Slashdot Mirror
The Dark Side of Paid Search
Tough Lefty writes "A new study by McAfee's SiteAdvisor Web ratings finds that sponsored results from some of the biggest names in the search engine business contain spyware, spam, scams and other Internet menaces. The key findings were that major search engines returned risky sites in their search results for popular keywords and sponsored results contained two to four times as many dangerous sites as organic results. Overall, MSN search results had the lowest percentage (3.9%) of dangerous sites while Ask search results had the highest percentage (6.1%). Google was in between (5.3%). Check the comprehensive study for all the data."
And if the spam breaks open many years too soon (whoa-ho-ho)
and if there is no room on my hard drive (whoa-hoa-hooooo)
and if your head explodes with scam site search results too,
I'll see you on the dark side of Paid Search (whooooaaaooo - hoooo whooaaaa-oh!)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
...get something you didn't bargain for.
Really, is this even remotely news?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I guess all these years of automatically ignoring and scrolling past the "sponsored" results has paid off.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
"Users can't count on search engines to protect them; to the contrary, we find that search result rankings often do not reflect site safety" Are users really depending on search engines to protect them? Even foolish users?
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
We have a central organisation that handles domain use and the arising domain disputes.
Why we don't have a central organisation that bans spyware/malware sites? Unlike porn, where religious and all kinds of debates open, the worst cases of malware are obvious and good for nothing.
Wouldn't it seem odd to someone if drug dealers advertised their services in newspaper ads? Why isn't it odd they are allowed to reach audience via controlled ads on the search engines?
We also have Yahoo/Ask/Google's ability to filter and review their own ads and remove offensive ads. They also remove them now, but kinda sloow.. kinda lazy... you know... just enough not to hurt their revenue and not be blamed by the public they're doing nothing.
We also have Google eagerly promoting their typosquatting service for domains while saying they don't.
It's a nice example of what greed makes good companies do.
As a libertarian, you shouldn't care if someone's selling rat poison as viagra.
The market will sort it all out - the seller will eventual lose sales as his reputations goes downhill. The invisible hand and all that!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
The 'obvious' tag bit me on the face when I read this.
nothing
Once again, MSN proves to be the superior choice when it comes to search engine
As a libertarian, you shouldn't care if someone's selling rat poison as viagra.
Yea, who needs a centralized protection. It's all natural. See AIDS for example. It's not as if having no immune system affects your life or anything.
It's hardly surprising, but I don't trust the AV companies. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but they simply have an interest in keep in us scared about viruses and such so that we buy their products.
When SiteAdvisor was independent, I felt I could trust it (partly because they it founded by geeks). Of course, I had no idea how they planned to stay in business, but as a free service it was great. Now I have the perception, at least, that it could have an agenda beyond objective detection of spyware etc. (mainly, scaring the bejeezus out of us).
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
Ok.. so we need an "anti-digg", where you bookmark a site and tag it with negative tags... then abrowser plugin to set your browser to have a threshold of allowed "badness".. the finally a "meta filter" on google to strip out results from crap you don't want.
meh
OMG LOOK at those CUTE LI'L Puppies and Kittens on www.screensavers.com !!111 How can a website with LIKE SO MUCH Cuteness be evil ????!!!
screensavers.com just DESERVES it's top "Sponsored Link" spot in Google's results!!1
kthxbye!!
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
That appears to be an innocuous "download Firefox with Google Toolbar" site. Perhaps you meant the typosquatter parked next door?
That seems to be dead. Ironically, it has a typosquatter parked next door as well.
Having been exposed to the Internet at a young age (for both it and myself), I've learned over the years never to touch Ads. Whether benign looking links in my Gmail to the annoying flash ads, there is no way I'm touching them. If I need a product, I find the manufacturer or vendor's website and do what I need to there.
So I pose the question, how long will the ad based revenue system remain relevant once your common internetite learns this lesson?
- Kal`Goblez
1: Virus
2: Attempted AdWare installs
3: Attempted Spyware installs
4: ActiveX controls
5: Java required
6: Anything else that it attempts to install when you visit
7: Sites that disable, or attempt to, your browser features like Right Click.
8: Sites that are only redirection sites.
and most of all
are you ready?
9: Sites that make themselves anywhere from hard to impossible to exit from afterwards without, at minimum, killing your browser process.
Flagging questionable, along with outright bad, sites would protect users, while likely reducing their traffic - which is what they deserve to have happen to them. More than twice I've used the Google cache to read a site's static content rather than risk visiting them directly.
And while they're at it, add an easily clickable link to tell Google that this site appears gone, or substantially changed from the search result summary and ought to be re-spidered ASAP would be nice too. Enlist your users in identifying bad search results.
Someone who does all this would have a strong hold on my search business.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
At risk of naively responding to someone who posted something in order to make a point, libertarianism is a philosophy based on the principle that individuals should be allowed complete freedom of action as long as they do not infringe on the same freedom of others. I'm not a libertarian, but I'm guessing they'd lump poisoning (whether the victim is limp-penised or not) under the whole freedom of others thingee.
That said, the interesting part of the discussion (besides connecting the dots in order to equate putting spyware on a machine with poisoning someone) is finding out where exactly you draw the line in terms of determining real infringement. Maybe that's where "libertarianism" falls apart.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
As a libertarian, you shouldn't care if someone's selling rat poison as viagra.
The market will sort it all out - the seller will eventual lose sales as his reputations goes downhill. The invisible hand and all that!
I don't think that you understand libertarianism. Selling rat poison as viagra is breach of the agreement between the seller and the buyer. As such the buyer or buyers heirs can instigate legal proceedings against the seller.
sponsored results
OK, it can cost a bit of money to get placed in sponsored results. So where does this money come from, when the sites paying for this high visibilty purportedly offer content for free?
We all knew the answer to that, before this article.
So how financially naive do you have be to click on a sponsored link with 'free' in the description - and not assume there is a hidden string attached?
That is like giving a $20 bill to the guy selling gum on the street in mexico and expecting change. In fact, I knew someone who did something similar to that in thailand. He didn't understand the language or the currency system, so he gave the peddler on the street his entire wad of bills and asked him to take what he owed him. The peddler took the money and ran off. That was his entire budget for the trip.
If clicking sponsored links is commonplace on the internet, common sense has degenerated to moronic levels.
-- "Common sense is for common people." - Dr. Piche
Representatives from the automotive insurance industry released a self-authored report yesterday that confirmed most freeways lead people through areas that are heavy in traffic, subject to increased probability of colissions and even vandalism and crime.
Auto insurance representatives questioned for the story said the frightening study proves that their product (which provides no guaranteed protection against auto collisions) is absolutely essential to safe driving. When asked why they spend millions of dollars to make sure they are not held liable in all but the most obvious of cases, insurance representatives had not comment, but reminded everybody how dangerous freeways are, and suggested that people should hold the state liable for offering such questional places for people to drive their cars in the first place.