Comment by aucisson_masque
7 hours ago
I don’t know if they did or didn’t try to kill bookmarks.
But on the commercial incentives, it does make sense for them to kill it.
Companies pay good advertisement so they show up first on the search result when a user want to find them.
Eg you want to go to carglass website: you type carglass in google and the company will most likely pay Google to show up first in the ads section because competitors are trying to sway away customers from them. If they didn’t outbid their competitors, even though the customer want to go to carglass, he will click on first result and may end up buying from their competitor without even noticing.
That wouldn’t happen if people had put carglass.com website in bookmark.
Google doesn't show ads on navigational queries because of the potential trademark-infringement legal issues that could result from recommending a competitor when somebody searches for a trademark.
Search for [carglass], no ads. Search for [facebook], no ads. Search for [spotify], no ads. Search for [american airlines], no ads. All of these would be very desirable queries to advertise a competitor on.
(IIRC they've gone back and forth on this depending on what the lawyers thought they could get away with; ISTR when Bing launched Microsoft would run ads on [google] that pointed to Bing. It's been a long time since I've seen an ad on a navigational query though.)
When you say "navigational queries" do you mean Google Maps?
If so, you may not be aware that the locations represented by square dots on the map are ads.
This a search domain term that means a search query where the user is trying to find a specific destination/product. I don't know how Google search works, but often a search will first go through an intent classifier and then use a different model based on the query type.
As a counter example, a couple days ago I was to install DaVinci Resolve on a new windows installation, so I searched "davinci resolve." Since I was used to having adblocker, I just clicked the top result, which is titled "DaVinci Resolve" but actually takes you to some awful shady thing like wondershare or softonic/uptodown, I forgot.
I feel like, navigational queries or no, Google should be held liable for allowing scam sites like that to advertise. I think there was a trending HN post recently on that front.