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A Closer Look at Google Adwords
zaphle writes "This article describes an interesting experiment with the Google Adwords service; in an effort to fine-tune the price per word, a mirror site was set up, paying a different price per word. I turns out the second site had to pay more in order to reach a similar click-through rate. My questions to the slashdot community: are organizations like Google redefining the law of demand and answer? To what extent does this imply a competitive advantage for larger companies? Do we need an ethical framework to direct companies to make such algorithms open source?"
Please pardon the immoral overtones that will be found throughout this letter, but things that you or I might regard as illogical or rotten might be considered by Google's lickspittles as an article of faith, a philosophical conviction, a political opinion, or even an innocuous form of entertainment. Let me get to the crux of the matter: If we contradict Google, we are labelled conniving Machiavellians. If we capitulate, however, we forfeit our freedoms. Google's a pretty good liar most of the time. However, it tells so many lies, it's bound to trip itself up someday.
The question that's on everyone's mind these days is, "How can Google force us to do things or take stands against our will and then turn around and shed tears for those who got hurt as a result?" On the surface, it would seem to have something to do with the way that its plans for the future are often disregarded merely as feral and are consequently not treated as the serious assaults on liberty and freedom that they definitely are. But upon further investigation, one will find that you might say, "Dirty, insensate crude-types simply pass through this world sowing the seeds of evil." Fine, I agree. But Google claims that men are spare parts in the social repertoire -- mere optional extras. I respond that dichotomous thinking has stymied its ability to reach solutions. Google's favorite buzzword these days is "crisis". It likes to tell us that we have a crisis on our hands. It then argues that the only reasonable approach to combat this crisis is for it to put belligerent, passive-aggressive materialistic-types on the federal payroll. In my opinion, the real crisis is the dearth of people who understand that the real question here is not, "Do Google's reinterpretations of historic events appear reasonable to anyone other than the worst types of misinformed egotists I've ever seen?". The real question is rather, "Why is Google so compelled to complain about situations over which it has no control?" The answer is not obvious, because we should ensure that the values for which we have labored and for which many of us have fought and sacrificed will continue in ascendancy. (Goodness knows, our elected officials aren't going to.)
In a sense, if Google can give us all a succinct and infallible argument proving that some people deserve to feel safe while others do not, I will personally deliver its Nobel Prize for Bleeding-heart Rhetoric. In the meantime, I know more about anarchism than most people. You might even say that I'm an expert on the subject. I can therefore state with confidence that Google cannot tolerate the world as it is. It needs to live in a world of fantasies. To be more specific, when it comes to Google's bromides, I indubitably maintain that we have drifted along for too long in a state of blissful denial and outright complacency. It's time to defy the international enslavement of entire peoples. The sooner we do that, the better, because if I had my druthers, Google would never have had the opportunity to displace meaningful discussion of an issue's merit or demerit with hunch and emotion. As it stands, if everyone does his own, small part, together we can admonish Google not seven times, but seventy times seven. As long as the beer keeps flowing and the paychecks keep coming, Google's helots don't really care that I challenge it to point out any text in this letter that proposes that it defends the real needs of the working class. It isn't there. There's neither a hint nor a suggestion of such a thing. I could substantiate what I'm saying about disingenuous, dastardly cretins, but I don't feel that that's necessary, since we all know what they're like. I won't pull any punches here: There is still hope for our society, real hope -- not the false sense of hope that comes from the mouths of cantankerous, horny braggarts, but the hope that makes you eager to make plans and carry them out. If I didn't sincerely believe that Google is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others, then I wouldn't be writing this letter. I conclude this letter with an appropriate quote: "You can observe a definite bias in Google's roorbacks relating to abysmal boneheads." I believe we all know who said that, don't we?
fp for my best dead buddy klerck
Get your google air! MMMMMM head on over and get some fresh brewed GOOGLE coffee and its off to your GOOGLE job in your Google hybrid car. i love it!
troll
Do we need an ethical framework to direct companies to make such algorithms open source?
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I keep on hearing that "open source" is about freedom. Since when is forcing someone to behave in a certain manner considered "freedom"?
Google can do what google wants to do as long as it's within the limits of the law, you don't like it? Start your own damn company that is more ethical.
Monstar L
Google is looking for the price where marginal revenue equals marginal cost....because google is becoming monopoly on search info, make profit, regardless of yahoo and msn's stats.
Who cares what people are paying to advertise?
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
The text just seems larger!?!
Google IMO has the best advert service because it's unintrusive and they're ads you want to see because they're context sensitive. To me that makes it more likely you'll be interested in what the ad's selling and you'll want to get it more because the ad doesn't piss you off. Because of this, google can charge whatever they like and most people will pay it.
~HTP~ Hug that tux
Like making a site with the $ .05/word.. and few others.. the total cost and time to do that should be quit low as said in the artickle. anyone using adwords to generate sales should definitely try to find the best results by doing those types of doubleblind tests.
Rule 2: Writing a spec is like writing code for a brain to execute.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. Google is a company. They are out to make a profit.
... you need to branch out and you may also do things that may be questionable.
... I think with enough contact/interest from people in the community that Google may become interested in sharing these algorithms (good public relations never hurt) ...
