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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?"
Plenty of sites block or blocked porn in one form or another. They have the right to refuse money from anyone.
Or so I would hope.
They're going to exercise more care about who they sell ad space to, not excise the sellers from the results. Two totally different things- and it's the ad space sales that they have to take actual responsibility for, since they're being paid...
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Nowhere to them claim to be unfiltered or unrestricted. They don't take ads for a number of other categories including guns. They also filter out sites they feel are fraudulent in trying to gain higher pagerank. So, where is this unfiltered and unrestricted Google?
I don't think the problem of buying cheap drugs from Canada/Mexico is the whole piece. Counterfeit drugs are a real problem. The are plenty of mail order drug companies that have been featured on TV. Quite a few politicians are still supporting state programs that import from Canada and/or mandate discounts from the Big Drug Companies. From an ethical standpoint, I find the prices drug corporations rake in on their patented drugs more revolting than the RIAA. My impression is that the drug companies spend more money on marketing than they do on R&D, despite their B.S. excuse that mandatory discounts will cut their R&D budget.
This is the wackiest conspiracy theory I've seen all day.
How exactly are the big pharmaceutical companies "leaning on" Google? Talk of Google's IPO has included mention of the company's value, which is several billion dollars. They aren't a small company that anybody can just push around. The only "leaning" tactic I can think of that would work would be a fleet of armored cars, loaded with green paper cargo, driving to Google's headquarters and unloading.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
When I do a search for something (Simcity 4 strategies this weekend for instance), I don't want the first 4 pages to be links to stores where I can buy the Prima guide. If I want that, I'll go to froogle.
And yeah, so what if most users don't know its there. If that's the case, make the first link that's returned say something to the effect of "Were you looking for something to BUY?" If so, click here. You get the idea.
Or add froogle as a tab on the front page, with a bubble that tells users what it is.
Anything to make searches for information return links to just that, not 2000 mom and pop websites that link to amazon.