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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?"
a bad idea. One of the reasons I know many people use google is purely because it's unfiltered and unrestricted. Millions use Google every day, changing anything major now could spell catastrophy.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
This is big pharaceuticals leaning on them to try and limit the ability of people to shop for perscription drugs outside the US and (gasp!) actually pay a fair price (and a price they can afford) for them!
You're using her as bait, Master!
This actually helps bolster my confidence in the teetering giant. I've been interested myself in signing up to run google's adwords for the launch of my next portal; this helps establish that they ARE sensitive to the needs of the people who really count on them. It doesn't matter who did it first; what counts is that google IS doing this. I respect that.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
The phrase search
"to be or not to be"
produces 2 incorrect results out of the first 10.
Notes:
It does not work. Check all of the first ten results: two of them do not contain the phrase
Putting a + in front of the phrase does not make it work
The search was done using quotes.
It is not a matter of "they are indexing millions of pages: give them a break". Altavista also indexes millions of pages, and it has no error results in its returns on phrase searches.
Google should fix the bugs in the search engine before worrying about ad words!
I'm am deeply sickened that Google names these companies as being legitimate. These are the companies MOST responsible for spam these days, not to mention getting drugs in the wrong hands. The affiliate programs run by these drug companies are nothing short of a license to spam on their behalf. The drug companies deny responsibility because they "can't control the affiliates". Bull.
These drug companies are scum. And Google is culpable by so emphatically stating that these companies are legitimate. Google had better watch who they decide to defend.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
I was trying to find personal accounts of side effects of a particular drug that I was taking. I wanted to know if other people were having the same experience as me, not what the drug's manufacturer said the side effects were. Any search containing the drug name produced hundreds of links to online pharmacies, making it very hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Does this mean I think they should ban these advertisers from the Adwords program? Not really - if they want to pay to advertise, then fine. But I do think that something needs to be done about the overloading of search results like I experienced.
I could kill you, sure, but I could only make you cry with these words
Perhaps the government should be looking at why it is that we have so many painkiller-addicted people in the first place. We have a $ystem that encourages doctors to pump people full of pills, rather than take more time-intensive solutions such as actually developing a long-term plan to treat the underlying sources of pain and illness.
Incidentally, if Rush Limbaugh knew what he was doing, he could have used these sites instead of having his housekeeper run his drugs.
Well, I don't think anyone said google doesn't have the right, but the question goes both ways -- why should they remove these sites from thier index? In search of the answer to that, I first noted who seems most interested in swaying google and others to censor search results:
"These legitimate businesses are an important but faceless part of the supply chain for these dangerous drugs," said Carmen Catizone, executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, which has been lobbying Google and other search engines to stop accepting advertising from rogue Web sites. "If the government is serious, it has to look at these businesses."
That's right, it's the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, which represents all those who make money by selling these types of drugs the fine traditional way -- via tightly controlled distribution sysems with loads of heavy markups for both the drug developer (good) and the middle-men (maybe not as good).
Of course, in general, pharmacists add value to the system -- they advise and help people avoid dangerous drug interactions and such. That's good. But note that sometimes, some people have to take a drug forever, and they tend to learn about that drug pretty well and manage to use it responsibly and safely without a white-coated guy handing it to them every week.
Then sometimes these people learn that the drug they pay $100/week for is available elsewhere for 1/10th or less the price. Same drug. A lot less money. Should these people be allowed to buy their prescriptions online for less money? (Note that I call them "prescriptions", to be clear that I'm talking about people with valid prescriptions from real doctors (Hi Everybody!), not those who just decided they need some oxy's for the weekend (Hi Rush!)).
My medical plan at work requires me to buy prescriptions online when they will be used for more then 3 months at a time (such as wifey's birth control pills). It's faster, cheaper, and automatic. I wonder how many of these "rogue websites" are actually following the law, requiring prescriptions from real doctors, etc. I imagine it would be a nice bonus for the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy if a few of the legit online drug services took a negative hit from this effort as well.
Of course, I believe any aduly should be allowed to get pretty much any drug they want and use it anyway they want as long as they don't share with minors or try to kill someone with them (except themselves, which is fine), so this whole issue seems kind of silly to me, but it's always interesting to follow the money trail that often leads up to such "crackdowns."
everything in moderation
Some time ago, we tried to sign up for AdWords and were refused because we sell supplies for making fireworks. We don't sell fireworks, explosives, or chemicals; we sell items like paper, string, paste, and equipment used by professional fireworks manufacturers as well as (serious, legal) hobbyists. We don't even sell how-to books or instructions. The reason Google rejected our advertising was not because of the items we sell, but because we market them as fireworks building materials.
Way too many folk look at google thru rose colored glasses. Poor innocent google.
Assuming google shines at all is going too far in my book.
