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Google AdWords And Ethics Issues

Posted by simoniker on from the could-should-and-would dept.

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?"

2 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. Why Not? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. It all needs to go to froogle anyway! by kcornia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.