Google Mulling Video Ads In Search Results

Bombula writes to let us know that Google is "finally succumbing to the power of the almighty dollar" and getting ready to implement image and video ads in sponsored searches.

Comments

Not "evil"

[gbulmash]

Finally "succumbing to the power of the almighty dollar"??? They gave in to Mammon quite a while ago.

Google displays video ads within a few different AdSense units. I've regularly seen video ads filling 336x280 ad spaces. Putting video ads in search results requires no technical advances. It's more a matter of laying out the search results to achieve the best balance of ad screenspace and content screenspace. So far, Google has done that pretty well with text ads in their search results.

If there's any news in this, it's watching the semantic argument that should result. People love to quote Google's tenet of "do no evil" and accuse Google of violating it wheneverGoogle opens up a new avenue for earning money. But it's not necessarily evil. It's just something they disagree with. And it's interesting, from a sociological perspective, to see how people can regard the opposing party viewpoint, in what are essentially minor disagreements, as "evil".

- Greg

Re:Not "evil"

[2.7182]

Can you be evil, but not do evil ?

Re:Not "evil"

[The_Fire_Horse]

Thats right.

Even slashdot shows video adds on the comments pages.

Re:Not "evil"

[megamerican]

The difference between being evil and not being evil is in your actions, not thoughts.

Re:Not "evil"

[Gnostic Ronin]

I'll agree with you. Absolutely not a good move. I don't want to see little movies playing all over my computer screen when I search for something. And judging by other adverts online, not only will they be large, but obnoxious. They'll loop every 30 seconds. All I want is to get the links I'm looking for without being hounded by obnoxious ads.

Re:Not "evil"

[Anonymous Coward]

I found the dontbeevil taq quite funny when the critical article has a video advertisement below it

Re:Not "evil"

[jlarocco]

I'll believe this when I see it.

Google's search results don't have any ads right now. Why would they jump straight away to extra annoying video ads?

Re:Not "evil"

[CastrTroy]

The difference between "Evil" and "Not Evil" is only a matter of opinion. Some people would say all ads are evil. Others, text ads are acceptable. Others, would say images with no video. Some would say video is fine, as long as they don't display it overlayed on the content. Other people would have no problem with any ads.

Re:Not "evil"

[gbulmash]

Intent can be as important to determining the degree or label for a crime as the act. Think about it, most American state penal codes have 6-8 different crimes you can be charged with when you kill someone... First through third degree murder, first and second degree manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter, etc., etc.

In fact, if you're defending yourself, you can kill someone and not be charged with a crime. But the action is always the same... you killed someone.
Furthermore, "evil" is a moral judgement, so, even if you're not buying into a societal definition, such as exists in a penal code, you're basing it on a religious definition. And the fun part is that the religious definition isn't based on a holy book, it's based on how your particular sect interprets that holy book. There are Muslims who think strapping a bomb to yourself and setting it off inside a school full of children is "evil", but there are others who think that this is what God wants. And, according to most moral codes, what God wants is inherently good.

So, actions are not good or evil in and of themselves. We interpret them as good or evil based on our value sets. Quite often we ascribe those value sets to God, because "God says this is right and this is wrong" carries a lot more power than "I think this is right and this is wrong, but it's just my opinion." Much as it is with beauty, Good and Evil can be in the eye of the beholder too.

- G

Re:Not "evil"

[NickCatal]

If they are anything like the adsense ones they won't be too intrusive at all...

Google isn't filled with idiots who think that they can just put an ad box on the side of their results and not loose respect (and market share)

Personally, I like the sponsored results... I find that a lot of the time the sponsored results are more what I am looking for than the search results. I probably cost those advertisers a fortune by checking out every single one of the ads until I find one I like, but still...

I found my latest printer cartridge via adsense... the store I bought it from had a listing on the top and they were also the most competitive in the way of price... so they got my money thanks to an adsense ad. Of course, now I get emails every week from the store about printer cartridges... bah... stupid "opt-in-by-default" system

Re:Not "evil"

[clarkkent09]

If there's any news in this, it's watching the semantic argument that should result. People love to quote Google's tenet of "do no evil" and accuse Google of violating it wheneverGoogle opens up a new avenue for earning money. But it's not necessarily evil. It's just something they disagree with. And it's interesting, from a sociological perspective, to see how people can regard the opposing party viewpoint, in what are essentially minor disagreements, as "evil".

You can blame google for that. From Google Philosophy page on their site: ahref=http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.ht mlrel=url2html-17653http://www.google.com/corporat e/tenthings.html>

: Number 6 You can make money without doing evil.
...Google has also proven that advertising can be effective without being flashy....

So they are associating not having flashy ads with not being evil. Now that they will have flashy ads that means they are evil. :)

Re:Not "evil"

[Anonymous Coward]

It does? Wow... AdBlock really does work then, doesn't it :)

Re:Not "evil"

[ajs]

Absolutely not a good move. I don't want to see Then - now, try to stay with me, here - you are not the correct target audience for said ads. Oh well. Advertisers will quickly find that sites which are frequented most often be people who share your tastes aren't the right place for video ads, and they will use the text ads that I use (see links in my sig) on my own site because I know my target audience.

Re:Not "evil"

[bmo]

"The difference between "Evil" and "Not Evil" is only a matter of opinion."

No, the difference between "evil" and "not evil" is the bubble on the output of the gate.

--
BMO

Re:Not "evil"

[Brian Gordon]

The difference between "Evil" and "Not Evil" is only a matter of opinion. Kant would disagree :P Heh, I understand what you're trying to say.

Re:Not "evil"

[Lumpy]

Incredibly bad move. Every privoxy proxy I help maintain (20 of them, 15 at businesses with 15 -100 employees) allows google ad's. the second a customer reports a video or photo ad they get added to the privoxy global block on all customers.

