Slashdot Mirror
Google Bans Ads For Essay-Writing Services
llamapalooza writes "Google announced that it will ban essay writing firms from advertising on their site. (The prevalence of cheating on campuses has been discussed here before.) While universities have welcomed the move, the affected firms are claiming it will 'punish legitimate businesses.' Google has specifically banned 'academic paper-writing services and the sale of pre-written essays, theses, and dissertations,' which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution."
Prostitution is banned? I'm sure I've seen ads for the Colbert Report.
After all, I am strangely colored.
which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution."
Depends on the drug
Anyway, who really cares who Google accepts for advertising - its what they index that really matters.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
They should also ban gimmicky ads like for web templates, ring tones, and single page sells.
Analogously, Slashdot could be seen as being a little like a website for other cultural groups using the tag line - "New
I don't know how big this problem is, but I feel that once you set down the path of banning things that "we don't like" then that list could grow long. How about companys that sell documents that look like university diplomas? To me it seems that they both would fall into the same category.
Nope, I like my dictionaries to have the word 'fuck' in them, my phone books to list escort agencies, and my search engines to not set moral standards.
I'm aware that this is only on the paid-for part of the business. I still don't like it. If it's legal, they should allow it. It calls into question whether they're putting their morality into the rest of their business.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
if I could have found those services.
"I'll create my own search engine, with blackjack and hookers" and essay writers.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution.
Essay writing is just a simpler form of prostitution. You know the old saying "Prose before Hos".
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
These are legitimate businesses, but that does not mean that Google has to display their ads.
Google can choose to display or not to display any ads they want. The supreme court has found many times that the right to not speak is equally as important as freedom of speech.
While I've never cheated. It's hard enough being an honest college student nowdays. Searching the web for research on topics and having that constant reminder pop up in your face. You can bypass 30 hours of research and writing with 20 bucks. Pisses me off to no end.
I admire the business plan behind it even when they make my life hell with thier grade curve changing essays. They must make a fortune.
As someone who is less than 48 hours away from a completed thesis Ph.D. thesis and a little over a week away from my defense, there is only one thing I have to say about this.
It's about damn time.
I hate to see that these services even exist.
I understand the cheating will always go on, at all levels of academics. The practice isn't against any laws, but it is nice to see Google not condoning something legal but flat out wrong.
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
These are legitimate businesses, but that does not mean that Google has to display their ads.
Google can choose to display or not to display any ads they want. The supreme court has found many times that the right to not speak is equally as important as freedom of speech.
I'm seeing a lot of anti-censorship posts on here. I'm really inclined to believe that Google did this because the paper-writing ads were popping up all over the place. As a student, it's frustrating to have to find other sources for a paper (to use as referances) and not get any results back but these paper-buying sites. Hopefully, Google is going to push to get them removed from their search index, as well.
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
Who bothers to sell essays and dissertations when half the spam I get offers me a PhD outright for $200!
Has anyone tried to get ad sense to offer them a degree?
Hell, even if you think prostitution goes hand in hand with sex-slavery, the problems of sweat-shop manufacturing slavery in and outside of the US are at least 10x worse and I don't see google banning ads for outsourced manufacturing.
I would expect that if there was one company that understood ultimate importance of free flow of information it would be google. Seems like they've become lost in the forest because they can't get past the trees - tobacco, et al are small evils, censorship is a big Evil.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
google isnt the government, its a privte company, they can deal with who they want to. I'm not forced to sell my products or services to anyone I don't want to, neither are google.
What annoys me is they dont give a damn about *where* they advertise. If I find a dubious website that resells copyrighted software I worked on without a licence, and is part funded by google adsense, they don't give a damn, they are happy to advertise on any site on the web, regardless what kind of site it is. Their terms of service state otherwise, but in practice, they get ignored.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
And what about all those teachers that are smart enough to check Google to see if pupils/students did not cheat? We all know that students are far more smart in finding this type of content than teachers... wkr, JoopZonnet
However, we agree on one point. Slavery is a great evil, whether it is women trapped into prostitution, forced labour of Chinese prisoners, indentured farm work organised by criminal gangs with the tacit consent of the government in the UK (and I expect in the US), or peasants forced by warlords to grow drugs to finance their gangs. I suspect that once the US economy goes into recession, avoidance of which seems increasingly unlikely, there will be sudden demands to control outsourcing to cheap labor areas. At which point Google may come under pressure to stop those advertisements. That will be censorship.