Disagree? Then explain why so many of the links I click on to buy things direct me to ebay, instead of the site I expect. If I cut/paste that link into a fresh window, it goes where it should. And this is just one issue...there is still the problem of sites buying a ranking from google instead of earning like they should. google is crafted, bought and falsified rankings run wild - give me an unbiased search engine/site any day.
i hate spam and advertisement. even google's seemingly unabtrusive adwords are annoying when i need to do research and need pages to come up fast.
i have found the mozilla firebird adblocking css script to be immensely useful for those who want to try it out, the instructions as well as the script itself is located at http://texturizer.net/firebird/adblock.html
this is by far the greatest adblocker that i have come across, it blocks a vast majority of the ads and works much better than the "block images from this server" feature which was very neat as well.
-m
I agree with your problem. For the time being, you can get rid of shopping entries almost completely by adding "-buy" at the end of your query.
I run a VW enthusiast website that primarily consists of people discussing the modifications of their Volkswagens. However, I do have a forum which "anything goes" and it happens to have pr0n posted once in a while. I ran Google AdSense for a few weeks and then they emailed me stating I had to censor the content or remove the ads. Needless to say, I removed the ads. I respect Google's intentions - most advertisers don't want to be affiliated with "risque" content...and they are just protecting their interests. They were very courteous throughout the issue and I would definitely use them again if I have a site that conforms to their guidelines.
Not that I completely agree with Googles decision but I would not exactly associate an addiction or chemical dependency to being "dumb". Ideally, you would always make the smartest decision for your own well being but that decision making process gets warped by the addiction. If this was not the case, 99.999% of people using tobacco would quit today.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Panther/Safari
... a YZF1000 R1 ZX9R ZX-9R Cat No: CLEAR TURN CBR929RR REAR - ZX7R DRIVING LIGHTS fz1
r1 SIGNAL ZX look of Turn Signal 98-99 TL1000R TURNSIGNALS FOR GSXR / Be the ...
www.bomberate.com/ ZX6_ZX7_ZX9_ZX12_ZX12R_CLEAR_TURN_SIGNAL_ZX_8356.h tml - Similar pages
...hit the link and end up at ebay marketplace (link says www.bomberate), looking at items for sale by Fisher Wholesale, etc....click on a link and you find it says....cgi.ebay.com .....? About as far away from bomberate.com as you can get.
Search for: gsxr turnsignals
Second link says "ZX6 ZX7 ZX9 ZX12 ZX12R CLEAR TURN SIGNAL ZX
Paste that link in a new window and you don't go to ebay...why?
Um, my pharmacist has frequently reminded me about things that may not be dangerous, per se, but are certainly helpful to know. The last batch of antibiotics I took, he reminded me to take it with food, that exposure to sun may cause sunburn quicker than normal while using the antibiotic, and that taking this antibiotic within 2 hours of a mineral supplement would lessen (significantly) the absorption of the antibiotic.
I do mail order my common 'scripts, and those I know how to deal with pretty well, but I like pharmacies when I'm actually ill. And, when I'm ill, I'm usually visiting in the middle of the day, so they're not that busy..
This is nothing compared to what Adwords did to all of their advertisers a couple months ago. It used to be where the default type of keyword matching was to take your exact words, and match them in any order across a user's search term. They changed this so that it expands each search term to "related" words, called "broad matching". These related words are usually anything but relevant. Even words which are spelled closely to your target word are included. Worse yet, they don't give a way to opt out of it, and they don't offer a replacement for the old style of matching.
The net result is that you have more people competing on obscure keywords (read: higher cost per click), and these new-found competitors don't even *want* to be competing with you!
And I thought their motto was "don't be evil". Hmm.
Josh Woodward
This is slightly off topic, but I noticed a number of people complaining about the same experience I had... looking for information about a medication and finding pages of online pharmacies rated higher.
:-)
However, I also run a blog (Useful Fools http://www.tinyvital.com/blog) and thus can tell you where those high page ranks come from: link spamming.
I started getting comments in my blog that were a bit odd (some ancient article would get a comment like "nice article" and nothing else). I would check and the associated URL was an online pharmacy. Also, I would get comments that were nothing more than a list of online-pharmacy links.
I delete all of these. I have modified my blog code to make the automated Movable Type automated spamming more difficult, just to find that the spammers using automated means come back to the site where it fails and manually enter the spam. I also modified my blog so the email notification of a comment to me also includes a hotlink to delete the comment. I am considering sequestering hotlinks until I manually approve them, but that's a bunch more Perl hacking and I hate Perl and don't have time
This approach causes the google page rank to be artificially inflated. By spreading the spam across a lot of blogs (and I assume BBS's and usenet), the links do not appear to Google's algorithms to be link farms (i.e. they create a widely distributed link farm that is hard to detect). I wouldn't be surprised if there are comments buried away in Slashdot that also contain these links.
One of my favorite blogs, Samizdata, uses a simple Turing test (an image with a random code in it that you have to enter) to deter automated spam. But this won't stop it all.
I fear that google will end up derating blog links as a result, which would be a big shame (I *like* the high page rank on my blog, and get lots of interesting comments and email as a result).
The only good weather is bad weather.