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?"

Comments

Why Not?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why Not?

[randyest]

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."

But have you ever..

[cabingirl]

...needed to look up anectdotal drug information?

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.

Re:Of course

[turtlexit]

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.

It all needs to go to froogle anyway!

[kcornia]

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.