I gave google a free pass because of the text ad's and the minimal bandwidth they consume. Video and image ad's are not allowed as they consumer too much bandwidth and go away.

Google, guess what? you are about to permanently lose several hundred pairs of eyes ever seeing your adverts. Hope it's worth it.

and you will lose more daily as I add installations. All it takes is a single demo to a customer and they want it installed.

Re:Not "evil"

[heinousjay]

Anyone who says ads are evil has a whacky moral compass, and they're diluting the term.

Re:Not "evil"

[sanyasi]

Furthermore, "evil" is a moral judgement, so, even if you're not buying into a societal definition, such as exists in a penal code, you're basing it on a religious definition. I have to disagree. Morality can exist independent of religion. Many religious people make this mistake of assuming that only religious people have morals.

Re:Not "evil"

[Lord Balto]

Do you think the monkey in the white house has morals? He certainly has some peculiar sort of religion.

Re:Not "evil"

[maalau]

Currently, Google's video ads only display a "static opening image" which you must click on to play the ad. A second click brings you to the advertiser's site. If Google adds video-ads to their sponsored search pages, presumably they will be the same, no?

Re:Not "evil"

[ozmanjusri]

Morality can exist independent of religion.

Actually, that's the fundamental contradiction inherent in most religions.

If all good comes from God, and God is omnipotent, then nothing that happens in God's realm can be evil (and Google can therefore do anything, including masturbation, golf and strangling cats, without being evil).

But if evil does exist, then there are values greater than God, which means God is not omnipotent, and Google can continue to expand indefinitely to take His place.

Either way there's a moral dilemma for religious Google users which us atheists will never have to confront.

Re:Not "evil"

[Nazlfrag]

He did mention the societal definition of morality as separate from the religious one, and really the vast majority do subscribe to one or the other. I guess it could have been more inclusive of individually defined morality though.

Re:Not "evil"

[watchingeyes]

Exactly. I find that the ads tend to be more precise than the organic results a lot of the time. The only time they're not is when the ad is misleading, but then I don't care because I just cost the advertiser some money with no intention of spending a dime on them due to their own actions.

Re:Not "evil"

[bladesjester]

If all good comes from God, and God is omnipotent, then nothing that happens in God's realm can be evil

This is a logical fallacy based on the mistaken assumption that because one has the power to do something, one must do it.

Being omnipotent means that you *can* do anything; not that you *will* do anything. It is completely logical for an omnipotent being to allow something outside itself to exist which also causes things that the omnipotent being itself would not do.

Re:Not "evil"

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how many eyeballs they are going to lose because many people will block these after just one ad.
Maybe its time to start shorting GOOG?

Re:Not "evil"

[watchingeyes]

Money does grow on trees! I knew it! Here I thought the $15B Google was raking in every year was from paid search listings.... guess I was wrong?

Seriously though, you either have an adblocker on and forgot about it, your blind, or you're on crack. Which is it? Google has had ads on their search pages for over half a decade now. How the hell do you think they can afford to keep the site running?

Re:Not "evil"

[kcbanner]

I guess they just assume that you need new cartridges by the next week :P
Maybe they had a "how much do you print?" option or something that determines the frequency of their ad newsletter :P

Re:Not "evil"

[whoever57]

Of course, now I get emails every week from the store about printer cartridges... bah... stupid "opt-in-by-default" system

If it is the same store as the one I used (but no longer), you will get SPAM from multiple, unrelated sources due to buying from this inkjet cartridge seller. I know that the cartridge seller has leaked my email address, because I used a unique address in my signup.

Re:Not "evil"

[thePsychologist]

Personally I don't see what the fuss is about.

Google text ads are unobstrusive and being text, they are difficult to remove. Who would want to anyway, I don't read them or click on them.

Video adds may or may not be unobstrusive depending on the placement. But, video ads are _not_ difficult to remove and it's already possible. So if you don't like them, remove them.

Re:Not "evil"

[seaturnip]

Google, not its critics is the one who insisted on presenting themselves as perfect angels by using a strong, simple-minded slogan like "do no evil". As far as I'm concerned they painted a giant target on their back, and deserve all the blasting they get about their hypocrisy.

Re:Not "evil"

[ozmanjusri]

It is completely logical for an omnipotent being to allow something outside itself to exist which also causes things that the omnipotent being itself would not do.

Not if the entity is the definer of all that is good.

The entity would then be permitting evil to occur despite having the power to prevent it. That in itself is evil (see Luke (10:25-37). Allowing evil to occur makes God an accomplice in vile acts, and therefore not pure good.

Re:Not "evil"

[ozmanjusri]

That in itself is evil

As is missing a parenthesis.

Please don't strike me down.

Re:Not "evil"

[DerekJ212]

Also, you left out the part of that proof that you have to assume God would WANT to stop evil if it did exist.

Re:Not "evil"

[jlarocco]

Wow! So you didn't read the comments, just guessing you didn't RTFA, either?

Gees, make one bad google joke, and every google fan-tard on /. points out the flaws.

Re:Not "evil"

[rtb61]

Evil is not just a moral judgement. You exist, you live, you have a built in survival instinct, you value you life. By extension that value you place in your life, as 'we' are not alone, becomes a shared value in life, we value our lives. So any act that circumscribes, limits, diminishes, denies pleasure in or extinguishes our lives, devalues them and is an act of 'evil', the opposite of being able to 'live', to enjoy in and share life.

