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points by ericmay 14 hours ago | 0 comments

Random anecdotes like this don't equate to "company juicing their numbers". You need much stronger evidence than that to make such an assertion. There are legal and financial ramifications for lying, companies are audited, there are official forms and documents that public companies must file. Of course a company can lie on those forms, but in the case of a company like Google you need extraordinary, factual evidence to make claims like "they've been juicing their numbers".

You basically have to say, everyone from the CEO/CFO, to the auditors, the financial analysts, the legal team, and all the way down are all lying and this random guy on Twitter is telling the truth. Sorry, not buying it.

[–] mlmonkey 14 hours ago

See the replies to that tweet. I agree, one swallow does not a spring make; but here there's a pattern. Ask anybody who does search advertising, and you'll hear the same story too many times for it to just be a coincidence.

Most people don't know this, but the Search Advertising auction is a black box. The advertiser just specifies a bid (the maximum they're willing to pay for a click); and the search engine promises that they will not pay more than that.

Here's a trick that Search Engines may (or may not, I plead the Fifth) use: the price an advertiser "i" who bid "bid_i" pays is bid_(i+1) * pctr_(i+1) / pctr_i where "pctr_(i+1)" is the predicted probability of click (pCTR) on the next lower ad; "pctr_i" is the predicted probability of click on the current ad.

Guess who calculates the pCTR? The Engine! In theory, if their pCTR calculations were 100% accurate, all advertisers would pay the minimum bid (which is typically $0.01)! Clearly, this is not desirable. So Engines juice the revenue by tweaking these pCTR values. Talk to anybody who works on auction mechanisms at a search engine, and you'll hear stories of how they tweaked these pCTR values.

[–] JumpCrisscross 13 hours ago

> See the replies to that tweet

Social media replies regularly confirm all kinds of nonsense.

[–] lotsofpulp 14 hours ago

I don’t interpret “juicing” to imply illegal.

[–] jedberg 14 hours ago

No one in Google is lying. If what the person in the Twitter post says is true, then everyone at Google is telling the truth, and so is OP.

And given all the replies to that post on Twitter, it sounds like it's true.

[–] bagacrap 14 hours ago

Juicing is not the same as lying. Did you read the post?

[–] objektif 13 hours ago

Some of the things he mentions is worse than lying like not complying to spend caps.

[–] ericmay 13 hours ago

In this context it's being used as tantamount to lying. "Juicing the numbers" implies that something is being misrepresented which is a form of lying.

Yes I read the post (please refer to HN guidelines on asking if people read something) and didn't find anything worthwhile there which is why I mentioned what I did.

Posting here for others asking about lying/juicing since I'm rate limited.

~~~~~

Lying on financial statements is in fact illegal. Juicing implies that some number is being misrepresented as higher than it otherwise would be which is a form of lying and thus would be illegal.

Obviously there are some gray areas - "we changed how we measure this" or something along those lines can be considered "juicing" or just a matter of changing a calculation to make more sense, but the broad accusation is extraordinary and requires much more evidence than some random person on Twitter saying some things. As an investor in Google (individually and through ETFs) it has no bearing on any investment thesis I have because I don't care what random nobodies on the Internet say and neither should you.