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Google AdWords And Ethics Issues
trystanu writes "The Washington Post reports that Google 'will stop accepting advertising from unlicensed pharmacies that have used the Internet to sell millions of doses of narcotics and prescription drugs without medical supervision', following both Yahoo and Microsoft's similar moves last month. The head of Google's U.S. AdWords branch maintains it's not just for the money but that they want their searchers to have the ads most relevant to what they're looking for. It's quite clear some advertisers are using the front door to spam Google rankings. Are some of the 100,000 advertisers now signed up for Adwords tarnishing Google's image at a delicate time?"
What's gotten into the GoogleBot recently? For four days in a row, a site of mine is visited by various GoogleBots (three or four different IP addresses) every hour, sometimes even more frequently. The bot always gets robots.txt (which doesn't exist) and the main index page, but nothing else. What's going on?
Illegal and unlicensed pharamacies - is the label they want to slap on Canadian pharamcies? It seems to me that they're doing Americans a favour by selling them at prices they can afford better. What a disgusting rip-off the drug market is. And you thought the RIAA and MPAA are bad.
Quite the opposite, actually. "Canadian" is what many illegal and unlicensed pharmacies are calling themselves -- in many cases, so-called "Canadian pharmacies" consist of a website run off a server in .us, and a bunch of people in India shipping the drugs. The Canadian government isn't happy about the country being given a bad name, but since these organizations don't conduct any business in Canada, it's hard to take action against them.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
all that spam only clogs the engine, and most of it are really crappy pages.
for a while, whenever i do a search, i haven't found relevant results on the first search page, sometimes the second will have something useful. specially when searching for hardware or manuals for devices.
it's really REALLY annoying.
*shower*
Unless I am misinformed, this has no impact on Google's search engine - only sponsored links (the AdWords service). Although it is pretty shady to mix in sponsored results with real results like other search engines do, Google places their sponsored links to the right of search results, clealy labeled - and it is entirely their prerogative who they will accept ads from.
They do have all sorts of measures in place to fight this - they watch IP addresses, access patterns etc. A friend of mine got his University department's IP range banned from Google by writing a script to click repeatedly on ad-words. It didn't take them long to spot it.
I know this for fact since I am working on a system I put together for partners here and in India for selling prescriptions online. Our site is 100% legal, yet we don't have a huge budget, so Google and other search engines were our main hope. However, this looks to have now changed.
For proof of fact that it is big money lobbying congress and the search engines, take a gander at this article (one of many on the subject). Drugstore.com and others are part of VIPPS, which is a 'licensed' group of online pharmacy companies. Getting VIPPS certification is not cheap and has particular requirements.
While I believe in making sure pharmacies are legit and safe, I think this approach is not the best and only benefits the ones who are raking in cash hand over fist.
Last week my ex-girlfriend injested a heavy dose of Vicodin, and I was feindishly trying to search Google to see if she had taken enough to overdose, or what someone would take if they were trying to commit suicide. The majority of results were for no-name pharm retailers selling drugs named "Vicodin Overdose" aimed at people who wanted to kill themselves.
I can see maybe a small handful of these companies being out there to cater in some twisted way (reality check) but to see the majority of these results using copy and pasted information from each other, selling this is absolute garbage.
The companies that try to take advantage of the technology behind a search engine to push such drastic products should be taken off. It was more difficult than it should have been to find the dose that is sufficient to be life threatening, for preventative measures, than it was to punch in some CC#'s and order oblivion.
Thankfully my ex was okay, no thanks to the majority of scum sucking businesses that populate some of Google's rankings.
Anon for a reason.
My wife spends $20 a day on google adwords and overture for her online store and I occasionally check the server logs.
I can tell you that both will record multiple hits from the same IP address as multiple hits (at least up to a dozen). I have contacted them both on this issue and they assured me they have "means" of identifying someone abusing the system. Neither would not tell me what their "means" are. I can assume also that neither are too concerned that abuse is prevented because it does improve their bottom line, just as long as it does not become too prevalent that advertisers lose their trust.
I don't see anything in the article about censoring search results or removing sites from the index. This is about ads, not search results.
Your points about motivation may still apply, but they're undermined when you bring up irrelevant issues.
I agree with you pretty much across the board.
I have one small clarification. Google will stop accepting advertising for these companies, I saw no mention of them dropping anything from the index.
Unless I missed something.
One could be interpreted as a form of censorship the other is in line with the "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason" signs you see posted in many physical establishments.
Use this Spam Report Page to tell them what you think is spam.
NoSuchGuy
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
This is not google's trickery.
To see for yourself try this:
-Fire up wget and grab the link above.
