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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
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 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.
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.