Social search and ads

Joseph Reagle

Our question(s)

What is the history of web search and advertising?
What does the future hold?

Directories

Yahoo directory (1994)

Search

AltaVista search (1995)

PageRank (1996)

Google search (1997)

AI search (2022)

Ad commodities

impressions (CPM, cost per mille): was it seen?
clicks/click-through rate (CTR): was the ad clicked on?
conversion: did the user buy or complete a survey?

Google

AdWords: ads on search pages (second price auctions: highest bidder pays the price bid by 2nd-highest)
AdSense: ads on Web pages

Banners

Find me…??

popups/pop-unders (browsers usually block)
interstitial banners (between/before content)
floating ads (on top of content)
map ad (search results; promoted pins; store promotions)
retargeted ad

Even pregnancy?!

Crap detection pause

Did Target Really Predict a Teen’s Pregnancy??

A few months after Pole’s presentation, [NYT] reporter Charles Duhigg interviewed me… he asked for interesting discoveries … I rattled off a few and included pregnancy prediction, pointing him to the online video of Pole’s talk … and introducing him to Pole… One year later… Duhigg published a front-page … article, sparking a viral outbreak that turned the Target pregnancy prediction story into a debacle. (Siegel in Piatetsky 2014)

Automobiles

A Cadillac driver … said he was denied auto insurance by seven companies… When he asked an agent why, she advised him to pull his LexisNexis report. He discovered six months of his driving activity, including many instances of hard braking and hard accelerating, as well as some speeding… When he finally obtained car insurance … it was double what he had previously been paying. (Hill 2024)

Pop-up ads

FB:Ads (2007)

Location
Age; Gender
Interests; Connections
Relationship Status
Languages
Education; Workplaces

FB:Platform (2007) & Open Graph (2010)

Allowing app developers access to the social graph.

Which led to…

Cambridge Analytica

FB:Spons. Stories (2011)

FB:SS Results

TBG Digital reported a 2 billion impression test showed FB:Sponsored Stories “ad units received a 46% higher click through rate, a 20% lower cost per click, and an 18% lower cost per fan than Facebook’s standard ad units.” (Constine 2011)

Back and forth

Google tried to do social with Google+ and Search+ (2012)
Facebook tried to do Facebook Search (2013)
Google did Shared Endorsements (2013)

Eventually, both returned to their corners: Google dominates search & FB dominates social. And TikTok uses “Spark Ads.”

AI search is the new frontier and battleground.

More recently

Safari blocks 3rd-party cookies

Facebook’s “Pixel”

Google’s “Topics”

Was deployed, though Google abandoned removal of 3rd-party cookies. (Whitwam 2025)

Evaluation and prediction

What do you think of Facebook Pixel and Google Topics?
What would you like to see in the future?

Conclusion

3-minute essay

Describe the major shifts in Web search & advertising.

Review

What were the major shifts in Web/advertising history?

directories
search
social
AI (to be determined)