Companies grow from profit, Google has grown a lot. To maintain growth percentages (which as you become gi-normous like Google, becomes harder to do)
I think that paid search priority is somewhat ethically questionable, but I am not at all surprised.
Given that Google has been taking efforts to make themselves appear even more friendly to the open source community (those huge contributions awhile back)
Who knows, though?
===
However, Google doing things that are questionable and quite publically, in my opinion, spin a dangerous message for the future. They may be progressing into a more pervasive position than Microsoft in the years to come, with increased power comes increased corruption.
Scary stuff!
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Cringely, near the end of his article, drones on and on about how he has "no idea what the heck is happening here." But, in fact, he very clearly states what is going on at the beginning of the article:
Google places you higher in the rankings of of paid search results based partly on your volume of click-throughs because, again as Cringely very claearly pointed out, the more people click the more money Google makes.
Why then, Cringely, is it so hard to understand that since the first site has been opperating for what I assume to be months or even years, it would more easily place at the top of the paid search results than the brand new experimental site you created?
Your experiment proves what you already knew: popular click throughs means higher placement for less money. What don't you get?
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050922. html
and there are a couple of additional comments (including replys from google) in the following weeks.
Just a speculative thought because no one really know about googles algorithms.
The result may be due to the original pages higher pagerank. I wouldn't be surprised if google would give higher position to "better" sites even in ads. In Googles context, higher pagerank means "better" site.
My quality social news site.com.
By not supporting everything google does, you are obviously anti-google! Prepare to be modded down into the flamebait abyss you belong in!
I have an alternate explanation. I believe what existed before the guy's experiment was a more-or-less stable "ecology" around those particular keywords. There were probably a number of people paying a premium for a limited number of clicks for those keywords, well above the 10-cent level he was originally paying for. Google probably sorted the higher-paying advertisers onto the best pages and left the dime-a-click ones for others and everyone was more-or-less happy.
Then when the experiment began, it disrupted things. The advertisers who were initially offering a premium found themselves with fewer clicks as their ads were placed on less advantageous pages, or when their ads were displaced entirely. They then changed their own behavior, perhaps by choosing different keywords and/or paying higher rates. This would have cascaded, causing other advertisers to change their behaviors.
The end result would've been a shift in AdWords' performance with those keywords, one that wouldn't easily be reversible, and which could account for the poor performance when the experimenter reduced his bids for clicks.
If you ask google to justify every detail of their pricing, you may as well demand it of oil companies & every other business.
If you don't like it, dont use it.
No, I don't think Google is redefining the "law" of demand and answer... they are just better set up to take full advantage of it.
And I don't see anything wrong with this.
Sure, in some cases, larger companies have a competitive advantage when it comes to this.
Mind you, larger companies also have a competitive advantage when they have a crap-load more money than smaller companies... they can hire a boat-load of top-knotch engineers, spend way more on advertising, etc. Does this mean it's unethical? No. That's the way it works.
Of course, there could be Monopoly issues, but I doubt that they are of issue in this case.
So, do we need an ethical framework? No. The smaller company needs a better negotiator to enter into the agreement and get the better rate and the service they want.
$0.02 (CDN)
Google on the law of demand and answer. It would seem the law of demand and answer doesn't register. Maybe it's outside the law, maybe an outrage. "I demand an answer", with an implied, or else I'll tell my Mom!
Maybe it's the law of the hidden CIA prisons, but, surely, if it's the law, well then, as we demand so shall we receive an answer.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
What's the obsession with Google?
I'm assuming that the lawsuit posted earlier this week was what prompted this - which by the way, in my opinion is total nonsense and has a snowballs chance in hell of winning in court.
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There is also this quality score factor that will seriously impact the bid. It appears that if your adwords is performing badly, youe min bid amount can increase many fold!
Long gone are the days of getting a simple answer from Google without advertising. As a search engine, it still does a very good job but, there are far too many people out there thinking that Google is the Only online advertising platform. This may have begun skew the results in favor of sites that have no real content other than a bunch of google ads. Google wins either way, click on the paid ads based on the search or ads loaded on the landing page of the search result. At some point, Google will loose it's lustre.
Google are doing whatever they want to in order to make a profit, even if that means messing around with the price per click like this. There is a reason that they are number one in the market place right now and by being in this position it enables them to set the prices they want to charge, it maybe not be ethical but it is profitable and that is all that matters in today's world of e-commerce. With businesses such as spyware and spamming still being huge
Business Voyeur
It works for all, it is capitalism at its best:
Anyone can bid prices, but the costs you need vary based on how well your ads do.
Useful pages that are well typed to keywords (lemonhead ads for a search for lemon chicken would have to pay more for instance) are good for us, which means good for google, because google want to make more money.
Advertisers are stupid, they want to be top of EVERY SEARCH no matter how useful it is, and they want it cheap.
Google says, the less relevant you are to the search, the higher the click through, the higher the cost.
If you happen to convert your audience, and you now become more relevant, you prices go down.
So if I start selling neckties to skaters, I might have to stump up a bit in the long run, but if I hit a craze, they would go down, until some chump makes his own neck ties and starts bidding above me.
I think it is dumb to make this public, and the guy behind this has an ulterior motive anyway.
Misleading ads change the equation, but what can you do.
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random letters - if you are visually impaired, please email us at pater@slashdot.org
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I said nothing but that it is ethically questionable. I don't recall saying that they should be stopped, nor do I remember crying about freedoms being infringed.
