26 Jun 2025 Search

I’m old enough to remember how respectable Google used to be, back during the Obama administration. Maybe someday a book will come out on how Old Google, generous cafeteria visitor policy and all, somehow morphed into the New Google that—unfortunately—too many people have to deal with today. (Winners don’t click search ads.) The tragedy of the commons is a false and dangerous myth to describe traditional commons, but it’s definitely a thing within big companies. A common resource, the company’s goodwill, is drawn down unsustainably by individual decision-makers looking for short-term success for their own individual projects.

Google pivoted to crime one project at a time, and as an Internet optimist sometimes I think they might be able to pivot back one project at a time. In the long run, the pivot back would be in the interest of shareholders, since there’s more money in running an ad medium that supports a publisher-brand reputation feedback loop than in a dishonest medium that people learn to avoid. Here are what should be some manageable-sized projects for those at Google who want to go legit. (Happy to come in and and pitch one of these in more detail to the new board-level committee on how to be less evil.)

Generative AI training opt outs for sites, separate from search. Everyone wants this, and it’s going to be required in the EU and other jurisdictions anyway. So might as well get credit for doing it voluntarily, in advance.

Fix the Google Ads Transparency Center to be less fraud-friendly. Google’s Ads Transparency Center is better than what Facebook offers, which looks like it’s optimized for deceptive advertising. But it still needs a bunch of work.

  • Policy-violating ads should remain available for affected people and companies. Currently any ad that is found to violate a policy is removed entirely. But sometimes it needs to remain available to people who can follow up. For example, if an ad includes a fake celebrity endorsement, or a trademark of a legit advertiser used without permission, that person or company needs to be able to see it to take appropriate action.

  • TinEye, other independent image search sites, and trademark monitoring companies should be allowed to crawl Ads Transparency Center. Some kind of firehose feed or API might help.

  • Ads Transparency Center should lead, not lag, actual ad serving. Ideally an ad would not serve to regular people until a certain number of independent services had already crawled it, but the ad should at least have been available for a little while.

  • All substantial ad variations should be available. Because a lot of ads are minimally reviewed or even automatically generated, it is possible for one version of the same ad to be legit and another not.

  • Index all text in the ad (using OCR if needed), not just search by advertiser or website name. Scammers often keep the same ad copy when making new accounts. Also, give legit businesses a chance to help out by searching for and reporting fake competitors.

  • Show, and allow searching by, intermediary companies involved in placing an ad, not just the advertiser.

  • For each ad creative, link to all accounts running the same or substantially similar ads.

  • Cross-link accounts that are using the same domains in landing pages.

  • Provide more metadata on accounts, such as date created and type of business documents that Google relied on.

  • (update 15 Nov 2025) RSS feeds for new ads similar to an existing trademark or brand asset. (A legit advertiser should be able to get an alert for possible fakes.)

With a full-featured Ads Transparency Center, legit advertisers will be able to do more to report their fraudulent competitors, and publishers will be able to do more to report crappy deceptive ads that show up on their sites. Both have an interest in doing it, so will be free help for Google on this. Google could differentiate their ads from Meta’s by improving the Ads Transparency Center to disadvantage the scam advertisers and help the legit ones.

Make a Site Transparency Center. Fixing the Ads Transparency Center will make it practical to spot more bad ads on good sites. That’s a good start, so do the advertisers a favor and address the good ad/bad site problem too. If you buy an ad through Google, where’s it going to run? This could be as simple as an old-school Yahoo-style directory, with RSS feeds for newly added sites by content category. And, of course, fully populate sellers.json, including owner domains. An individual who owns a site and wants to keep their legal name confidential should be able to use their web byline for sellers.json, but that personal privacy argument doesn’t apply to Google’s big confidential site problem, which looks like corporate owners of multiple domains. A Site Transparency Center would also help firms like Link-Busters that copyright holders use to spot infringing sites.

Roll back the trademark policy. Yes, it was clever to make brands bid up the price of search ads on each other’s names, and that bit of gamesmanship probably makes Google some money, but, sorry, way too much crime here, people. Time to end the use of one advertiser’s trademark by another without explicit permission. A trademark owner needs to be able to block any use of their trademarks by other advertisers, or only allow use by permission, as for distributors or dealers. Today, as John Horn explains,

Under the new policy, trademark owners will need to inform Google specifically about advertisers they want to exclude from using their brand. If you come across an ad misusing your brand, simply reach out to Google, and they’ll take care of the issue.

Trademark owners won’t see most fraudulent uses, since employees and service providers for the real brand are probably not targeted by the fake brand, and Ads Transparency Center is of limited use.

(update 9 Aug 2026) Google is a scammer’s paradise by Cory Doctorow.

Nearly every local merchant has undergone Google’s verification process, which includes a step where Google physically mails a postcard with a unique number to the merchant’s registered address, which the merchant must then key into Google to prove that they’re located where they say they are.

Despite this, Google’s ad-sales system will happily sell anyone the right to advertise a different website for queries for specific merchants, and those ads appear above the real result for the business’s website. To make this even worse, Google’s spent years making it more difficult to distinguish ads from “organic” search results, changing the font and size of the “ad” warning to make it harder to spot, and making the font and color of the ad itself closer to the color of the search results below it.

stop dialing for dollars around ad agencies. This is a common complaint among ad agency people. As an agency, you get the client’s campaigns set up the way they work best—saving money by avoiding wasteful placements—and then some minimally trained Google contractor calls the client directly to tell them you did it all wrong and they need to turn on some feature Google happens to want to push. The agency can do some work to address this problem, making sure that the client knows that Google does this and that someone from the agency is available to join a meeting to find out if it’s a real issue. But Google could do the most to fix it by including the agency to start with. See Don’t Be Evil: A Campaign to Stop Google’s Interference with Agencies.

Andon cords for ad review and support. If Toyota assembly line workers get behind in their work, they can pull the cord and stop the line. Install a similar cord for support and ad review teams, and hook it up so that anyone on the team can pause turning on new sites and ads if they’re in the weeds. Better to keep the quality level as consistent as possible than to randomly impose deceptive ads on people because of moderation and support issues.

Support responsible privacy laws. Some companies are like obligate anaerobes, and won’t survive in the presence of decent privacy laws. But Google is more like a facultative anaerobe—it can survive in today’s high-surveillance, low-trust system but will really thrive in an oxygen atmosphere. Advocating against any privacy law, even those that will disadvantage the obligate anerobes, such as the companies that provide databases of assassination targets or North Korean drone strikes as a service, is suboptimal. Stop teaming up with less reputable surveillance companies on lobbying, quit the creepy sockpuppet orgs, and find some long-term aligned allies to work with on lobbying for better laws. The Check My Ads Institute Policy Platform could be a good place to start. More: power moves, signaling, and a helpful book for understanding Big Tech