-try this again while specifying "--referer=http://google.com".
-compare the two files.
The switch is being done by bomberate.com's webserver depending on the referer address given, google has nothing to do with it.
it should also be pointed out that the "ebay" link does not in fact go to ebay, but rather a site on bomberate.com which lists e-bay auctions.
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
He's right and he's wrong. Yes it gets redirected, but no, it's not google doing that. It's "bomberrate", whoever they are, redirecting to ebay based on the google referal.
Just look at the "real" bomberrate page: it's essential a long circular string of links (a ton of which are labelled with variations on the word "Yu-Gi-Oh") all pointing to each other. Notice how they claim to sell an amazing variety of unrelated products, but you can never find any information on how to buy them? It's just page after page of long strings of text filled with abbreviations, specs, and other likely search terms, all pointing back at one another. Does this this strike you as the front page of a legitimate business, or a site designed to maximize the number of unrelated queries that turn it up? The entire site is a link farm designed to exploit Google's page-rank algorithm, get itself positioned very high on any search containing any of the insanely numerous, highly unrelated terms it contains, and then redirect them to a bunch of (quite possibly fraudulent) ebay sales in the hope that some sucker will bid on them.
The only thing Google has to do with any of this is the fact that they've been trying to fine tune the algorithm enough to put asshats like these out of business for a long time now.
I just saw this from Search Engine Watch. Its kind of offtopic, but pretty interesting. FWIW, Google is entitled to have whatever ToS it likes for its AdWords. For example, they would not allow advertising of weapons, prostitution etc. Of course, if they are removing them from teh main index, thats censorship. But it looks like they might be able to do this using this Commercial Results Filter:
Google Dance Syndrome Strikes Again
By Danny Sullivan
There's been a new outbreak of Google Dance Syndrome, causing some web sites last month to lose top positions for some search terms. However, unlike previous outbreaks, a "cure" exists that makes it easy to compare results from "old" to "new" Google. These comparisons have some marketers convinced that recent changes at Google are designed to boost ad sales, a charge Google flatly denies.
For sites to lose rankings on Google -- or any search engine for that matter -- is nothing new. Search engines are constantly adding and removing pages, as well as altering the algorithms they use to rank pages. However, there's a great obsession with Google because of the large amounts of traffic it can deliver. Of the four most popular search engines -- Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN Search -- Google's results are used at the first three.
Every so often, Google makes massive changes to how it ranks pages. When these happen, they are usually accompanied by complaints from some search engine marketers or webmasters that Google's ranking system has gotten worse. However, judging this is difficult. Often times, those injured by changes indeed point out examples of searches where Google fails in terms of relevancy. However, examples of where Google's new system succeeds can also be found.
My previous article on this subject, Coping With GDS, The Google Dance Syndrome, explores in more depth the difficulties of measuring how well Google is doing after such changes. But unique to this latest change is the fact that there's now a method for comparing "old" and "new" Google, something that's never been possible before.
The Filter Test
Specifically, Google Watch's Daniel Brandt discovered that including a made-up word as part of your search may cause Google to show radically different results. Since his original post at WebmasterWorld.com, hundreds if not thousands of site owners have tried this test. Based on their reports, the "filter test," as it has become known, seems to show how Google previously had ranked things.
Here's an example of the filter test in action and why it works.
1.
Search for laptop rentals. You'll get thousands of matches, telling you that Google knows of plenty of web pages that contain both of those words on them.
2.
Search for laptop rentals dhdhdhdhdh. You'll get no matches, telling you that Google knows of no web pages that contain all three words. We already know from step 1 that there are plenty of pages that contain the words laptop and rentals. So, it's really dhdhdhdhdh that doesn't exist on any of these pages.
3.
Search for laptop rentals -dhdhdhdhdh. This should bring back exactly the same results as the search for laptop rentals. That's because we are asking for all pages that contain both laptop and rentals on them (which we know exist from step 1) but commanding Google to exclude any pages that also contain the word dhdhdhdhdh with the -dhdhdhdhdh part of our query. Since we know from step 2 that there are no pages with laptop and rentals on them that also contain the word dhdhdhdhdh, we should get the same results as step 1. Instead we get much different listings.
Why does this happen? One popular theory is that Google is using a new "filter" to prescreen results for "money words," searches where it hopes to sell its AdWords paid listings. You can understand the popularity of this theory by looking at the before and after for that search on laptop rentals. Before, you get mostly businesses that appear to specialize in laptop rentals. After, these are all gone -- r
AdWords does not affect normal search results! This is about the sponsored links, and they are very obvious, and also separated from the actual search results.
Can we please quit it with the FUD and misinformation now? What is this, Google Watch?
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