I was pointing out the fact they are a company, it seems obvious to you or me, however, some people seem to think they are the second coming.
===
They are not breaking the law, doing what they are doing, while I wouldn't do it and think that it is only a sign of future problems... if they want to do it, that's their business (pun not intended)...
Cheers!
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Adwords does placement on more than just the cost-per-click. This fact is spelled out all over their website, try something like https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?a nswer=10215&topic=114 :
"We want to ensure that your keywords get a fair chance to run and that we do all we can to properly gauge their performance. We use a Quality Score to do this. Each keyword is given a Quality Score based on data specific to your account, including your keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR), relevance of ad text, historical keyword performance, the quality of your ad's landing page, and other relevancy factors.
Quality Score = keyword's CTR + relevance of your ad text + historical keyword performance + other relevancy factors
Your keyword's Quality Score and maximum CPC (at the keyword or Ad Group level) determine your ad's rank on Google search and content sites. (For the top positions above Google search results, however, we use your keyword's actual CPC.) Remember that improving the relevance of your ad text and keywords will increase your keyword's Quality Score and reduce the price you pay when someone clicks on your ad."
If you start a new campaign, it is no wonder that Google will not be able to give you the same placement as with a campaign that has run for years. It's new, it's unknown, the visitors / clicks are unknown, heck - even the cost-per-click value is jumping around. It looks weird to the system, it gets placed lower or even removed from some of the results.
What happens in the end: those who target properly (right keywords) and have a good ad copy get lots of clicks, those clicks end up making your placement better (while paying the same amount of money). The users are voting for your ad (whether they buy or not is partially unknown to Google -- "partially" because you can track it through Google if you want to).
A new factor coming into play is the landing page - the page that the ad takes you to. According to their blog ( http://adwords.blogspot.com/ ) they are now evaluating the quality of the landing page. So if you search for "children" and click on the "Get children at ebay" ad, and the page they link to does not offer "children", then sooner or later (heh, hard to guess, it depends on the amount of automatisation behind the checks) Google will either remove the ad or move it down, while the advertiser is still paying the same amount per click.
Is that evil? Is that being greedy? or is that just watching out for the "user experience"?
.... if this guy didn't trip over a duplicate content filter. I would be very surprised if Google didn't check to make sure it wasn't being fed the same content from multiple sources. From Googles point of view checking for duplicates is a good thing. They don't want their natural listings (or ad listings I imagine) to be filled with hundreds of copies of exactly the same site.
I would have been more interested to see the results of a test that modified the wording of ads and how that affects placement.
Finally, I wish I was getting 15000 click throughs a day. Sigh.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
I was thrilled with the ad-block extensions of Firefox, and welcomed the relevant ads from google. I'll admit, I have actually clicked on, and even (shocked) bought a few things.
I hate desperate ads, like those on TV and everywhere else. Advertisers realise that they are failing.
When/if google starts flash, popups, then start to complain.
Tired of online retailers charging extra to ship products to Alaska?
Google is so over confident, titan like, behemoth co. that they CAN manipulate pay per click or whatever they want.. yes, because you allowed them to do so. there is nearly no competition because of your pigheadedness and your stupid Google sheep chearing. If someone trademarks "we do no evil" doesnt mean they will follow such a rule, exactly the opposite is happening now and you probably didnt even notice their arrogance of late. omg.
Im sorry but it pisses me off knowing google controls many aspects that are dishonest. How much money is google making to fraud clicks? These questions go unanswered. There are many situations out there where people are running bogus sites and putting up ads. They get paid for bogus clicks along with Google. Google knows this. And until people become more aware and start monitoring the relationship of visits and clicks from google ads, google is going to take advantage of the situation as long as it can.
This is only speaking from an experienced point of view. Ive managed many Adwords along with much programing and server monitoring. There is many inconsistencies that are never brought to advertisers attention. But advertisers have no choice but to pay. Their company and business rely on those ads.
Google not only knows what you like, thanks to the things you search for, but it also knows who your friends are, and what they like thanks to relationships formed through GMail invites and Orkut which could come in very handy when it comes to targetted advertising in the Christmas season (and any other gift buying season).
And I'd be quite appreciative of that as I've no idea what to get my Dad this year, and a few casually placed Google Adwords undermining my own thought process wouldn't go a miss!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
the funnel just keeps getting narrower, darker etc...
what a surprise?
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as we all ?know?, change is inevitable, & denying/ignoring gravity, logic, morality, etc..., is only possible, on a temporary basis.
concern about the course of events that will occur should the corepirate nazi life0cidal execrable fail to be intervened upon is in order.
'do not be dismayed' (also from the manual). however, it's ok/recommended, to not attempt to live under/accept, fauxking nazi felon greed/fear/ego based pr ?firm? scriptdead mindphuking hypenosys.
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"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land."
