Daniel P. Shannon
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daniel.sh
Daniel P. Shannon
@daniel.sh
260 followers 230 following 1.3K posts
Not gay as in happy, queer as in mincing and villainous • Engineer, architect, technical lead • Formerly at Vox Media and Bauer Media, currently for hire • https://daniel.sh
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Reposted by Daniel P. Shannon
daniel.sh
February 3, 2025 at 2:31 AM
Reposted by Daniel P. Shannon
daniel.sh
"Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers. The better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed." —Sergey Brin and Larry Page, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" (1998)
Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines.
September 3, 2025 at 7:25 PM
daniel.sh
You could make a case that running an advertorial protection racket is a difference of kind from selling ads—like if you're taking money from the airline, and the users, and the publishers, and competing with all of them, the incentives are alignedish. In that they're Google's.
November 19, 2025 at 8:22 PM
daniel.sh
It's incredible. "Ads bad" is their argument for creating and deploying the algorithm in the first place.
November 19, 2025 at 8:21 PM
daniel.sh
I love telling people about the PageRank paper. Be sure to take a big sip of coffee before you read the PageRank paper. bsky.app/profile/dani...
daniel.sh Daniel P. Shannon @daniel.sh · Sep 3
"Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers. The better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed." —Sergey Brin and Larry Page, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" (1998)
Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines.
November 19, 2025 at 6:53 PM
Reposted by Daniel P. Shannon
daniel.sh
himboptical—[pounding the lectern and shouting over the boos and hisses of the angry crowd]—HIMBOPTICAL illusion
September 15, 2025 at 4:00 AM
Reposted by Daniel P. Shannon
daniel.sh
"imagine the most perfect himbo. this himbo must exist, because not to exist would be an imperfection." —himbontological proof
November 1, 2025 at 12:46 AM
Reposted by Daniel P. Shannon
daniel.sh
"You would have thought they'd make more jokes about Susan Sontag." No you woudn't.
February 28, 2025 at 1:18 AM
daniel.sh
jinx
November 15, 2025 at 7:16 PM