So are you really alive, or is your carcase just a random bio-electric phenomena. Personally I can sense the value in my life and by extension the value in all the lives around me and just like any physics or mathematical formula, when I subtract from life, when I attempt sate my greed at the expense of other life, I know I diminish my own existence and commit an act of 'evil' and yes whole lot of little evils can quite readily add up to a big evil (well at least on balance I well take what in likely probability seems to be the safest least destructive path through life, live and let live).

So are adds evil, well of course they can be depending upon what they are promoting, the lies they are telling, and the truth they are obscuring. For google's budget, cheap, low end advertising, with little or no review of the quality or the accuracy of the add, and so should the add market evil acts (life diminishing, sorry folks it all 'adds' up) then google by providing a venue for that add is promoting evil.

Re:Not "evil"

[bladesjester]

(Here I go playing devil's advocate. I find this kind of discussion to be fun on occasion)

Who's to say that a little "evil" isn't needed or even good? Perhaps preventing all "evil" would be worse than allowing some of it to occur.

Balance is important. Things that are completely one-sided don't generally exist or last if they manage to exist in the first place.

Perhaps man simply sees evil as something he can not precieve the purpose of and does not agree with when the truth is something else entirely. I've known a lot of people who define "evil" as anything they don't like, when a lot of those things are actually good and necessary (death being one of them).

Re:Not "evil"

[rtb61]

I have found absense to be a pain as by far the majority of the time when it comes to doing searches I am not looking to buy something, and I defy any marketdroid to try to prove that the majority of times that people use search engines they are looking to buy something. Overall when it comes to the quality of companies using adsense I have found them to be at the low end of the quality and service spectrum, in line with the budget advertising venue, and I have never bought off an adsense advertiser and I have even stopped looking at them months ago.

Google's spreading of adds deeper and deeper and tacking up more and more screen space and bandwidth, smells of diminishing market share,and not being able to justify their current market value. As they become more desperate and start showing more and more adds so they will lose more and more market share, and as a result need to show more and more adds, which of course leads to...., a real problem going forward.

Re:Not "evil"

[ozmanjusri]

Balance is important.

True of course.

However if I was to torture a person who disagreed with me even for an hour, most people would consider me unbalanced.

Guess who tortures people for eternity?

Re:Not "evil"

[RexRhino]

The monkey in the white house is a head of state. States are simply social machines, and in and of themselves are amoral.

Re:Not "evil"

[courtarro]

Oh, I get it now - Google can put up ads as long as they're in self defense, right? Er, as long as they didn't mean to? Um ... they can put up ads as long as it's not ... motivated by hate ... errrr ...

Re:Not "evil"

[clayne]

Google has historically shown themselves to be full of shit on more than one occasion.

Yet even more reason to disable all plugins in Opera and then enable flash on a per-site basis when it's needed.

Re:Not "evil"

[misleb]

How about "insidious?"

Re:Not "evil"

[misleb]

I have found absense to be a pain as by far the majority of the time when it comes to doing searches I am not looking to buy something

Two words: "Firefox" and "Adblock"

Google's spreading of adds deeper and deeper and tacking up more and more screen space and bandwidth, smells of diminishing market share,and not being able to justify their current market value. As they become more desperate and start showing more and more adds so they will lose more and more market share, and as a result need to show more and more adds, which of course leads to...., a real problem going forward.

Seems to me that the people who really care (me, for example) will just block all the ads, everywhere.

-matthew

Re:Not "evil"

[the_womble]

The video ads Google already distributes to other websites only play if you click on them: not that intrusive. Some of the formats used would take up no more space than the ads Google already puts on search results.

So, probably, they will not play every time you search, they will not be large or obnoxious, and they will not loop.

Re:Not "evil"

[ozmanjusri]

God would WANT to stop evil

I've covered this elsewhere, but to paraphrase Edmund Burke;

All that is needed for evil to prevail is for good Gods to do nothing.

Re:Not "evil"

[bladesjester]

Guess who tortures people for eternity?

I've worked with some people that could probably qualify... =]

Re:Not "evil"

[ozmanjusri]

I've worked with some people that could probably qualify... =]

Good answer.

I was expecting you to suggest Celine Dion.

Re:Not "evil"

[evilviper]

Google isn't filled with idiots who think that they can just put an ad box on the side of their results and not loose respect (and market share)

So, you're saying basically ever other web-based company on the planet is, in fact, filled with idiots?

Re:Not "evil"

[willllllllllll]

Time to start using the Adblock extension in FireFox.

Re:Not "evil"

[Anonymous Coward]

There are Muslims who think strapping a bomb to yourself and setting it off inside a school full of children is "evil" They're awfully quiet about it though, don't you think?

Re:Not "evil"

[G-funk]

Unless of course you enjoy internet video, which adblock kills for a lot of people (myself included) :'(

Re:Not "evil"

[l33t gambler]

Two words: "Firefox" and "Adblock"

What about a plugin that only disables gif/svg animations and flash plugin?
If many people block everything they will just add more ads, and more annoying ads. Like ads that refresh every 10 seconds (I encountered that today at www.techarp.com actually.). Better to have tolerant ads than no independent websites.

Re:Not "evil"

[misleb]

Huh? Maybe I've been using Adblock for so long that I just don't know that I'm missing something, but I don't have any problems with internet video.

Re:Not "evil"

[EddyPearson]

Aww stop with the greed thing. Google provide a world class set of free services, all supported by non-intrusive ads.

Why shouldn't they be allowed to make a nice phat profit? Greedy would be having a premium service, or selling non-adword rankings.

Re:Not "evil"

[Phroggy]

Balance is important.

True of course.

However if I was to torture a person who disagreed with me even for an hour, most people would consider me unbalanced.

Guess who tortures people for eternity?

God doesn't torture people for eternity - quite the opposite. Hell is simply eternal separation from God. Yes, Hell is torture, but it's not something God causes.