Pining for the fjords
Actually, it's "Don't be evil" from their CoC. And I imagine their decision to refuse this type of advertising is, in their opinion, the lesser of two evils.
That really is stretching the definition of a legitimate business.
Granted, there may be no specific law, but it's not as if there's a single respectable university in the land which will knowingly accept work prepared in this way.
> which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution." i had always wondered why google adds never advertised anything i wanted
"' Google has specifically banned 'academic paper-writing services and the sale of pre-written essays, theses, and dissertations,' which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution.""
Google is taking such a moral high morals; considering that they censored searches in China.
1) Tobacco isn't illegal in my country; US. Why is it censored?
2) Drugs; depending on the drug it may not be illegal to purchase (depending on the country). There is no law that says you cannot advertise or sell drugs in the US. You just have to have the proper paperwork filed to sell and buy drugs. Yet, Google sees fit to ban it.
3) Weapons; perhaps the right to bear arms in the US Constitution doesn't mean anything. You can bear them but don't advertise them. There is no US law that prohibits the advertising or the sale of weapons. Well, weapons of mass destruction is an exception but I cannot remember someone selling WMD on AdSense. But lets suppress it anyway.
Hypocrisy!
So? I couldn't care less. I guess it is up to Google to choose which kind of advertisement it wants to serve. Also Google gets less money cause of the outage of those advertisements.
First of all, I don't think selling papers is _illegal_, though. Unethical, yes, but then lots of unethical things pass for normal and legal business these days. (And it was even worse in the past.) So _if_ your implication is, basically, "they may be legitimate, but they're not legal", I'll have to disaggree there. They're against university rules, but AFAIK not against any state or federal laws. If they were illegal, you wouldn't need Google to do that, you could just forward those links to the police.
Second, legitimate is even trickier. Where do you draw the line? Technically speaking, anything legal _is_ a legitimate business. If you don't want it done, just pass a law to outlaw it.
And the business side pops up all the time (e.g, "but it creates employment!") when debating whether or not to make something illegal. It sure popped up in the spam and telemarketting debates, for example, all the way to the highest level. So basically when deciding whether it's legal or not, some MPs/congressmen/whatever-you-have, already considered the business side of it, and whether or not they want businesses doing that. E.g., whether the (lack of) ethics of it outweigh the employment created, tax income, and/or bribes from that lobby. In a way they already decided if that kind of business is legitimate or not.
Employment vs inflation is a constant concern since the Great Depression, when basically suddenly supply outstripped aggregate demand. (Yes, Say's Law does still apply, but "supply creates its own demand" only by lowering prices, and in the Great Depression suddenly the only point where you could actually sell all that stuff was below the production costs.) This became even worse when most industry moved offshore. Now we need even less people producing stuff. What do you do with the rest? Leave them unemployed, like in the 19'th century? Well, that also lowers the money they can spend to buy stuff, and that-a-way lies the downwards spiral that led to the Great Depression in the first place.
So nowadays governments actually get to see that employment stays roughly where they want it, and create some extra aggregate demand. (Deficit spending, pork barrel, social security, etc.) It works too, since we no longer have the economic crisis cycles that plagued most of the 19'th century and the first part of the 20'th century. Back then it was considered _normal_ that the industry goes through bankruptcy cycles and rises from the ashes based on demanding even longer work hours and lower salaries.
In a nutshell, a government's job is to see to it that you encourage (or at least don't discourage too much) people to create more jobs that don't actually produce something. Pretend to manage each other, create whole castes of marketters just trying to steal customers from each other, or do all sorts of convenience services to each other. And chip in a little to make it all keep working. Deserved or undeserved, ethical or unethical, as long as the negative impact is small enough, it doesn't matter. It matters that unemployment doesn't get out of hand. Because noone wants another Great Depression.
That's why even when debating something as annoying as telemarketting, the question just _has_ to pop up, basically, "how many jobs _are_ we nuking in the process? and can the rest of the economy absorb those?" You don't want to be the paladin in shiny armour that saved people from all evils... at the expense of causing the economy to collapse.
