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And what about all these companies?

As an owner of patents you are biased in favour of them, just like all the mega corps that own a fuckton of them. After Google paid a few billion for patents recently they might be reluctant to see the downside of the system, and neither will they permit any change to the patent system because that might decrease market value of their "warchest".

Aside from a few cases where consensus is in favour of patents, like pharmaceuticals, the patent system today mostly serves to attack and often elliminate competition. Why does every Android device made pay $5 tax to Microsoft? Did Microsoft invent something that Android could not possibly be produced without? Hint: when contacting manufacturers MS does not even specify which patents they infringe. How is this different from legalized blackmail?

Google and other ads are specifically designed to look like search results and exploit the fact that older people cannot see contrast of the background as well as younger people. Or even younger people using bad quality or badly calibrated monitors. (Or using Flux).

The contrast on the background is much lower than the federal 508 standard for contrast and I think has changed to over the years to a lighter shade as Google "optimizes" it.

http://i.imgur.com/Wmdd0.png

One is an ad and one is a search result, is there much difference? Given the average quality of monitors, I think those are designed to fool even otherwise sharp eyes.

There is a border on the right of the ads but none on at the bottom. Google must be getting tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue from the color change from blue to yellow, the ones shown in the example are about $50 to $100 for each click.

http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-it

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentionally-trying-to-minimize-the-fact-that-these-are-ads/

Guess they employ many behavioral psychologist super PHDs who tweaked the carefully and scientifically calibrated colors on ads and removed all contrast including borders to make many folks not realize where the ads end and the actual results begin. Forget about people going to paid websites and screwing websites that don't charge users that rank well organically because they're good and popular but don't give the Googolplex any money.

"Study:Contrast sensitivity gradually decreases with age"
http://www.eyeworld.org/article.php?sid=818&strict=0&morphologic=0

Here are two other mighty convenient examples where Google made "innocent" mistakes by vacuuming more data to track users intrusively and show them ads. Not sure if they're evil or just incompetent.

Here's an example of them being *both* very competent and evil.

Removing borders and decreasing contrast between ads and results to get more clicks and more money from advertisers and users, especially older people who can't see contrast well. I am sure they employ professional psychologists with PhDs whose sole objective is to increase ad clicks by using A/B testing, even if they user didn't intend to click ads, they must be making billions off these "optimizations".

http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-it

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentionally-trying-to-minimize-the-fact-that-these-are-ads/

Unlike Microsoft, they do have amazing PR though, with making lots of people believe the all the 'do no evil' BS, while slowly taking over the browser market by beating Mozilla to save money on ads.

Google is no better at greed for money.

See how Google started removing borders around ads and made the shading super light in order to get ad clicks from older people and people with bad monitor calibration:

http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-it

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentionally-trying-to-minimize-the-fact-that-these-are-ads/

Those carefully and scientifically calibrated colors must be worth atleast few hundred million of extra revenue from their cash cow by making gullible people click on ads mistaking them for real search results.

"Study:Contrast sensitivity gradually decreases with age"
http://www.eyeworld.org/article.php?sid=818&strict=0&morphologic=0&query=

Chrome is a trojan horse to weaken Mozilla which is becoming less powerful because Google uses its ad dollars to bundle Chrome with Flash, Acrobat and Java updates by default thereby reducing Firefox's share and has the nice side effect of reducing Google's payments to Mozilla for searches.

And Web DRM? Of course it's going to be a HTML standard very soon because IE, Safari and... ding! Chrome are going to be supporting it fully with 80% marketshare and people will blame Firefox if Netflix doesn't work in it and recommend you switch to Chrome to see movies! iOS, Android and Windows Phone, BBOS will add support for 100% tablet and phone support for the DRM.