Re:Not "evil"

[misleb]

What about a plugin that only disables gif/svg animations and flash plugin?

The problem is ads, not svg/gifs/flash. I don't want to have to manually allow things for sites work correctly. Adblock selects exactly what I want to block: ads. And that includes video ads. The issue of Google video ads is solved before it even becomes a problem... for me at least.

If many people block everything they will just add more ads, and more annoying ads. Like ads that refresh every 10 seconds (I encountered that today at www.techarp.com actually.).

How do you figure? What good does it do to repeat ads more often and make them more annoying if fewer people are seeing them? That could only be seen as a desperate and unsustainable reaction. It would just drive more people to block ads. I was pushed to my limit years ago and I just said, "Fuck it. I'm taking control of my browser (and TV). All ads: gone." I'm going to try my damnedest to ignore the ads anyway, why not automate the process? Take some load off my sensory filters.

Better to have tolerant ads than no independent websites.

False dichotomy. Maybe you're too young to remember, but there was a time when most sites didn't have ads. Heck, there are still many sites that don't rely on ad revenue. Also, web hosting is getting cheaper and cheaper every day. If a site is really that valuable to me, I'll pay (micropayments?) for the content.

-matthew

Re:Not "evil"

[ozmanjusri]

Hell is torture, but it's not something God causes.

So God isn't really omnipotent?

Re:Not "evil"

[walt-sjc]

First off, I agree to a large extent...

False dichotomy. Maybe you're too young to remember, but there was a time when most sites didn't have ads.

And there was a time before web sites existed at all too, but someone is paying for a site in ALL cases.

Heck, there are still many sites that don't rely on ad revenue.

Sure, but SOMEONE is paying for it. The question is WHO is paying for it? There are sites paid for by "good will", such as a company hosting an open source project, and marketing sites, which is just an advertising expense (the entire site is a giant ad,) but every site costs something, and someone is paying.

The reality is that the content consumers really want isn't free to deliver. Because so many people want it, the site needs some sort of revenue stream to pay for itself due to the hosting costs.

Also, web hosting is getting cheaper and cheaper every day.

Yes, but the number of users is increasing faster than hosting is getting cheaper. It's still fairly expensive to host anything that gets any significant traffic at all. Yes, you can get $5 / month hosting, and no, you can't run YouTube off $5/month hosting.

If a site is really that valuable to me, I'll pay (micropayments?) for the content.

There we go. That IS the ultimate solution - however, we don't have a viable micropayment system right now. Instead, all we have are sites want some sort of monthly / yearly subscription. The situation sucks. Like you however, I found some of the ads out there so intrusive that I now block all ads, and all javascript / cookies by default.

Re:Not "evil"

[Corrado]

I think your talking about this and there is a solution. Basically, you have to turn off the "Show Tabs on Flash and Java" option and your video will once again work properly.

Re:Not "evil"

[LordSnooty]

Advertising is the art of convincing people to buy things they didn't know they wanted.

Re:Not "evil"

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference between "Evil" and "Not Evil" is "Not ".

Re:Not "evil"

[Anonymous Coward]

> Google, guess what? you are about to permanently lose several hundred pairs of eyes ever seeing your adverts. Hope it's worth it.

They're not going to notice a few hundred `pairs of eyes`, mate. Sit down and shut up.

Re:Not "evil"

[KoldKompress]

God is two of three things:
Omnipotent, Omniscient and Kind.
If a God is Omnipotent and Omniscient, it's aware of the suffering in the world, and can take action to prevent it but does not.
If a God is Omnipotent and Kind, it is not aware of some of the suffering, and thus does little or nothing.
Or, a God is Omniscient and Kind, aware of the evil in the world, but powerless to stop it.

Re:Not "evil"

[Anonymous Coward]

wsell cince you are too fucking stupid to understand, I'll take the time to spell it out for you.

The Parent Post is talking about what HE controls. I guarantee there are at least 1000 of him, times 100 = 100,000. Now even more people out there are getting annoyed with ad's. so as people like him get off their asses, unlike shitholes like you, and inform people on how to reclaim the internet by blocking advertisements. (People like you feel it's stealing and will destroy the economy)

So if the parent poster says his action will affect hundreds, and the number of guestimations of installed copies of privoxy and other ad blocking proxies out there are at least 1000 installs at companies ranging from 15-100 employees then it adds up to hundreds of thousands of eyes, and thet number will grow daily.

I know it's advanced matematics that a little 8 year old with a 84IQ like you can not possibly understand. but I like to help the handicapped and you seem to be the Slashdot poster child for the incredibly stupid.

Can you send us a photo so we can make posters?

Re:Not "evil"

[clayne]

First off, I agree to a large extent...

False dichotomy. Maybe you're too young to remember, but there was a time when most sites didn't have ads.

And there was a time before web sites existed at all too, but someone is paying for a site in ALL cases. Fuck this, I'm going back to Gopher.

Re:Not "evil"

[marcello_dl]

> The entity would then be permitting evil to occur despite having the power to prevent it.

Preventing it would lead to injustice. /mode maxwell_smart on
The old "let's change rules halfway the game as we're winning" trick. /mode maxwell_smart off

An universe without a god is always fair: what happens is the result of some kind of rules the universe is stuck with (for whatever reason, it's irrelevant), evil and good being only rationalizations of some living species.

When the christian God idea enters the picture, it says justice will be made, but in one particular moment, the judgment.

Which adds to the inherent fairness of the universe, if such god exists (which is not the objective of my criticism)

Blaming god or consider the concept impossible for lack of intervention to stop evil makes two logical mistakes:

1) Continuous justice as the only form of justice, instead of the justice at the end which also settles things. See the parable of the weeds (Matthew 13).