First of all if he gets 15000 @ 0.15 clicks per day he is paying $1500,- a day in advertising that is $547.500 per year in advertising alone. His friend must be an internet miljonair! I somehow doubt that such a large operation would execute the test as described in the article. I think the figures are a bit inflated to make it a better story. Furthermore I use Google Adwords for my company (http://www.tiouw.com/). I spend around $5000 a year on Google. As everyone who has ever worked with AdWords knows is that when you change your ad, it changes your click through rate. Changing URL's, text, anything has a direct result. It takes some time before the system gets used to the changes and then you are back on track. I expect that if the company in the article would have run for some time with the new settings it would generate more and more hits. Finally, tests have shown that people do not click on the no.1 position, but prefer no. 2 or 3.
are organizations like Google redefining the law of demand and answer?
You mean supply and demand, the cornerstone of capitalism? More like - Google is redefining the rules of advertising and IT for the entire world.
To what extent does this imply a competitive advantage for larger companies?
Well, just like the superbowl, only companies with big bucks can get prime time advertising real estate.
Do we need an ethical framework to direct companies to make such algorithms open source?"
Keep your ethics and morality out of my consumer choices. If I dont like how google does business, I will stop buying from them. I live on Kauai, and I turned my girlfriends dying massage business into a thriving business (www.kauaioutcallmassage.com) spending only 20$/month over the last 2 years. Google has been incredible for my family, please don't rain on or change my parade with Google!
Horns are really just a broken halo.
To be honest, I just checked, and while there are 1,030,000 Google results for "Cringely," there are no ads at all on the results page, indicating -- as many have long suspected -- that I have no commercial value whatsoever.
Minimum price for 'cringely': $0.42
Too expensive for me..
BTW, the article is quite bad. All the important information is missing like the positions, CTR, minimum prices and CPC. OTOH, the algo is probably quite complex and it seems the higher bidder is not the winner.
Million Dollar Screenshot
I think Google puts a stiff penalty on lowering your price-per-click. I am sure most advertisers will (sooner of later) try is they can lower their rice-per-click. Google's algorithm will start to give them bad ratings immediately and most will be back to the old price in no time. The few that accept the hit in click troughs, will cost Google some money, but the ones that go back to the higher price will more than make up for that. Just do the math...
-- (:> jms cs.vu.nl (_) --"---
You'll see all of them around 1, 0, and -1.
For some reason... there is a tendency for anything that isn't directly supporting Google to get modded down.
This includes relevant points.
===
So for the most part, unless you have something against Google to say, you're pretty much 'preaching to the converted'...
Cheers!
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Not to burst anybody's tin-foil bubble, but there's possibly another less nefarious explanation to what is going on. As we know, Google wants to keep their Adword algorithm secret. It's quite possible that Google realized long ago that folks could map out their algorithm by simply playing with the input parameters just like Cringely's friend was doing. In order to prevent the inevitable reverse engineering of the algorithm, they might have put in some code to randomize the effectiveness of the results when Google has detected that someone is changing the parameters. If that guy wants to see if Google is really punishing him for lowering his price, he should try setting the price back to $1 and see if things go back to what they were before. I'll bet they won't.
Of course, another possibility is that they have a bug in their code. I've heard that some programmers actually make mistakes sometimes.
Send/track messages to 100K people: www.xPressAlert.com
So start a new site with zero page rank and it will have to pay more to get the same placement, if it can do so at all. Older sites will pay less because they've been around longer, and their ads will have shown themselves to actually have been relevant.
It boils down to a simple axiom: Google rewards relevance.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
It's *ADVERTISING*... The more you pay the more you get... Did anyone really ever believe any different? The more you pay the bigger the incentive Google has to stick *your* advert on someone's page and on the more popular pages at that. Now say DOH! and slap your forehead.
...
"Punishes"
Deleted
Rule 2: Writing a spec is like writing code for a brain to execute.
This just shows that a newcomer company that is pouring a bucket of money into advertising can be about the same as successfull as an established one that does not. But once the newcomer decreases the ammount of advertising it starts sinking rapidly.
From my point of view this is just normal, not some EVIL doing of Google.
Here's a common story:
"I put Google AdSense on my website. I earned about $140.00, and Google was just getting ready to send me a check. Then, out of nowhere, Google sent me an email telling me I'd generated 'invalid clicks' and that my AdSense account was terminated, and all of my profits would be returned to the advertisers."
Hundreds, if not thousands, of AdSense displayers just like me have faced this fate. But here's the question to AdWords advertisers. Have you ever seen a "refund" on your AdWords account due to some AdSense advertiser generating "invalid clicks" for your ad? I never did. Google confiscates the money from the AdSense displayer, but does not return the money to the related AdWords advertisers! That is to say, Google keeps the money that the AdWords advertisers paid to display their ads; and also keeps the money that they were supposed to pay out to the AdSense webmasters for displaying those ads.
Google is making a killing on displayed advertisements for a lot of keywords and phrases, without paying out a penny to those who are displaying the ads on their pages. They're arbitrarily cancelling AdSense displayers' accounts for unspecified reasons, and if you try to determine why, you wind up in formletter hell. "Do No Evil," my arse.
I've been on both sides of the fence. I advertised through AdWords, I displayed AdSense ads on my site. And Google decided to kill my AdSense account while I was on vacation, for "invalid clicks," and despite emails requesting details, they wouldn't bother to explain what that meant.
