice is comfort. Until developers are willing to abandon certain areas of comfort things like performance are only given lip service. In doesn’t matter what they want if they are actively working in opposition. This is performance is a massive incompatibility to hiring.

austincheney commented on It's 'Alarming': Children Are Severely Behind in Reading nytimes.com/2022/03/08/us... · Posted by u/LittleMoveBig

austincheney · 4 years ago

> Children in every demographic group have been affected, but Black and Hispanic children, as well as those from low-income families, those with disabilities and those who are not fluent in English, have fallen the furthest behind.

The pandemic affected everybody almost equally by political jurisdiction so demographic stratification suggests there is more to blame in addition to the pandemic. Looking at young children in my area my first blame is convenient access to touchscreens.

austincheney commented on A new speed milestone for Chrome blog.chromium.org/2022/03... · Posted by u/twapi

fluoridation · 4 years ago

>I could demonstrate that JavaScript tool can execute file system search much faster than the OS

What do you mean? How do you search the file system without calling into the OS?

austincheney · 4 years ago

A micro service to a localhost node application. There is a file system API in the browser now but it isn’t mature and is highly restricted compared to the terminal.

austincheney commented on A new speed milestone for Chrome blog.chromium.org/2022/03... · Posted by u/twapi

IshKebab · 4 years ago

I suspect that isn't why you weren't hired.

austincheney · 4 years ago

Why would you suspect that? Are you a JavaScript developer? If so have you seen the terrifying horror on people’s faces when you mention alternatives to querySelectors or that you can write/execute code faster by not using vDOM? Mentioning performance is the fastest way to exit a job interview.

austincheney commented on Ask HN: How did you overcome perfectionism? · Posted by u/Anand_S

simonw · 4 years ago

I keep coming back to the old Reid Hoffman quote: "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late."

I also constantly remind myself that "perfect is the enemy of shipped".

A useful thing to remember is that you are the ONLY person that knows how beautiful the thing you were planning to build was going to be. What you've actually built is always going to be disappointing compared to the potential thing you had imagined.

No-one else has that context though. From someone else's perspective, you built a thing! If that thing is interesting or solves their problem, they couldn't care less what it would have been if it had matched your imagination of its full potential.

Most people never build or ship anything at all, so shipping itself is a big cause for celebration.

austincheney · 4 years ago

> I also constantly remind myself that "perfect is the enemy of shipped".

That is easy to say as marketing first personality with access to money. In this case shipping anything is critical and you can fix it later.

As a bootstrapped technologist product quality is all you’ve got. If the product isn’t revolutionary then nobody cares and you won’t change their opinion. So, in this case you need to get it mostly right, because you won’t get a second chance at a first impression.