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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
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
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 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.
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 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.
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'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.
:-)
Ok, for once a doctor is not prescribing something. He cites the main reason as it being too addictive.
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.
So you have "sleeping issues" and think that these pills are going to solve it. Because you had them before and now you need them to be able to live your life normally. Um, that's an addiction pal
If you're not diagnosed with a sleeping disorder (and sleep problems are just a symptom of something else), then sleeping pills are not going to help you in the long term. If it's not stress/lifestyle/health, then go see a sleep specialist. Some sleep disorders are very very serious (read: life threatening).
This is why self-medicating is bad. If being able to buy these things online prevents you from going to see a specialist and inevitably leads to you not getting diagnosed with a serious illness then that would be a Bad Thing(TM).
Check out SleepNet for more info.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
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.