Sponsored Search Results Domination in Google Search and Ad Auction
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/353000+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
We increasingly find ourselves in some Google search results when the first few results are all advertisements or even the entire first page is consisted of ads. Google, for its self-interested and almost unchecked market power, started to put more ads into the search results to maximize its revenue. While Google may need extra work to make sure we see more ads, the increasing amount of ads could be explained as a natural result of either VCG or GSP auction.
For some searches, we might have n advertisement slots a1, a2, a3, …, an, based the keyword we typed into the search bar. Thousands of advertisers might be competing and auctioning for these relevant ad slots. Now we can consider a special slot a* and a special advertiser x*. The special slot has zero value and the special advertiser will bid 0 for any slot. The special slot a* models the slot for all organic search results and x* models the vast majority of the website links that do not pay Google for promotion. No matter whether we use VCG or GSP, the last slot a* will always be matched to x*. Using this setup, Google doesn’t need to do any extra work to adjust the order of organic search results and ad, since the organic search results will always be after all the ads in this setup. For some common keywords that can have a lot of matching ads, it’s indeed very likely that the ads will push all the organic search results into the second page.