<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>drdaeman</author><text>&amp;gt; They don&amp;#x27;t know this?&lt;p&gt;Of course they do, but people pay crazy money for this and it plays the important role in Google&amp;#x27;s market valuation, so it&amp;#x27;s in Google&amp;#x27;s best interests to continue chanting the Big Data Big Money mantra. It doesn&amp;#x27;t help that the myth&amp;#x2F;meme is strongly backed by the whole cyberpunk genre, as people love the dystopian themes of &amp;quot;big corporations know everything about you, down to your most secret desires you don&amp;#x27;t even realize yourself&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;And it probably even work by some small but statistically significant margin, compared to some arbitrarily picked baseline, so they can even back this up if necessary.&lt;p&gt;The king is naked, though.</text><parent_chain><item><author>jklinger410</author><text>&amp;gt; Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead&lt;p&gt;And then&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Google&amp;#x27;s visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane.&lt;p&gt;Ah, so they have all of the information and yet their ad products don&amp;#x27;t work. They don&amp;#x27;t know this?</text></item><item><author>samwillis</author><text>From the point of view of someone who spent 10 years running an e-commerce store, and all its advertising, until a couple of years ago. Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead. The hay day of being able to play the game and make a tidy profit is long gone.&lt;p&gt;Google are playing every trick in the book to extract every possible cent from advertisers, spying on their business and sales to maximise their own profits. Google&amp;#x27;s visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane. People complain about the tracking of users&amp;#x2F;visitors, but the tracking of businesses is just as bad.&lt;p&gt;They probably have better insights into the economy and market trends than most governments and banks.&lt;p&gt;The penny is dropping, advertisers are noticing, my long term expectation of Google&amp;#x27;s business are not what they were.</text></item><item><author>codegeek</author><text>You either play the Organic SEO game or you Pay to Play (Ads). Google as a search engine is now useless when it comes to searching for a tool&amp;#x2F;software etc because everyone has gamed the &amp;quot;Best software for xyz&amp;quot; etc. But what&amp;#x27;s the alternative ? None. There are these &amp;quot;review&amp;quot; websites like Capterra&amp;#x2F;Software Advice&amp;#x2F;G2 and again you have to pay to play. You can technically get a review from a customer and get listed BUT if you want to be shown on the main page for that category, you need to pay crazy PPC.&lt;p&gt;Source: I play this game since I run a software business. Would love an alternative but there are none. You either Play the game or you Die.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>A glitch in the SEO matrix</title><url>https://www.izzy.co/blogs/a-glitch-in-the-seo-matrix.html</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>samwillis</author><text>They appear to work just well enough to keep you hooked while they increasingly eat your margin.</text><parent_chain><item><author>jklinger410</author><text>&amp;gt; Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead&lt;p&gt;And then&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Google&amp;#x27;s visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane.&lt;p&gt;Ah, so they have all of the information and yet their ad products don&amp;#x27;t work. They don&amp;#x27;t know this?</text></item><item><author>samwillis</author><text>From the point of view of someone who spent 10 years running an e-commerce store, and all its advertising, until a couple of years ago. Both SEO and search result ads on Google are dead. The hay day of being able to play the game and make a tidy profit is long gone.&lt;p&gt;Google are playing every trick in the book to extract every possible cent from advertisers, spying on their business and sales to maximise their own profits. Google&amp;#x27;s visibility of all transactions on every e-commerce website on the internet is insane. People complain about the tracking of users&amp;#x2F;visitors, but the tracking of businesses is just as bad.&lt;p&gt;They probably have better insights into the economy and market trends than most governments and banks.&lt;p&gt;The penny is dropping, advertisers are noticing, my long term expectation of Google&amp;#x27;s business are not what they were.</text></item><item><author>codegeek</author><text>You either play the Organic SEO game or you Pay to Play (Ads). Google as a search engine is now useless when it comes to searching for a tool&amp;#x2F;software etc because everyone has gamed the &amp;quot;Best software for xyz&amp;quot; etc. But what&amp;#x27;s the alternative ? None. There are these &amp;quot;review&amp;quot; websites like Capterra&amp;#x2F;Software Advice&amp;#x2F;G2 and again you have to pay to play. You can technically get a review from a customer and get listed BUT if you want to be shown on the main page for that category, you need to pay crazy PPC.&lt;p&gt;Source: I play this game since I run a software business. Would love an alternative but there are none. You either Play the game or you Die.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>A glitch in the SEO matrix</title><url>https://www.izzy.co/blogs/a-glitch-in-the-seo-matrix.html</url></story>