At any rate, that's why a lot of unproductive and even mildly unethical stuff is allowed to exist. In fact, encouraged to exist.
If you think that such companies are crossing the line into outright harmful, well, just lobby your lawmakers to outlaw it.
But, yeah, I'll aggree that Google is free to choose the companies it does business with.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Truly useful services like prostitution, pot, warez and essay writing need no advertisement. Potential customers will actively look for them in regular Google search results and offline through references from friends. It's the useless services like "free" credit reports that need to spend money on ads in order to rip off clueless people.
That's a pretty shitty web site that you've been spamming. Improve it or stop wasting our time.
Well most of the addsence set up is 100% automatic. They simple don't "see" the sites or screen them. You can complain I think. It has worked for others. But once Google become a public company, they cannot legaly do no evil if it redueces stockholer value. So i don't think they are worse than M$ yet, it will take time.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
So google is the Internet police now, with it's own laws?
Interestingly, these laws are also people driven.
Firstly, the expression is restraint of trade.
Secondly, it's totally irrelevant to this case.
Third, haven't you got a paper to write?
Fourth, go fuck yourself. HAND.
It is safe to assume that "illegal" is implied. Banning ALL drug advertising would be rather odd in most cases. Remember: Even simple things like aspirin are drugs. It's no surprise Google is happy to accept money for advertising legal drugs.
Just like with eBay and other major sources of illegal warez, it's a matter of scale.
If you're a small independant developer with unsufficient funds to fight Google for years in court, they'll just ignore your claims. If you're a big university which employes professors in law, Google will listen.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The list of banned adds reflect what Google's AdSense clients, the people who put Google adds on their web pages, are willing to put up with. Many people would be unhappy to see adds for prostitution, guns or tobacco on their web pages, and choose another advertising partner if Google let those through. Losing those partners would hurt more than losing the advertisement customers for the listed products.
Now homework cheating services are on that list.
So this is a case where maximizing profit also happens to be "do no evil" (depending on your definition of evil).
I'm also uneasy about this, but I can sympathize with Google. After all, their collective GPA must be one of the highest in the world. These guys are billionaires because of their education, and I'm sure they're aware of it.
Google apparently still allows ads for Diploma mills. Usually they claim that they examine your "life experience", and then grant you a diploma based on what you already know. In practice, they just sell you pieces of paper without checking, and you can then use the diploma to pretend to other people you have taken a real university degree, i.e. fraud.
For example a reporter was able to buy a degree in aerospace engineering, a field he knew nothing about, from Ashwood University. Ashwood University is deceptively named to be similar to Ashford University.
But if you search for "Ashwood University" in Google you get plenty of ads. As well as the Wikipedia article which document the fact that the operation is fraudulent. The Wikipedia article is vandalized regularly by people trying to edit out the well-documented criticism. The vandals are probably the university owners or degree holders.
I have sent an email to Google some time ago, saying that they were advertising for fraud. But my email had no lasting effect, obviously.
...Write slashdot posts? I'm finding it rather a strain at the moment.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
It's really about net neutrality. Google should ideally just let ads through without (artificial) moral or political interference.
It will make cheating a little more difficult, and make the cheaters be a little more creative.
I don't really see the moral justification; cheaters lose out on a learning experience, and essay writers lose out on jobs. Overall GPA has nothing to do with overall career success. In the business world, cheaters are the ones who usually win. I've personally seen cheaters social-network themselves into leadership positions while people who actually spend their time being productive and efficient get treated like losers. Google cannot change reality.
Actually, now that you mention it, I'd rather have more prostitution ads than some of the other scams I'm bombarded with.
E.g., you almost can't go to a page that's even remotely game/gold/whatever related, without getting powerlevelling and gold farming ads nowadays. Not only that kind of cheating actively disrupts the game for everyone else, but in most cases nowadays it's a scam. There's a whole class of keylogging trojans and viruses nowadays that simply steal someone's login data. Then the scammer logs in, sells everything that guy's characters have (leaving them literally naked), then transfer the money to the scammer's characters to be advertised as "buy gold for low prices!" Even on Google.