2) Asking god for injustice: If you want continuous justice from a god you want an universe that is either inconceivable, or hasn't life in it, because life is not a continuously just process (heck natural selection or, in intelligent design wacky theories, the race for the faster sperm cell to the egg are deeply unjust, the other sperm cells didn't choose to be slower, poor 'em). Or it's asking a god to maintain a threshold by which it's ok for unjust events to lead to the creation of you, and it's not ok to see you suffer. Changing the rules halfway the game, as I said.

OT Another thing i don't usually get: "the christian god is omnipotent and fair" doesn't constitute proof of the existence of god. It's theology, that is, it assumes god has revealed itself and proceeds to try and rationalize things about it. What implication does trying to disprove the fair assertion have? You don't disprove god through it, you just assert you have a different opinion of the universe than a possibly existing god. Which is independent of the existence of him. Yet many atheists go to great lengths to build on such arguments.

Re:Not "evil"

[blahplusplus]

"Anyone who says ads are evil has a whacky moral compass, and they're diluting the term."

You obviously have no idea what you're talking about, ads have HUGE influence on culture. This doesn't mean all ads are evil, but I've worked with girls who have serious body image issues due to a lifetime of being bombarded with unreal images of beauty. Saying we have a "wacking moral compass" is ignorant. We a right to criticize ads and ad messages since they are cultural creation / pollution centers just as much as anything else.

Re:Not "evil"

[marcello_dl]

> Guess who tortures people for eternity?

A sadistic god doesn't constitute the only model for hell, you know.
"But that's what X preachers say" isn't going to cut it, unless you let your opinions be affected by possible trolls.

Maybe it's written "and I'll torture them for eternity" and i missed it, though,

A chroot for those who don't want to share the glory of god is a model for hell, too.

The burning coming from remorse of the realization we made injustice is a model for hell, too. An old one too, dating back to Dante at least.

Not to get too apologetic, A creator who decides what to save about its creation and what to scrap is a model for hell too.

Re:Not "evil"

[Logic and Reason]

The fact that different people have different conceptions of "good" and "evil" does not in any way prove that there is no such thing as objective good and evil. That the moral rightness or wrongness of an action depends on the intent of its actor also does not prove this; it simply means that the "action" in question comprises both the physical actions taken and the intent with which they were taken, e.g. killing someone in self-defense vs. killing in cold blood.

You have confused the intent of an action with its purpose, I think: in the case of a terrorist attack, the purpose may be a good one (e.g. stopping a war), but the intent of the action itself is to take the life of uninvolved bystanders, which makes the action inherently evil. That some people disagree with this assessment is irrelevant, just as it's irrelevant that some people believe the world is actually flat.

Re:Not "evil"

[marcello_dl]

Besides, the "go and do likewise" of luke10 is a mandate, and postulating that since believers have been asked to do acts of mercy, then god is obliged to do the same is completely illogical. If God acted directly there would be no need for a mandate.

Re:Not "evil"

[ozmanjusri]

Maybe it's written "and I'll torture them for eternity" and i missed it

Luke 16:22-26

And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried;
And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.
And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.
But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.
And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that [would come] from thence. Rev 21:8

But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part [will be] in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone

Re:Not "evil"

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but isn't this a case of shooting the messenger? ie, the evil thing is not the ad itself but the company who put it there..

Re:Not "evil"

[nicklott]

If a site is really that valuable to me, I'll pay (micropayments?) for the content. No you won't (well, maybe you personally will, but 99.999999% of the rest of the world won't). Ask anyone who's run a content site that has chosen to go ad-free, subscription only instead of ad paid free-at-point-of-delivery (and that is a choice all successfull sites have to make at some point). The subs funded sites die before they hit the ground. You instantly lose 90% of your traffic and the remaining 10% are slowly whittled away by new competitors that chose the other route.

Re:Not "evil"

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but knowledge is power! So if a God is Omniscient, he is therefore Omnipotent. Therefore, case #3 is invalid.

Re:Not "evil"

[blahplusplus]

"True, but isn't this a case of shooting the messenger? ie, the evil thing is not the ad itself but the company who put it there.."

Actually ad's have the "Evil artifact" effect, but they are really more like say environmental pollution, once you put an add up it's like adding smog to the air. While the company is technically responsible for the "smog" it doesn't make the smog itself any less a health hazard.

Now you might think I'm "splitting hairs" or "being anal" (and if I did not qualify my statement you'd have a point) but if we think about it, we are impressionable at certain times depending on our mood and repeated exposure. Hitler was correct in that: "The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one."

We pick culture and attitudes up by osmosis just as much in other areas of our life as we do consciously.

We see this everday, and ads are a ubiquitous force.

Re:Not "evil"

[marcello_dl]

Do you realize neither one qualifies as compatibile with the tormentor God's image i criticized?

I am tormented != somebody else is tormenting me. In fact it's a flame. What's it meaning? back to square one.

Re:Not "evil"

[ozmanjusri]

I am tormented != somebody else is tormenting me.

Matt 13:41-42

The Son of man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Re:Not "evil"

[jahudabudy]

Just to add a little bit more smoke to this particular topic, there is some debate amongst religious philosophers as to what "omnipotent" really means. All-powerful is most commonly interpreted to mean "able to do anything". A somewhat more nuanced interpretation is "able to do anything that is possible". Instead of "possessing all power", it becomes "possessing all power that exists". A subtle difference, but very important for many debates. By denying God the power to perform a logical paradox, which would seem to be impossible and thus not available to the limited form of omnipotence, his choices and thus his supposed actions or inactions change drastically.

Re:Not "evil"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Guess who tortures people for eternity?"