I immediately pulled the AdSense ads from my sites and replaced them with Yahoo Publisher ads. Good news on that front, Yahoo is actually sending me checks. And I can guarantee you that I'll never again spend a penny on any Google service, be it AdWords or any other fee-based product they come up with.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
I recently made a simple web page for my family's business. It's a small hotel, with 8 rooms and we were looking for a way to fill up the available rooms during the medium-season months (May-June). I was thinking about using Google's AdWords to promote the site to people looking for rooms in my specific area. On the other hand, I could just try to increase the page's PageRank without paying a dime (which is probably happening with this post on Slashdot ;-) but the search results might not be targeted to an "interested" audience...
If we were to use AdWords, we wouldn't spend more than $30 per month. Would AdWords be better for such a case or should I just play with the PageRank?
Pigadia Bay Hotel ~ Karpathos, Greece ~ http://www.karpathos.net/pigadiabay
I have had enough of SpecBear! The following text regards my complaints of recent days against SpecBear and his subtle but petty attempts to teach myopic concepts to children. Before he spews any more psychoanalytical drivel, let me assure him that when I was younger, I wanted to give him a rhadamanthine warning not to control what we do and how we do it. I still want to do that, but now I realize that from secret-handshake societies meeting at "the usual place" to back-door admissions committees, his hirelings have always found a way to lower our standard of living. Have you ever had a bad dream about SpecBear trying to create an atmosphere that may temporarily energize or exhilarate, but which, at the same time, will pose the gravest of human threats? Well, I have news for you. That wasn't a dream; it was real.
SpecBear spews nothing but lame retorts and innuendoes. Why is that relevant to this letter? Because SpecBear likes harangues that cashier anyone who tries to preserve the peace. Could there be a conflict of interest there? If you were to ask me, I'd say that honest people will admit that I must, on principle, establish clear, justifiable definitions of fetishism and chauvinism so that you can defend a decision to take action when his brethren paint pictures of temperamental worlds inhabited by frowzy, fatuous ne'er-do-wells. Concerned people are not afraid to view the realms of vandalism and resistentialism not as two opposing poles, but as two continua. And sensible people know that SpecBear's intent is to prevent us from asking questions. He doesn't want the details checked. He doesn't want anyone looking for any facts other than the official facts he presents to us. I wonder if this is because most of his "facts" are false. Do I want SpecBear to require religious services around the world to begin with "SpecBear is great; SpecBear is good; we thank SpecBear for our daily food"? No, thank you very much; I, not being one of the many immature, pathetic meatheads of this world, would much rather build an inclusive, nondiscriminatory movement for social and political change.
I wouldn't judge SpecBear's hired goons too harshly. They're doubtlessly just cannon fodder for SpecBear's plot to make life less pleasant for us. That's just one side of the coin. The other side is that SpecBear spouts the same bile in everything he writes, making only slight modifications to suit the issue at hand. The issue he's excited about this week is racialism, which says to me that SpecBear has worn out his welcome. But it goes further than that; SpecBear finds reality too difficult to swallow. Or maybe it just gets lost between the sports and entertainment pages. In either case, I recently received some mail in which the writer stated, "There are a series of options I could pursue, if necessary." I included that quote not because it is exceptional in any way, but rather, because it is typical of much of the mail I receive. I included it to show you that I'm not the only one who thinks that SpecBear wants nothing less than to treat anyone who doesn't agree with him to a torrent of vitriol and vilification. His lieutenants then wonder, "What's wrong with that?" Well, there's not much to be done with scary, oleaginous sots who can't figure out what's wrong with that, but the rest of us can plainly see that SpecBear's apologues are rife with contradictions and difficulties; they're totally malicious, meet no objective criteria, and are unsuited for a supposedly educated population. And as if that weren't enough, SpecBear's favorite tactic is known as "deceiving with the truth". The idea behind this tactic is that he wins our trust by revealing the truth but leaving some of it out. This makes us less likely to call people to their highest and best, not accommodate them at their lowest and least.
Relative to just a few years ago, two-faced perverts are nearly ten times as likely to believe that SpecBear's blessing is the equivalent of a papal imprimatur. This is neither a coincidence nor simply a sign of the times. Ra
"Teachers leave us kids alone
When you believe that "government is the people", or that the voting process somehow removes the element of force from the definition of government.
For companies, ethics usually conflicts with maximizing profits for shareholders so, no.
If you want an ethical framework, you have to practice what you preach.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Google denied AdWords to BeDoper.com because they say I "attack individuals, groups". I asked them to tell me what they're talking about, so I can remove it. They won't tell me. They want me to self-censor and resubmit, until they ok the site. If they had integrity, they'd just tell me what they're talking about, instead of being so vague.
But it's all thinly disguised. I read that they denied AdWords to a site because it sold stickers with a W with a line through it. Apparently Google feels strongly about the letter W.
Don't be evil? Give me a break.
Get my free Hitchhiker's Guide Tribute Novella:
not another "this is unfair, you HAVE to open source your code", this is fucking stupid, the only reason people want googles code OSS is so they can steal it and use it for themselfs
portfolio
"My questions to the slashdot community: are organizations like Google redefining the law of demand and answer?"