Now I don't want to go into the whole debate of whether virtual goods should be treated as real ones, but it's:
A) just actively ruining someone's gaming experience, and
B) in a dumb destructive way at that. The price for selling those items at the vendor is often 1 or 2 orders of magnitude lower than their normal in-game value. It's like burning someone's house down to sell the ashes. That dumb and destructive.
Even not treating those as "property", if you put in the balance the joy of someone who bought 100 gold in a game, vs the grief of someone who lost items worth 2000 gold for that, it's a bad trade all around. It's ruining someone's _months_ of time "investment" to let someone else feel rich and powerful for maybe a couple of hours until they blow it on some stupidity at the auction house. They haven't worked much for that gold, so don't expect them to put much value on it. They'll maybe buy a weapon they'll use for 2 days until they buy more gold for the next one.
C) maybe more important, it's rewarding and encouraging activities that are destructive and predatory IRL too, not only in some virtual imaginary game world. The viruses and keyloggers are very real, and often used for other nefarious purposes too, like harvesting bank accounts, credit card numbers, as spam bots, as DDOS bots, etc. It's activities which are already bad as it is, and sadly too rewarding as it is. I don't think anyone actually wants to encourage them some more.
So, frankly, if I look at A, B and C, I appreciate a hard working prostitute a lot more. She's just providing a service for people who want it, and selling only her work and time, not actively ruining anyone else's day for something to sell.
Or I constantly see google ads for crackpot conspiracies, crackpot young-earth/flat-earth creationism, scams, frauds, phishing schemes, spyware, etc. Even Google itself had that piece of news about how many people clicked on a "Is your PC virus-free? Click here to get it virused" ad. It was on Slashdot too.
Meh. I'll take prostitution ads instead, please. No, I still wouldn't buy sex, but, hey, I'm not buying all the other crap advertised at me either. So gimme some nicer ads at least.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of ads at all. But getting rid of them completely is, obviously, not an option. So if I _have_ to see ads, let's have some good old fashioned porn and prostitution ads instead of all that crap, please.
They're more honest than half the rest of advertising too. I'm going to barf if I see one more ad for snake oil that's supposed to solve all sorts of problems that don't even exist, and with made up testimonials at that. And idiot PHBs actually believing that crap.
At least with a prostitute you can know realistically what you can get, and how it would work. Human anatomy only allows for so much variation, you know, and there's only so much that plastic surgery can do. (Admittedly, that's a lot.) You can't claim to reduce TCO 10 times, increase ROI ten times, allow untrained monkeys to write enterprise-class programs in 21 days, solve world hunger, cure cancer, and bring global enlightenment. Everyone just knows that even a kilo of silicone implants won't do that
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I am soooooo offended by your suggestion. I DEMAND AN APOLOGY!!!
yea but if you hae 1/2 a brain you can sell prostitution services online just call it a escort service! i assume if you want to sell tobacco and firewarms then you can do the same... this is really just publicity at the end of the day...
You haven't completed your Piled Higher and Deeper yet, but you already don't remember what's going on out there in the real world?
Forcing students to write completely pointless and retarded essays is what's causing these services to appear and thrive. Seriously, right now I'm writing a "How to Save the World" in 6,000 words essay and no, it's not a technical analysis of ways to stop a comet from smashing into Earth, just general bullshit about population, society, the environment and crap like that. I wrote every single one of the required essays myself and probably wouldn't use a service that would do it for me, partly because I'm such a cheap bastard. However, hopefully these services would make professors rethink their regular assignments, just because you had it tough doesn't mean everybody else should, too.
I don't see how Google playing the morality squad role here (while going la-la-la when somebody points at China) is in any way an applaudable action.
Essay-writing services can be used for non-immoral purposes outside what many think their target audience is. But ignoring this, I have the following to say.
Banning the advertisements isn't going to solve the issue of plagiarism. In fact, it could compound the problem by pushing it underground. If someone is motivated to cheat, they're probably going to cheat regardless of whether they see an advertisement on Google, or whether they have to hunt underground for a service. Afterall, is Google banning search results?
For the third year of my UK bachelor's degree I was once extremely pressed for time. Personal circumstances, that the essay material was quite peripheral to the core of the study and that I was edging in at the highest grading tier (1st) already led me to try an essay writing service.
