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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.
Notice how there are very few if any AdWords when searching for "goat" or "goatse".
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
Of course this is tarnishing google's image. This is basically the same thing that has happened to every single search engine. Yahoo was a great search engine in its time. They started getting millions of hits a day, and they decided to sell space on the site. Then, yahoo sold ranking on the engine, and you start having skewed results. Finally, People stop coming because of the pop-ups and bad search results. This isn't a great position for google.
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
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
....Porn ads... ( allow me to get my asbestos pants on real quick ) ... Sure, its fine an dandy for people to not be able to get prescription meds, but you can do a search for 'free movies" and get bombarded with adword ads for all the pr0n you can ever need. if their trying to look out for the good of its users, little timmy doesnt need to see "finding dildo" when he's trying to get "finding nemo"
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
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?
Now that people are starting to exploit googles' page ranking system on a regular basis and since google is having to bow to legal pressure and thereby lose their outsider "street cred"...they're in the exact spot that yahoo was in in 1999.
All they need now is a half-assed web hosting service.
How many times are we going to see this repeated online until we learn that a jack-of-all-trades really IS master of none?
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
There goes my sex life. Where am I going to buy cheap Viagra now?!
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
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*
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
Are some of the 100,000 advertisers now signed up for Adwords tarnishing Google's image at a delicate time?
No. It's Google's own fault for tarnishing its own image. They have control of how they function and others have merely taken advantage of it. Google allowed it to continue until now, when they realized problems were in the making.
But then again, tarnishing its image towards whom? Advertisers, users of Google, the government, or everyone?
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.
If people want to buy pills without a prescription, then by all means let them. What's the big deal?
I've been lookin' at some of those sites lately because I would like some Ambien. I've had sleeping issues for years now and doctors are very reluctant to prescribe them to me because they're "too addictive", which is total BS. They might be, but I don't have addictive personality. The best sleep I've had in my life has been while on those pills. Considering it's my sleep being affected, I really don't see the problem with buying 'em online. It's not like I'm buying Oxycontin and getting doped up.
Who's Google to step in and play the police?
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs, which is what these adwords are, is extremely tightly regulated in the US. It was only legalized recently, under strict controls, and is still illegal in many (most?) jurisdictions. Some people think that any DTC advertising is a bad idea.
If you publish an ad for a drug, and the FDA didn't sign off on it first, you're breaking the law. Google is almost certainly required to do this -- I'm amazed that they got away with it for so long.
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.
A few weeks ago when Rush Limbaugh was in the news for his addiction to prescription painkillers, I remember reading a story on the Web (MSNBC maybe?) about his medication of choice, Oxycontin. It was talking about the dangers of unregulated use and so forth...pretty standard health reporting stuff.
The funny thing is that at the bottom of the article was a couple of google search word ads (to be fair, I'm not sure it was actually Google, but same concept) offering the chance to buy the drug the article had just warned us about. Talk about your mixed messages!
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
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?
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/
Are the TV networks unethical if they refuse to take huge fines from the FCC to run ads for illegal products?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
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 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
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
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.
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.
As you say, when one-person companies are paying 50 cents per click, the idea of somebody clicking away at their advert can get quite insulting.
Not, of course, that anybody is above "spending" their competitors' money with the occasional click on a google ad-word for a competitive query.
Note to google: you need to download the list of open proxies every day, and refuse adwords impressions from IP addresses on that list!
Or just respond to a click with a portscan. If you don't mind being a little unpopular...