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This might be down-modded by Google-fanboys, but it needs to be said: Google has had something like this coming.

As a customer both of Google AdSense and Google AdWords, I have been victim of many of Google's own anti-competitive and censorship policies.

First, if your webpage contains keywords like "war" or "suicide" (as any news page will sometimes) Google will not serve your site paying ads but will serve you Public Service Announcements (PSAs) about saving Gorillas and stuff like that. By Google's own criterion, they wouldn't sponsor news.google.com or the NY Times, except, well, they do. If your money is big enough then it's kay; only smaller sights are oppressed. They have revoked supporting non-PSAs at the recently slashdotted News for Christians site Good Fig:

http://www.goodfig.org

They stopped mainly because Good Fig covers things like the Isreali-Palestinian situation (war), the COPA (the keyword "pornography"), a sex-abuse victim reconciliation study (the keyword "sex"), etc. There also is a story reported here that Google wouldn't allow Valley Firearms LLC or any other firearms retailer to advertise their firearms, while Google will advertise porn links that are only 2 clicks away from ultra-explicit material.

Google wouldn't support paying ads for Slashdot unless Slashdot had big enough money (which they might), because Slashdot covers stories involving the keywords "sex", "pornography", etc., etc.

Next, using Google AdWords I had a click-through-rate (CTR) of 0.6% with an average position of 4-5 while Google requires 0.5% for the top spot so I was doing fine---until Google ran my ad on "content focused" sites and got me a "content focused" CTR of 0.1% and are now trying to charge me a $5 "full-restore" fee for my "underperforming keywords/ads." One of the "content-focused" sites was Amazon.com and they ran my ad on a few book pages where you have to scroll way down and read the "You might also be interested in.." section. Like anyone will ever read that.

So, Google's search page rules and they have some of the best and brightest technical minds working for them; however, when it comes to the money-people Google has hired to direct policy and manage how AdWords and AdSense work, they have some clear issues....

This might be down-modded by Google-fanboys, but it needs to be said: Google has had something like this coming.

As a customer both of Google AdSense and Google AdWords, I have been victim of many of Google's own anti-competitive and censorship policies.

First, if your webpage contains keywords like "war" or "suicide" (as any news page will sometimes) Google will not serve your site paying ads but will serve you Public Service Announcements (PSAs) about saving Gorillas and stuff like that. By Google's own criterion, they wouldn't sponsor news.google.com or the NY Times, except, well, they do. If your money is big enough then it's kay; only smaller sights are oppressed. They have revoked supporting non-PSAs at the recently slashdotted News for Christians site Good Fig:

http://www.goodfig.org

They stopped mainly because Good Fig covers things like the Isreali-Palestinian situation (war), the COPA (the keyword "pornography"), a sex-abuse victim reconciliation study (the keyword "sex"), etc. There also is a story reported here that Google wouldn't allow Valley Firearms LLC or any other firearms retailer to advertise their firearms, while Google will advertise porn links that are only 2 clicks away from ultra-explicit material.

Google wouldn't support paying ads for Slashdot unless Slashdot had big enough money (which they might), because Slashdot covers stories involving the keywords "sex", "pornography", etc., etc.

Next, using Google AdWords I had a click-through-rate (CTR) of 0.6% with an average position of 4-5 while Google requires 0.5% for the top spot so I was doing fine---until Google ran my ad on "content focused" sites and got me a "content focused" CTR of 0.1% and are now trying to charge me a $5 "full-restore" fee for my "underperforming keywords/ads." One of the "content-focused" sites was Amazon.com and they ran my ad on a few book pages where you have to scroll way down and read the "You might also be interested in.." section. Like anyone will ever read that.

So, Google's search page rules and they have some of the best and brightest technical minds working for them; however, when it comes to the money-people Google has hired to direct policy and manage how AdWords and AdSense work, they have some clear issues....

One wonders why it took them so long.

One wonders even more why Western European nations like Great Britain were beaten by the Chinese.

One wonders why the Russians even beat us to the punch in the first place, when we supposedly got the better German rocket-engineers from WWII.

///

Good Fig - News for Christians.

http://www.goodfig.org

One wonders why it took them so long.

One wonders even more why Western European nations like Great Britain were beaten by the Chinese.

One wonders why the Russians even beat us to the punch in the first place, when we supposedly got the better German rocket-engineers from WWII.

///

Good Fig - News for Christians.

http://www.goodfig.org

I presume this post will be down-modded, but the question needs asking.

This is an interesting story, but I don't see why it is "News for Nerds." It's interesting news for Americans; it's news of such great interest to Christians that I've even submitted it to the new Good Fig site which is a News for Christians site that follows the Slashdot format:

http://www.goodfig.org

It's interesting that one of the most highly discussed Slashdot articles of all time isn't entirely topical.

I presume this post will be down-modded, but the question needs asking.

This is an interesting story, but I don't see why it is "News for Nerds." It's interesting news for Americans; it's news of such great interest to Christians that I've even submitted it to the new Good Fig site which is a News for Christians site that follows the Slashdot format:

http://www.goodfig.org

It's interesting that one of the most highly discussed Slashdot articles of all time isn't entirely topical.