I used an essay service that let you specify your desired grade, level (bachelor's degree, masters or PhD, though not which year of bachelor's degree) required turnaround (standard 1 week, express 48h delivered by midnight on the 2nd day, express 24h delivered by midnight on the next day) and word limit. You could also specify sources that you needed to have referenced.
I picked the 24h, but specified in the comment box that I was happy with 48h delivery but would like to pay the higher amount in order to ensure that they took proper care in writing. I also provided a couple of references we had been given.
The essay I got back after 20h was 15% below the recommended word limit and literally crap. No logical progression, shoddy grammar (who writes short sentences starting with 'So'?) and just a bunch of bullet points all pasted together that didn't lead to any conclusion. One of the sources had not been used with the explanation that 'I was unable to find the source you quote for which I should not be held liable', and the others only in extremely generalised ways that could pretty much apply to any article on the subject.
The only recourse was that I could 'return it along with a list of desired changes for the author to make', but given that the same person would write it I didn't really see the point. I spent the last day rewriting paragraph by paragraph ~£500 ($1000) lighter and was really so embarassed over the result that I didn't ask for feedback on it.
-AC
...one of the ads seen at the top of this story:
Custom Essay Writing
Professionally written essays and term papers delivered on time
CustomEssayWriting.com
irony meet your elder cousin...
7-8-9-10-0
It's ironic that the some of the Google-ads that I'm seeing below this story now are: 'Where to get academic papers' and 'How to write a better paper' After a reload, I got an ad for online Casinos. Personally, being a friend of someone who runs an online database of essays, I think there are three negatives to this. A. people have a choice and if they choose to cheat and risk penalties that should be their right. B. By moving such choices to the rim of existence, you also make it harder for teachers and such to check for plagiarism. And C. you run people out of business who are offering a fairly victimless "crime," at least compared to prostitution and drugs.
Just wondering.
I'll emphasize a few points:
-Google does have a quasi-monopoly, in the sense that a lot of (most?) other search engines contract with Google for search results, and none have come to the same quality as Google, hence if you want an accurate search result you "google" for it
-I'm arguing that the employment market rewards cheating (I think most management text books would agree, but that is another subject). You can't really cheat with a successful business model (although you can steal people's ideas)
-and I said "ideally"... ideals are hard to come by and not always practical. In essence Google is not being net-neutral by what it is doing (discriminating against certain types of businesses). It is an academic point. I could always run my own search spider or use http://www.yacy.net/yacy/Download.html if I wanted more neutrality... but those options of course require more work
Your points are well taken. I myself will continue to use Google.
You must be very lucky with your supervisor or have very good contacts. I submitted my thesis two months ago and still no word from the examiners about it. This is the way it works here (Australia); you submit and then wait until the examiners have read it. Then you have to defend it either by viva voice (not that common here for historical reasons) or by written report. The faculty tells me that waiting for 6 months is not uncommon.
We faced the same dilemma at Uclue.com, a paid Q&A service. Although we don't encourage people to ask for essays to be written, we can't completely block such questions because it's not always easy to tell whether a question is for a student essay or for some other purpose.
We resolved it by deciding that we would reject such questions if there was any hint of them being requested in "final form". In any case, we post the answer publicly on the web, so the essay research is available for all students and staff to see, and a quick web search will readily show up if a student is trying to submit the essay as their own work.
Paid Q&A/Research
One can not stop those services like that. Its as if one wanted to get rid of doping in sports by forbidding the advertisement of doping. Having part or all of a theses written from a ghostwriter is very similar to doping. It is cheating. For PhD thesis, where the research has to be defended in a seminar with experts, the fraud is probably difficult. For term papers, schools will have to adapt and add oral examinations for papers which look suspicious. Students will have to sign a statement that they wrote the theses without having payed for outside help and violators will be denied a degree. Like in sports, where doping violators have their titles removed. By the way: sanctioning has the risk of the Streisand effect. By forbidding the adds, Google has made the best publicitiy for the services.
