Search Ad Search Ad - Recursion Problem?
I though crossed my mind that makes me question if advertising is anything close to being an appropriate element of real-time search today. The thought came to me when realizing that there’s so much sentiment data that’s been pulled together from tweets, that any query you throw at a Google real-time search engine would be easily answerable through the sentiment of posts users have made on your concern.
“Are headphone Brand X good or worth buying?”
If we make an assumption that recently is less a concern in this sort of query (but that the user still wants to query the real-time channels, organizing the results for this query by their sentiment makes maybe the most sense. How many results return positive messages on buying brand x versus negative ones?
Aside: My prediction is that any good real-time search engine will not simply return real-time messages that contain the keywords form my query, but will use message attributes like “in reply to” to look up all the responses have returned whenever someone asked a question like it.
So I’ve made the query, and I see Brand X makes pretty bad headphones based on the sentiment of the results to my query, and now Google (or whoever) is showing me an ad for Brand Y headphones. What’s my very first instinct in this case?
…”Does brand Y make good headphones worth buying?”
And until I get a result that I’m happy with, I’ll keep using the ads as my guide for what to search next.
To go really out on a limb on this specific example. If Google knew what ads to show me based on my first query, that Brand Y is related to what I searched, Brand X, what would be stoping them from doing that leg work for me?
“You searched Brand X headphones and got the result that they are no good, but here’s the result of all these other headphones made by Brand Y, Brand Z, and Brand W for you to look at. Looks like Brand W got the best response. You can further investigate our results by clicking this link, or if you want to buy right away click this second link”.
Who knows what real-time search will end up looking like.
Malcolm Bastien
Enterprise Agile Coach
Enterprise Agile Coach helping leaders in Fintech, Banking, and HealthTech build fast flow through systems thinking and aligned autonomy, empowering teams to deliver high-performance results at scale.