Anyone have any idea what the "law of demand and answer" is? Wow, a completely nonsensical slashdot summary -- must be Thursday.
http://gtickle.com/
When you have companies such as Msoft who will willfully use open souce code in their products to their advantage but lock their stuff down with a team of lawyers and huge cash reserves to fight people off, it is not the any benefit to have Goggle's algo. open source. They would be cuttng their own wrist so to speak. I do enjoy open source, but don't feel EVERYTHING needs to be open source. Especially in such a competetive arena where companies (again such as Msoft) are buying other compaines to leverage themselves to take Google down. And to the comment, "To what extent does this imply a competitive advantage for larger companies? Do we need an ethical framework to direct companies to make such algorithms open source?", I am not sure I understand this correctly. Is it asking should there be some ethical board to look at a way company makes money and determine how much they should make? For a brick and mortar establishment, is it really realistic to say to the owners, "we see you are making good money here on your customers. Turn over your books so we can see your costs and profit margins so we can see how you are doing this." Because for an online operation, it would be basically saying the same thing. "Turn over your code so we can see how you determine how you charge people"
I think that is just wrong. (If I am understanding the article correctly)
Try a fourth answer. Google is perfect in your eyes and always will be. You couldn't imagine a world without Google and wouldn't think anything they did was bad even if you saw a videotape of Google employees machine-gunning orphaned babies.
It boils down to a simple axiom: It's currently popular to love Google, and you are doing the popular thing by defending them no matter what.
Google = Microsoft circa 1995 = IBM circa 1985 = Grok's High-Tech Wheels circa 4200 B.C.
The thing about your ad going up and down based on its click through rate is in the documentation on adwords. Or it was when I was looking at it a while ago. That's standard operating procedure for ANY ad network--optimize ad placement for revenue. No-brainer there. I did that sort of things years ago in my ad network.
As for the reduction in click throughs after lowering the price. Not enough information was provided to really understand this, but:
If he's advertising two identical sites, did he use two identical ads? If so, it's perfectly logical that click through rate would be reduced on at least one of them--which would penalize that ad to get even fewer click throughs.
Lowering it from $1 to $0.40 would likely drastically move it's placement so wouldn't we expect it to hugely lower the click through numbers? I'm not sure why that should be surprising.
Also, since his original ad had a significant history--and apparently a successful one--we could certainly expect it to be getting special placement by adwords. His new ad, though, did not have that history, and so moving it up and down drastically more based on price is to be expected.
But in the oil industry, the price goes up and down and every customer pays the same ammount
But that's just simply not true. Big refineries pay less than small ones. Big distributors pay less than small ones. Smart retailers that commit to longer-term contracts pay less than those living more hand-to-mouth. Prices paid at every level of the oil (and every other commodity) market and distribution chain fluxuate wildly, and the long-term viability and business flow of each player can impact what they pay. Just like Google rewards long-time customers, long-lived established (and relevent) sites, etc.
While not illegal this does not justify a claim of "NOT EVIL"
How is evaluating your customers and striking deals that seem appropriate, according to your own interests, evil? It's not like Google (or search, or advertising in general) is some natural resource or government service that Google is on the hook to spread around evenly in some utopian socialist model... they're a private sector company deliverying a service in a way, and according to methods that they have established. If you think it's Eeeeevil for them to evaluate their customers, looking at the big picture, then all you have to do is spend your money somewhere else. They have competition: Overture, MS, Yahoo, etc.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
A proper control.
Sure, there's the $.10/word control of the original site...but it's not really a control because it ran ads long before the experiment started, which means it can't really be compared to the dummy sites given Google's vast number of factors used in listing.
When you run a $1/word site and drop it to $.40, you really need two more contols to measure the change: a second $1/word, and another that was kept at $.40. The only way to know for certain what the performance should have been at $.40/word is to have a control at that level.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
The two "identical" sites are actually different - the first one has been in AdWords for a long time, and probably has a bonus, because people have clicked its ads a lot. So there is nothing unethical.
What is the "law of demand and answer"? I've never heard this term before. What language is this from?
Insert witty sig here.
To take the seat from google, is actually fairly easy. It can be done in as little time as a year or two. You simply have to come up with a superior product, or take away one of several other advantages (that part is far easier than anybody realizes).Google is not a monopoly and can not aquire one via network services. To be fair, google can still aquire a monopoly via other products, but not via a network service.
taking away MS's power is a very different matter. MS holds it power via monopoly. That monopoly is powered from their OS and office. At this time, take away one, and their entire empire will crumble (they are working hard via xbox to prevent that from happening). But to take one away is very difficult and slow.
Consider Linux taking on the desktop. It is happening, but it is slow. But the fact that Novell and Redhat are growing on the desktop says that it is happening. But MS is fighting it everywhere. In addition, Sun's new attitude towards linux actually hurts that (they are trying to bring back the *nix wars and place them against linux; they did not learn their lessons).
finally, MS's attitude towards losing out to OASIS in mass. is most interesting. MS has realized that if they lose their lock on their closed docs, then they lose it all. Considering how easily this thing got politicized shows how easy politicians are bought, as well as how much money MS has. It makes me wonder, why did MS allow Mass. to carry on against MS during the trial.
No, the company to fear is MS. It is taking a long time to topple them. Google is above board and can be quickly toppled.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That's outrageous!
Get over it, big companies, (or anyone who is willing to pay more per word) are going to get shown more frequently. That's just basic economics. I'm sorry to burst the Open Source Free love bubble, but money does still have a role in many everyday transactions.
I guess you'll just have to accept that.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
All the important information is missing like the positions, CTR, minimum prices and CPC.