Pff. No one really goes to college to learn. You go so that you can have a nicely filled field on your resume. Don't for one second think that it denotes intelligence or knowledge in any given field, it's simply a mark of time dedication. In America the further in debt you are, the better society will perceive you. That's why you also need that little house int he suburbs and a brand new vehicle.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Its somewhat stupid to refuse business ( revenue ) from *legitimate* and *legal* businesses. But, its their right to do so.
Its also my right not to do business with companies that advertise there, due to their rules.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The education in US seems to be relying too much on writing papers. That is plain stupid. Instead of trying to catch every plagiarizing bugger, why not to abolish those essays once and forever? Or at least limit them writing only during the class time?
I think that much more problems will be solved and much less will be created when we establish that free education is not an obligation, but an option. It is inhumane to force people learn math if they do not want to.
The major complication of this decision is that it will lead to radical overhaul of other fundamental principles of the country.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Now I don't know what to write here.
Work like no one is watching. Dance like you've never been hurt. Make love like you don't need the money.
Depends on the juridiction.
And here in Switzerland, it is illegal to advertise for it.
A drug company can advertise its brand name (As in "Here in Mepha we make generics and thus are cheaper than concurrence !")
A drug company may indirectly infer that it does produces drugs against some problem ("Having sexual troubles ? You shoul talk about them with your doctor ! this message is brought to you by Pfitzer")
But a drug company CAN'T advertise its products to the general population ("Eat Prozac ! It's will make your life happier !")
Also, addiction to medical drugs is on the rise in developed countries and is starting to de-throne the classical usage of illegal drugs. Both with people getting addicted on naturally addicting drugs like sleeping medication or pain killers, and people who get "psychologically addicted to comfort pills" (eating anti depressant and viagra like candy, even if those don't necessarily cause physical addiction).
I'm not a hippie saying that drugs bring more problems than they solve, or that we shall go back to a society with no chemical remedies (That would be suicidal : I'm a doctor).
I'm just saying that general public should be a little bit more informed about those problems and less exposed to pharmaceutical marketing (which anyway is what cost the most for a drug company, and not the R&D as they are complaining anytime someone tries to lift drugs patents to help developing countries).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Reduce, reuse, cycle
[...] which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution.
http://www.google.com/search?q=grenades - turns up an ad reading:
"Grenades
Looking for
grenades? Save!
www.shoppingpage.us"
(Now, I know that they're not actually selling grenades, but rather have a pile of ads based off of a list of generic words/terms, but it's pretty funny. "Landmines" used to turn up an Ebay ad reading "Looking for landmines?")
Tobacco, drugs, weapons, prostitution, and essays should not be a list of banned searches, it should be a convenience store.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
My wife wanted to start one of these websites. She's a college english teacher, and she was fairly certain she would make 2-3 times her teaching salary doing this. The people writing these papers aren't just poor students. They are people who can't make a decent living teaching.
The point of these "pointless" essays is to teach you how to write and to insure you've mastered the material. If you don't need to learn that, great, enjoy the coast to your bachelor's degree. Or even better, drop out of school so that you don't discourage students who do want to learn. I'm pretty sure the assignment wasn't to "write a general bullshit essay," yet you blame someone else for that. Maybe it's bullshit because you don't give a damn about it? Finally, 6,000 words, oh how my little heart breaks for you! That's substantially less than thirty pages, more like 20. What a heart-breaker. Drop your lazy butt out of school, get a job carrying heavy things, then come back and report to us. I think just 60 words will do.
But that's exactly what Google is Doing and it's part of their "DO NO EVIL" mission statement. Otherwise, they'll say screw you, we don't care about all of the chineese activists or the american privacy so we'll turn over all the data we've collected to any government that asks us with money in hand.
Is that what you really want Google to do or would you prefer they hold to their Mission Statement that includes "DO NO EVIL"?
In this case, I'm satisfied because google is simply excersising their right as a business of stating "We Reserver the Right to Refuse Service", which happens to be quite legal so long as it's not discriminatory, such as refusing service to an ethnicity such as black/hispanic/asian, which is ilegal.
I'll continue to get my erotic massages through Craigslist, thank you.
Adding such user preferences would muddy up their message about automatic matching of adds to web pages.
Google has never been about adding choices, their trademark is their ultra-simple, yet functional, interfaces. Just about everybody else had Boolean operators in their search before Google, in fact, the idea of providing a search service with only AND was quite revolutionary in its time.