Not God. The teaching of a fiery hell where people are tortured for eternity is a non-biblical teaching. So, if you are a Christian who believes in the Bible, you do well to examine the book for yourself and learn that the hellfire is a false teaching. It was a scare tactic used by clergy back in the dark ages and it seemed to fit the political agenda of the puritans who came to the USA, so they kept it around. Today, this teaching turns people off to the Judeo-Christian god, Yahweh (anglicized, Jehova), and rightfully so -- it makes God out to be some evil monster.

I know this is OT, but I just had to refute some false information.

Re:Not "evil"

[EdwinBoyd]

Unless you're Catholic.

Re:Not "evil"

[misleb]

Sure, but SOMEONE is paying for it. The question is WHO is paying for it? There are sites paid for by "good will", such as a company hosting an open source project, and marketing sites, which is just an advertising expense (the entire site is a giant ad,) but every site costs something, and someone is paying.

When did I suggest otherwise? The point is that ads are not required to have "independent" web sites. Some sites charge for content, some site owners just pay out of their own pocket. Some sites take donations. The idea that we either allow tolerable ads or have no (independent?) sites is blatantly false. Will there be fewer sites if many block all ads? Maybe. Does that bother me? Not really. People will find ways to make money if they need it. How they do so is not my problem as long as it doesn't involve asking me to view content I don't want to view.

Yes, but the number of users is increasing faster than hosting is getting cheaper. It's still fairly expensive to host anything that gets any significant traffic at all. Yes, you can get $5 / month hosting, and no, you can't run YouTube off $5/month hosting.

Not to start quibling or anything, but doesn't one simply link to a YouTube video? You don't have to stream it yourself.

There we go. That IS the ultimate solution - however, we don't have a viable micropayment system right now. Instead, all we have are sites want some sort of monthly / yearly subscription.

What better way to force the ultimate solution than to make a make a statement by blocking all ads?

The situation sucks.

For whom? The situation is working out pretty well for me. "Free" content and no ads. I'm actually hesitant to encourage ad blocking at this point just so it DOESN'T get to the point where I have to pay for content.

Like you however, I found some of the ads out there so intrusive that I now block all ads, and all javascript / cookies by default.

That is just a little too far for my tastes. You're talking about more than just blocking ads. Adblock is nice and passive. It works automatically. The minute I have to start saying "allow cookies" and "allow javascript" on a site by site basis is the day I say "The situation sucks." Fortunately, I have no problem with javavscript or cookies. The ads are gone, and that is what I care about.

-matthew

Re:Not "evil"

[Phroggy]

Yeah, the old question of "can God create a boulder so heavy He can't lift it?"

A definition I heard not too long ago is that God can do anything that is consistent with His will. God's will is constant and unchanging, despite several passages from Scripture that appear to indicate that God has changed His mind on occasion (I'm still not sure what to make of those). If you can wrap your head around the idea that God's will never changes, then the idea that God can only do things that are consistent with His will starts making partial sense - at least you have a consistent framework to work with.

Re:Not "evil"

[misleb]

Sure, but if that "other route" becomes unprofitable because many people block ads, then they won't really have much choice but to charge for content.

Re:Not "evil"

[thesandtiger]

This doesn't mean all ads are evil, but I've worked with girls who have serious body image issues due to a lifetime of being bombarded with unreal images of beauty.

No, you've worked with girls who have serious body image issues due to being raised by parents who were seemingly unable to give them an appreciation for the difference between fantasy and reality as well as encourage a level of self-confidence to be able to shrug off stuff like this.

Blaming advertising for people's fucked up self-image is like blaming video games for making people violent. It's just not the case.

Of course, I'm an overly tall, gangly lesbian with bad hair, pasty skin, small boobs and big feet. So I knew from about the age of 11 that I wouldn't be trading on my looks and thus not to take that shit seriously :p

Re:Not "evil"

[Anonymous Coward]

The story of the rich man and Lazarus is but an allegory. That it is indicative of a burning hell is contrary to scripture. For example, when the canaanites sacrificed their children to baal, Jeremiah 7:31 shows us that this is repugnant to God. How could that be repugnant to God if he was guilty of the same thing?

There are other places in the Gospels that speak of "gehenna". Knowing Jesus' audience helps. In Jesus' day, gehenna was a burning refuse dump. When you threw something there, it was gone for good. Pitching something into gehenna was, in effect, getting rid of it for good and not tormenting something.

As for Revelation, take a closer look at the context. In Revelation, it also says that "death and hades" are thrown into the lake of fire. Now, how can you throw death and hades into a burning hell? Death is not a tangible thing that you can throw anywhere, and hades cannot be thrown into itself. You have to ask, then, what does this mean? Well, what happened if you threw something into a lake of lava? It would be destroyed for good. God is going to wipe out death and hades (the state of being dead). Look at revelation 21:1-4 and that should make the context clearer. Also, if you continue where you left off, the Bible calls this the "second death". The second death is not torture in hell. It is eternal destruction.

No, God does not torture people in hellfire, nor does he allow this. Hellfire is a false teaching and many many people are misled bu it.

Re:Not "evil"

[Anonymous Coward]

Hitler had ads, that he made the jews watch.

Re:Not "evil"

[nicklott]

I work with large ad agencies regularly and I can assure you that they are not worried about the effect ad-block is having on their business. I've given up mentioning it now, but the usual response was "ad-what? why would people want to do that?", followed by "If ads make them angry they're not our target market" and one has pointed out that if fewer people you know aren't going to click see the ad that raises the CTR. Love it or hate it advertising is here to stay.

Re:Not "evil"

[irenaeous]

I have to disagree. Morality can exist independent of religion. Many religious people make this mistake of assuming that only religious people have morals.