That's because Google AdSense and AdWords customers are under contract not to disclose them to any third party.
I am sure most advertisers will (sooner of later) try is they can lower their rice-per-click.
"Rice per click"? What does The Hunger Site have to do with anything?
Do we need an ethical framework to direct companies to make such algorithms open source?
Since a corporation's primary charter is to make money for it's owners, revealing information like this could be considered unethical under current norms. This is why we have the concepts of patents and other IP. A patent is a contract betwwen the government and the patent holder in which the patent holder is granted a limited term monopoly on an invention in exchange for publishing the details of the implementation of the invention. The strength of the patent system determines how willing the corporation will be to publish the details of their invention.
The main alternative to patents is trade secrets where (like in the case of the Coca-Cola formula) the corporation decides that that it is not in it's best interest to publish it's invention.
This is the framework we have now. An ethical framework that would result in a company publishing all of it's inventions without any compensation would be a very different society and much more collective than what we have now. Whether such a thing would work is not well supported by history.
You gotta buy more to get more kick, but if you cut back the increased dosage you go into withdrawal.
The better experiment would create two or more new sites and test adword on an even footing of history with both Google and searchers.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
http://www.madd.org/stats/1298 sez less than 17k killed in 2004 due to alcohol related deathe
e s says 58,226 were killed in action or classified as missing in action.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_war#Casualti
can you 'splain the difference?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
This is not the whole story! That Sept 22 article was old. People should read the follow up articles from October before comment?
. html. html
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051006
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051013
Try doing a test with more than 2 data points. That frog-guy doesn't even make me raise my eyebrows.
One of my readers makes his living selling goods over the Internet, and his sole means of obtaining customers is through Google AdWords. His business is robust for a one-man operation and he makes a good living. Knowing the actual numbers, I would say he makes a VERY good living, which shows the effectiveness of Google and AdWords as an advertising medium.
...
"It's like Vegas," said my friend. "They want you to lose. Try to game the system and they cut off one of your legs."
If they "want him to lose", why has he decided to "bet his life" so to speak on making a living from Google? There are other ways to make a buck in the world...
beware the jabberwock, my son! the jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Ads?!? What Ads?!?
I use Firefox with NoScript, FlashBlock, and pop-up blocking enabled, and I rarely see any ads on the web... those that do show up on my screen I have a knack for completely ignoring... I couldn't tell you the last time I actually noticed an ad, though they must be there from time to time (or any time I do a Google search and it shows sponsored ads, which I may see subliminally, but not conciously, so they don't really count.)
Am I missing out on targeted ads? Well, the last time an ad encouracged me to buy something (targeted ad or other) was.. uhm... never. The biggest industry (well, perhaps with the exception of military contracting) in the 1st world (advertising) does nothing to effect me except raise the prices on pretty much anything I have to spend money on... I'd rather have my taxes hiked by 50% and put all the people in the industry on welfare and live a life free of advertising...
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seuss
Did these people ever hear of Wener Heisenberg?
The new site and the old site must have competed against each other in the bidding if they ran at the same time. New Site probably lowered Old Site's click-through rate, so old site's rankings dropped, causing a downward spiral of lower click-through and lower ranking. Long ago the site rankings may have gone up in a virtuous circle of higher click-through and higher position - at a time when there was less competition. Just because it happened once, doesn't mean it can happen again the same way.
Old site didn't have the history of new site, so it wouldn't rank the same. The system is complicated, and just because some people don't understand it, doesn't mean that Google is being EVIL.
Google has explained the ranking algorithm. It is historical Click Through Rate (CTR) times Bid times 1,000, equals effective Cost Per Mil (CPM), thousand impressions. Google ranks ads by effective CPM, end of story. For new ads that have no history, Google assumes a low-side CTR.
The lesson: If you want to test Google Adwords, tinker with a few keywords or a few ads at a time, in case you get unexpected results, to avoid hosing your entire campaign.
Second lesson: Use the Google conversion tracker. For each keyword, set Bid = Conversion Rate * desired Cost Per Action (desired CPA = what you are willing to pay to get a conversion). That works real well.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So the best strategy would then be to start low at $0.05 and then very gradually increase it to $0.10? On the other hand, the system could then give lower click-throughs to encourage the advertiser to keep raising the price.
see a Text Widget
Those questions are really absurd.
Google managed to grab the lion's share of the online ad market by supplying non-obtrusive, relevant ads. People liked it, and used it. If you don't like it, don't use it. It's that simple.
When (or if?) competition catches up with Google, then they (Google) will be forced to come up with something new or different. Again, if you still don't like it, or think it's unethical, then don't use it. This will put more pressure on Google to change (not that I, personally, see anything wrong with the current incarnation of Adwords).
I understand from the article that the guy got approx. 15k clicks for $1 per click. That means that he paid $15k for that experiment, which seems quite unlikely to me.
The article is a little shaky. It's not clear what happened with the first site: how were those click-throughs changed from day 1 to 2? Certainly, the "market" for that word isn't large enough to sustain two identical campaigns with two identical sites?
see a Text Widget
Well, I was born in the States, and grew up there... the past 2 years I've been living in Toronto because my wife and son are Canadian.
