Slashdot Mirror

I'm behind Ad Limiter, which limits Google search ads to one per page, picking the best one based on SiteTruth ratings. You can set it for zero search ads if you like. It also puts SiteTruth ratings on Google search results. It's a demo for SiteTruth search spam filtering.

This Mozilla/Chrome add on has a general ad-blocking mechanism inside. Unlike most ad blockers, it's not based on regular expressions looking for specific HTML. It finds URLs known to lead to ads, works outward through the DOM to find the ad boundary, then deletes the ad. So it's relatively insensitive to changes in ad code, and doesn't require much maintenance. The same code processes search results from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Bleeko, DuckDuckGo, and Infoseek. (Coming soon, Yandex support, and better handling of Google ads within ads, where an ad has multiple links.)

So, if I wanted to do a better ad blocker, I could do so easily. Should I? Is another one really needed? Are the headaches of running one worth it?

I'm the author of Ad Limiter, which blocks most ads in search results from Google and Bing. By default, it lets just one ad display, the best one based on our site legitimacy ratings.

So this is something else to identify, rate and block.

(I'm surprised that Google is getting into banners. Targeted search ads are much more valuable than banners. Banner ad click-through rates are so low as to barely be measurable.)

Right. Google Shopping was originally a price comparison service. There was no charge for being listed. Then it was changed to an paid ad service. All the links on it changed to Google ad links. Our Ad Limiter browser add-on, which hides all but one Google ad per search result, then started limiting the number of shopping results displayed. We finally allowed more ads to show through on explicit Google shopping pages.

Now, Google Shopping results have changed again, so that they look like real search results. They even have additional Google ads, with the light tan background. But in reality, every result on a Google Shopping page is a paid ad.

Blocking at the web browser level, where the blocking program has an idea of what's going on, works best. Blocking at the IP level will stall out some sites. It's technically possible to block in the browser in such a way that the site can't figure out that it's being blocked. Few sites detect ad blockers yet, but more could. It may be worthwhile to delay loads of ad sites and see if this stalls the loading of the real content. For mobile, it would be amusing to have an ad-blocking proxy site which reads the ads into the proxy machine but never sends them over the air link.

We need a new level of popup-blocking technology, one that understands HTML layers and decides which ones get to appear. Anybody working on this? Also, most of the existing ad blockers run off of big lists of regular expressions, which are manually updated. That's rather retro technology. They should be using classifiers.

Blocking tracking sites is usually a win. For this page, I'm blocking Google Analytics and Comscore Beacon, using Abine's DoNotTrackMe Firefox add-on. This blocking has the amusing side effect that CBS shows will run without showing any ads.

Of course, with "apps", it's much tougher to block. It may be necessary to run apps under a virtual machine that prevents the app from doing certain things. An ad-hostile version of Flash might be worth constructing.

Should some ads get through? We offer Ad Limiter, which declutters Google search result pages by removing all but one ad. We pick the one ad based on our ratings of site legitimacy. Interestingly, most users of that add-on seem to be business sites - usage is high on weekdays and drops off on weekends. There may be a market for business-based ad blocking products.

The big problem with ads is that sites keep increasing the number of ads per page or per unit time until the number of users drops off substantially. CBS actually admitted that they cranked up the number of commercials on their on-line shows until the usage started to drop.

There are limits to this, as Myspace found out the hard way. At some point, users revolt and go elsewhere. Facebook seems to be following Myspace in that regard, as "sponsored stories" and larger ads chew up more of the screen. Google started with small blocks of ads on the right of search results, but now there are ads at the right, top, and bottom of search results.

As a counter to that, I did Ad LImiter, which is a reaction to Google and Bing putting too many ads and paid results on search results. You get to select how many ads you want to see per page. The default is 1. You can set it to zero, but one Google ad is often useful. Think of it as moderation, applied to advertisers.

I'd like to see more tools like that. It would induce advertisers to produce better, more relevant ads, if they were competing against other ads for some criterion beneficial to the user. Google selects the ads to show based on an algorithm designed to optimize Google's revenue. This is not necessarily optimal for either user or advertiser.

From an add-on developer perspective, Firefox's frantic updates are a pain. I have the same add-on for Firefox and Google Chrome. Most of the code is common. On the Firefox side, I have work-arounds for two bugs in Firefox, and they've been open bug reports in Bugzilla for many months. There's a new bug this week because the last update to the Mozilla add-on SDK broke something in message passing. That's supposedly fixed in the next version of the SDK being released today. Now I have to rebuild, update and test my add-on, then run it through the Mozilla approval bureaucracy again. (Yes, the AMO web site says this happens automatically. That's only true if you let them host the source code.)

Over on Google Chrome, it just works. No workarounds needed. A stable API. No updates needed from my side.

I get far more downloads of the Firefox version, though.

Google has gone nuts with the ads.

Myspace tried that. It didn't work out well for them.

Google's advice to their AdSense advertisers is both funny and pathetic. Google suggests that the content should be a tiny box in the center, surrounded by Google ads on all sides. Google has actually sent out emails to AdSense advertisers telling them that they should have more ads on their page. That's what Myspace looked like during their screaming dive to irrelevance.

(We give away Ad Limiter which cuts Google ads on Google search results down to one ad per page. Since AdBlock Plus sold out and started allowing ads from their "partners", Ad Limiter is picking up a modest number of users. Or you can use DuckDuckGo, which limits itself to one ad per page.)