Moral laws, even when followed by non-religious people, derive their inherent quality of "rightness" from the minds and experiences of beings that make morals meaningful. It is the existence of a transcendent personal God who acts as a law-giver who can hold humanity accountable that makes morals both meaningful and universal. Without such a concept, morals become relative to the individual who decides what rules are right and wrong for themselves, and what meaning the rules will have for them.

That said, there are I think reasonably secular ways of deriving moral and ethical rules from agreed premises. For example, if we all agree that it is good to love our neighbor, regardless where we get this rule or why we find it meaningful, then we can use that to derive agreed upon moral principles without reference to any specific religious belief. It is just that any such principles are relative and "dead" when divorced from the One who gives morals universality and transcendent meaning. But I find morals are in fact universal and meaningful to people of all kinds. On a practical level, it is difficult if not impossible to live as if moral laws are really relative and not universally meaningful and applicable to all.

Re:Not "evil"

[misleb]

If what you say is true, then I'm happy. The longer advertisers remain blissfully unaware of my ad blocking, the better. Although I still feel a little bad for individuals (particularly children) who don't know or care enough to block out advertising. On one hand I hate advertising for its insideous and malignant effects on society in general. On the other hand I love that I can so easily filter it out (at least electronic forms) and get free content while others pay the price.

Re:Not "evil"

[Mr. Slippery]

It is the existence of a transcendent personal God who acts as a law-giver who can hold humanity accountable that makes morals both meaningful and universal. Without such a concept, morals become relative to the individual who decides what rules are right and wrong for themselves, and what meaning the rules will have for them.

First, religious morals are hardly meaningful and universal. For example, the "moral" concept that certain consensual sexual acts are "evil" is neither.

Religious morals are exactly relative to the individual who's preaching, who then tries to back up his own opinions by attirbuting them to deities.

Second, even if there were some supernatural entities making moral decrees, so what? "Might makes right" is no argument. If your gods want me to behave a certain way, they owe me a reasoned argument, not a set of royal decrees.

Third, there are non-supernatural ethical codes that are quite clear: utilitarianism, Kantian rationalism, and rights theories.

Re:Not "evil"

[marcello_dl]

Do you realize this (famous) one is even more generic? Weeping and gnashing of teeth could be caused by whatever model of hell I already cited. The tormentor god is still missing- and so old testament-ish if I may.

Re:Not "evil"

[marcello_dl]

Sorry, i forgot the explanation:
being thrown ~ being chrooted and
weeping, gnashing of teeth != being tortured by a god.

Re:Not "evil"

[ruinous]

Except that kind of argument only really works if you're willing to completely disregard the way that we use language. 'Evil' (note the apostrophes) is a word, which has different significance within different cultures. Evil is an act which harms others unnecessarily. In the former case, I'm MENTIONING the word. In the latter case, I'm USING it. And when I USE the word, that's what it means. When I talk about Evil, I'm talking about a completely different thing (act which harms others unnecessarily) than, say, when a fundamentalist Christian talks about evil (act which is prohibited by scripture). This doesn't make them wrong in the use of the word, it merely makes their use inconsistent with mine. So I don't feel there's any intellectual problem with me calling slavery evil, or calling stoning people to death evil, or me calling female circumcision evil, regardless of whether other cultures consider these things acceptable. To say that I'm wrong to describe these things as evil because they have different ideas about what is evil makes no more sense than to say that I'm wrong to say "George Bush is an ass" because a British person would think I was calling him a donkey.

Re:Not "evil"

[ozmanjusri]

For example, when the canaanites sacrificed their children to baal, Jeremiah 7:31 shows us that this is repugnant to God. How could that be repugnant to God if he was guilty of the same thing?

It wasn't always repugnant.

Isaiah 13:15-16

"Every one that is found shall be thrust through; and every one that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword. Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished."

Numbers 31:16-18

"Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the LORD. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."

Re:Not "evil"

[ozmanjusri]

Do you realize this (famous) one is even more generic?

Sure, and I realise fire is water, and burning is drowning.

Where do you get these alternative meanings from? The Ministry of Truth?

Re:Not "evil"

[gbulmash]

It's a common misconception, one even I fall victim to. I've always thought a code of conduct based on religion was a moral code, and one based on reason was an ethical code. Apparently, according to the dictionary, there are many points of overlap. A moral code can be based on reason or ethics, and doesn't need a religious justification.

Re:Not "evil"

[marcello_dl]

Can't you stick to logic, which ought to be your weapon, instead of introducing irrelevant questions? Still no sign of the tormentor god.

About alternative meanings, it's your ipse dixit that makes them alternative. Even if they were, so what? How alternative was the meaning behind reconstructing the temple in three days? How alternative was this generation will see the kingdom of god?

You probably chose the tormentor god because it represents the best approximation of your idea of him. Fine but it's an assumption that ruins whatever logical attempt at disproving the ineffable you are making. I usually work the other way round, showing both believers and unbelievers how shaky is the ground for their ideological clashes.

Want an example? A transcendental God can't exist by definition. Existing means "being part of all there is", transcending reality means not belonging to it. Such god might super-exist, that is we define an extension of the concept of existence outside the domain of "all there is". It's an assumption. So "exists", "is one", "is good", "is evil" are all assumption that these concepts make sense outside their domain.
An immanent god exists by definition, you simply call all there is "god". If we define the christian god as transcendental and immanent at the same time, the question does it exist, or does it super-exist are meaningless.

You wouldn't use a variable outside its scope yet you are trying to prove/disprove assertions that are logically flawed themselves.

Re:Not "evil"

[walt-sjc]

Not to start quibling or anything, but doesn't one simply link to a YouTube video? You don't have to stream it yourself.