So yes, I know well that of which you speak... I had a manic phase after losing a high-stress job, and can't tell you how much I spent other than saying it was my life-savings. It was an epiphany though... hearing that money can't buy you happiness just isn't as visceral as spending ~70,000 in two years on crap and winding up suicidal, manic, bi-polar and divorced...
If I had it to do all over again, I'd have done the divorce part *first* and skipped the suicidal, manic, bi-polar part alltogether.... then I could at least have put a nice down-payment on a house. C'est la vie.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seuss
could someone aside from google get financed and do something "interesting"?
:)
I doubt google is in any way financing slashdot but I remember the days when slashdot featured the more arcane news than it does now. Though this post is not one of them, many of these google posts that I've seen on slashdot lately I saw days before they are slashdotted on other sites. Sure, "Slashdot: IT is what IT is" but I remember what it used to be too.. you know what I'm sayin'?
My advise, please don't take this as a diss. Google seems great, as is Slashdot but some folks I think are just reposting google related news for their imaginary karma points or whatever you get on here when you post. Reposting easy to find info is easy slash karma. But does that make you slash-enlightened? probably not.
Have you ever seen a "refund" on your AdWords account due to some AdSense advertiser generating "invalid clicks" for your ad?
Yes, I have. As per Google's documentation, you can click on the "My Account" tab and look for "Service Adjustment" in your billing summary. I have received some small refunds.
This sounds like pure marketing. If some one is willing to pay more to get their name out there, then they get what they paid for. Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the comment arguments go against good and completely ethical business practices. If you are selling a book, would you sell it to (a) some one willing to pay $10, or (b) some one willing to pay $15?
How is this fundamentally different than the premiums that networks charge for PrimeTime TV commercials? The cost of the Google ad placement is not the per-click charge but the aggregate of all click throughs over a period of time.
If you have a business that only gets 100 clicks in a month you are going to have to pay $1/click to get the same exposure as someone that gets 1000 clicks a month and pays $.10/click. This is the exact same price for the real-estate. The primary difference between Google and TV is that Google is fairer - you only have to pay when your advertisement is successful in generating business.
My Blog
Hmmmmm, very timely. Since I started reading reddit, I rarely see anything new on slashdot.
This has always been the case with click programs. If Google wants to preserve its reputation they should disclose as much as they can with better reporting--otherwise you'll see more and more paranoid webmasters. If they ever shaved clicks, sooner or later we would find out--sell your GOOG on that day.
Seems to me the best way to discourage uninteresting content is to stop reading it and stop posting replies. Like this one, in fact, which does nothing for you but piss you off, nothing for me but waste my time, and nothing for the site but increase the response generated overall by an article neither of us is interested in. Ah well.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
The experiment was flawed. The existing site had a long established click-through rate and so was ranked highly on its click-through virtue. The mirror site did not have such a long history.
This experiment would be more valid if the two sites had existed for the same amount of time.
Program Intellivision!
Anyone who has gone through an SEC audit at their firm can tell you that the whole "laissez-faire" capitalism thing is deader than a doornail.
That doesn't bother me, but to make dubious claims about "freedom in the market" is questionable at best.
It doesn't help that the SEC rules are quite often more vague than a 4th grader making up rules to a game as they go along.
EOM
Open source licenses like GPL are intended to force people to behave a certain way (decreasing someone's freedom) because its net benefit enhances everyone's freedom.
The GPL in no way decreases someone's freedom. Without the GPL, you are stuck with plain old copyright. By accepting the terms of the GPL, you *increase* your freedom because it then gives you freedoms that would otherwise be prevented by law.
One thing that wasn't considered in this experiment is the fact that Google frowns upon websites that have duplicate content. By doing so, the tester may have notced he was experiencing a lower page rank as well as fewer listings in organic listings. This could have caused the Google ad to be discounted and even viewed as a SPAM website (obviously a big no-no). While we cannot contest the power of Google, the system is much more intelligent than the everyman and will not reward people trying to receive more traffic by creating duplicate websites (even if a test).
It's not too different from how women are (from the male perspective): once she gets used to being bought expensive stuff, try dropping down to 40% of your old level and see if she won't think you're a cheap jerk.
I guess that's why some male readers have trouble understanding this...
see a Text Widget
Well, here is my story slightly on topic.
I have a web site that I was hoping to help pay bandwidth on through Google Adwords.
It was all working quite nicely for a few months until time came around for Google to pay the bill (they won't pay out until at least $100 is due you.)
Then out of no where - they decided *I* was putting in unwarranted clicks or some BS like that and closed my account and zapped my check.
Let see, taking in money to put your message in Ad Words, having other people display those ads for months on end on their sites, and then not bothering to pay people who display it on their sites... I think I have discovered Google's road to profit.
Yes. I am bitter.
I've proposed an algorithm to reduce AdWords' YMMV factor.
Short version -- Google should use an algorithm similar to AdSense to automatically pick keywords most relevant to the advertiser's URL.
You should have to pay less to bid on keywords that are relevant to your web site's content. It should be expensive to outbid Mr. Cringely on the keyword "Cringely".
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
-- Subvert the dominant paradigm. Repeat as desired. http://ownlifeful.com/
Sounds to me a lot like an old article posted here (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/01/20322 9)
It seems that google is doing the same thing that BellSouth tried to do... In my mind, you shouldn't be able to give priority to one site over another