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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?"
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.
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.