Without any empirical evidence whatsoever, I conjecture that this move will benefit those who buy such papers. Large mills may not show up at the top of search results as often as before, so consumers may be more likely to buy from a larger pool of producers, lessening the chances of getting caught by someone noticing similarities between papers.
After having read some posts about this activity creating jobs, I have to agree. In the short run, it provides work for those in fields for which there is otherwise low demand. Which also tends to encourage teachers of such to assign more papers, providing more work for their community.
Personally I think "Don't promote businesses which serve no purpose other than helping students cheat on their schoolwork" is entirely consistent with "Don't be evil."
It's a good decision for Google's own selfish reasons, too. They prefer to hire the creme de la creme, who rise to the very top by their own efforts and nature. Such essay writing and other cheating services only facilitate the rise of the scum.
(Hat tip to the late Edgar Bergen.)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Censorial bastards! They deserve the same karmic fate as XM--a two-day outage. How will the world cope with a two-day Google outage?
Sent from my iPhone
Besides, I don't think it's right that richer people are able to buy their way through college and then act the part of a trained professional. I'd prefer that my doctor, nurse, and boss have a thorough, honest education. I think it's better that these students be forced to write their own papers and actually read the material. However, I don't believe there is anything wrong with things like Sparknotes, as they often help better explain the material, and still require some studying and effort by the student.
It's interesting how quickly the topic of censorship arises in the context of the word "ban." Imagine instead if the headline had stated "Google no longer to accept advertising dollars from essay services". Just like any other business, Google is free to choose who they take money from. We've certainly seen cases before where radio and TV broadcasters choose not to run ads they find offensive or misleading.
That said, as Google dominates the search market, they do have to be aware of the kind of power they wield. As the defenders of Microsoft are quick to point out, being a monopoly is not illegal, it's what you do once you've reached that state that matters.
Whatever happened to "Do No Evil"
I'm not keen on companies getting "destroyed". But it would be better if Google didn't have a quasi-monopoly on search/ads; as it is right now, they do have the power to destroy companies at their whim.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Fluoxetin the ative stuff in Prozac, as well as other "selective seretonie-reuptake inhibitors", has a complex (and slow) dynamics.
Depression, in an oversimplified way, can be said to have 2 interesting characteristics : it makes one very negative. But it also removes most will power (the patient becomes apathic and doesn't do anything apart maybe occasionally complaining).
Again in an oversimplified way, SSRI-class drugs will have a faster effect on the apathy than on the mood. Thus there's a time-window during which the patient starts to act much, but still hates everything including himself and has a very negative self-image. As now, unlikely what was before, he *has* the willpower and can act more easily, there's a risk he may commit suicide.
Thus good follow-up is necessary. It's not a therapy someone attempts on his own decision, alone at home, without seeing a doctor.
This is one of the main reason I think drug advertising should be banned : drugs are complex stuff, and it should be the doctor's job to decide when to use what. Not the decision of the patient and people shouldn't be massively brainwashed by the drug corporation's propaganda. The patient's decision is only to ask for help and then to accept or decline what a doctor proposes.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
>> which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution
Sure, the goog doesn't allow ads for "tobacco" and "cigarettes", but they do for "tobaccos" and "cigarette holders." No ads for "prostitution", but they allow "sex for sale." "Weapons" and "handguns" -- no problem. "Drugs"? Yep.
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
Sure scientific studies have definitive proof that 2nd hand smoking is going to kill you and rape your corpse. But it's nothing like Global Warming. Google should ban car ads before anything else.
Essays
Over 30,000 available online download one today!
DueNow.com/Essays/
~Vexed and loving it!
"Managing director Matthew Wilson says this will punish the legitimate, transparent companies, which sell essays, but which warn students that they must not be used dishonestly"
Just like the drug companies that will sell you crack...but they warn you first that it must not be used in a harmful way, so they're legit!
I've always found it amusing how Google censors prostitutes but not pornography. It's ok if thousands of people profit enjoy your sex services at once, but not if only one or a few do it at a time.
Did I miss something here?
With that kind of money, wouldn't it be easier to just hire somebody to blackmail your professor?