Chrome on Chromebook already has the EME DRM module. Firefox and Opera are powerless to stop it. We have already seen this play out with the h.264 HTML5 video support in Chrome fiasco when Google promised it would drop H.264 from Chrome to push WebM but did not and Mozilla was left holding the bag with WebM and had to recently had to eat crow and add support for patent encumbered H264. The web is owned by the corporates, not individuals anymore, there was some hope when Firefox was at 40%, not anymore. And we all willingly gave them the power by believing in "open" and "do no evil" and switching in droves.

Thet post troll has unintentionally stumbled on something interesting.

See how Google started removing borders around ads and made the shading super light in order to get ad clicks from older people and people with bad monitor calibration:

http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-it [ppcblog.com]or-maybe-not/

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentionally-trying-to-minimize-the-fact-that-these-are-ads/ [blumenthals.com]

Those carefully and scientifically calibrated colors must be worth atleast few hundred million of extra revenue from their cash cow by making gullible people click on ads mistaking them for real search results.

"Study:Contrast sensitivity gradually decreases with age"
http://www.eyeworld.org/article.php?sid=818&strict=0&morphologic=0&query=

but they go directly after the science of human behavior. All done in a warm, fuzzy feel that Google is somehow your very best friend. It's entirely psychological.

Hello first post troll, but you unintentionally stumbled on something interesting.

See how Google started removing borders around ads and made the shading super light in order to get ad clicks from older people and people with bad monitor calibration:

http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-itor-maybe-not/

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentionally-trying-to-minimize-the-fact-that-these-are-ads/

Those carefully and scientifically calibrated colors must be worth atleast few hundred million of extra revenue from their cash cow by making gullible people click on ads.

As I point out occasionally, many, if not most, of the problems with web spam, phishing, etc. on the web are because Google doesn't verify the identity of the business behind a web site.

Businesses don't have any right to anonymity. Even in Europe. In the European Union, businesses come under the European Directive on Electronic Commerce.: "Member States shall ensure that the service provider (defined as "any natural or legal person providing an information society service" i.e. a web site) shall render easily, directly and permanently accessible to the recipients of the service and competent authorities, at least the following information: (a) the name of the service provider; (b) the geographic address at which the service provider is established ... (c) his electronic mail address...". The European Privacy Directive is only for individuals. If the search end of Google took a hard line on that, search would be much less spammy. Currently, they can't even keep totally fake business locations out of Google Places. Yes, "Illusory Laptop Repair is still in Google Places, right in the middle of the railroad crossing. So are so many phony business locations that it's been covered at length in the New York Times. Legitimate local businesses are screaming about this; customers try to find them and end up calling some outsourced lead-generation service, thinking it's a local company.

Google wants to use Google+ for "crowdsourcing" recommendations. They used to use Citysearch and Yelp for that, but those became too polluted with fake recommendations. The trouble with "crowdsourcing" is that crowds can be sourced. You can buy "likes", "recommendations", and "+1"s in bulk on any of the black hat SEO forums.

Recommendation systems only work in three situations - when the number of reviewers is huge compared to the number of items being reviewed, as with movies, when the reviewer is known to have bought the product, as with eBay and Amazon, and when the reviewer's identity is verified and their reputation is known. Google seems to be trying for #3. To make that work, they have to tighten the screws on "Google+" users. Tightening the screws on businesses would be more productive.

That article is about link spam, which is the older Google problem. The newer problem is "places" spam. Since Google merged Google Places results in with web search results, spammers have been hitting Google Places hard. Google Places spam involves both creating phony "place pages" and adding phony "recommendations". Recommendation spamming turns out to be easy and effective, easier than creating link farms.

For a good overview, see Mike Blumenthal's article on "Illusory Laptop Repair". He inserted a phony business into Google Places, locating it on a railroad crossing. He gave it some recommendations ("The best illusory repair shop ever!"). Search Google for "virus repair bradford pa", and there it is. Despite writeups of this in many SEO blogs, it's still live in Google.

Want to fix the problem? Google is trying to hire a "Program Manager, Evaluation, Search Quality".