Exactly who do you think is paying for youtube bandwidth? I'll give you a hint. Starts with the letter G. Now G makes most (nearly all) it's money off ad sales. If that revenue stream is gone, youtube is gone. Search is gone. Maps is gone. etc., etc. Same thing happens with facebook, myspace, torrent trackers, yahoo, and damn near all other consumer content sites. Having been involved at a high level at several .coms, I can tell you that ad revenue is Very Very important to that type of site because the other funding models just don't work in real life. The loss of ad revenue is what killed a lot of the .coms in 2000/2001 (such as advertisers not paying their bills, a drop in ad rates, and number of placements. The thing that keeps them alive NOW is the fact that less than 1% of users block ads. You can bet that if FF came with adblock installed and enabled by default, sites would do everything in their power to block firefox.

RE javascript and cookies, I also have concerns about privacy and security that you obviously don't (given your statements.) Noscript and the firefox cookie tools are quite unobtrusive actually, since you are NOT constantly dealing with them, only the first time you visit a site. After a day or two, you hardly mess with them at all.

Re:Not "evil"

[Anonymous Coward]

> So if the parent poster says his action will affect hundreds, and the number of guestimations of installed copies of privoxy and other ad blocking
> proxies out there are at least 1000 installs at companies ranging from 15-100 employees then it adds up to hundreds of thousands of eyes, and thet
> number will grow daily.

You're taking it all a little too seriously. It's just some ass-wipe on Slashdot blowing off steam. People don't generally mind ads. More people use the net all the time and only a fraction are going to use adblocking software. What are people going to do - avoid sites which use google ads? If you need the info from a site then you're going to go to the site. Ad blockers are going to be in a constant war with advertisers with no final outcome - it'll just continue indefinitely.

You're probably too simple to understand this, however, and will continue to give little lectures about how this is the beginning of the end for Google. Google sells ads - it's their business model. They're hardly going to stop advertising but continue to provide a service, are they.

Boycotting a company is exactly like killing yourself - it'll have no impact whatsoever. It would, however, improve the signal to noise ratio on Slashdot...

Re:Not "evil"

[NickCatal]

So, you're saying basically ever other web-based company on the planet is, in fact, filled with idiots?

I didn't say that... there are a lot of companies who know what they are doing..

Then again, I thought Facebook had their "Apps" system locked down. Now it is making a lot of profiles really ugly.

Re:Not "evil"

[ozmanjusri]

About alternative meanings, it's your ipse dixit that makes them alternative.

This is the kind of distortion of reality that always makes me regret even talking to you religious fanatics.

The words are there in black and white, but you make an assertion that their meaning is diametrically opposite, then accuse ME of ipse dixit.

Conversation over.

Re:Not "evil"

[misleb]

Exactly who do you think is paying for youtube bandwidth? I'll give you a hint. Starts with the letter G.

Sorry, I thought you were talking about a small site linking to a YouTube video. But I guess you were talking about YouTube itself. I'll say this just one more time: I GET THAT SOMEONE HAS TO PAY FOR BANDWIDTH. Do you think I'm an idiot? You really don't have to harp on this.

-matthew

Re:Not "evil"

[blahplusplus]

"Blaming advertising for people's fucked up self-image is like blaming video games for making people violent. It's just not the case."

You're statement lacks insight and subtlety: How do you think christianity spreads? The bible. If a meteor hit the planet wiping out all christians and all bibles or traces of bibles and such literature, there would be NO christians. So saying the bible the "artifact" has no effect on people is ridiculous. If people reading karl marx and such people went onto adopt communism it is very obvious that ADVERTISING WORKS! You prey on peoples natural instincts, inclinations and prejudices and habits. People do it all the time in normal social interaction to "get a rise out of others".

Now video games don't make people violent, but they do INFLUENCE people, the amount of influence if there is any at all depends on the individuals characteristics. This is not to say "they are mind control devices" or any such nonsense. Take bioshock example: Someone who is a capitalist or communist might be strong effected by the content of the "ayn rand" dystopia, or maybe it might spur their thinking to think and reflect on values they cherish / dislike.

Have you ever played a game and wanted to throw the controller when you lost? The fact is when lots of our behaviour is AUTONOMOUS. Until we mature and grow. I've taken care of kids and watched them change and grow and certain kids (individuals in a population) definitely have stages where they are very impressionable.

Re:Not "evil"

[irenaeous]

Religious morals are exactly relative to the individual who's preaching, who then tries to back up his own opinions by attirbuting them to deities.

Introducing the adjective "religious" misleads -- either there is a univerally applicable moral law to which all accountable, or there is not. The opinons of various individuals affect this matter not one bit. But, if morals are nothing more than a set of conventions or rules produced by humans, then they are not universal. Each individual is free to invent any type of moral system that seem right to them -- there is no higher authority to judge them differently. The choice is not between a moral law that is transcendently based and a "non-supernatural" ethical code -- it is between a moral law that is transcendently based and no moral law at all.

Second, even if there were some supernatural entities making moral decrees, so what? "Might makes right" is no argument. If your gods want me to behave a certain way, they owe me a reasoned argument, not a set of royal decrees.

Kant makes a good rational case. Like me, he regarded God as a necessary postulate for the foundation of morality. No serious religious thinker grounds moral law in arbitrary moral decrees. Rather morality derives from God's nature and character which even He cannot contradict, but which cannot exist apart from Himself (i.e. apart from a personal being) since morals are by nature a set of oughts or duties that reside only in a mind.

Third, there are non-supernatural ethical codes that are quite clear: utilitarianism, Kantian rationalism, and rights theories.

The adjective "non-supernatural" is also misleading. An arbitrary ethical code is no code at all, so all such codes are base in some way on reason, but of these ethical codes are "dead" by and in and of themselves.

Re:Not "evil"

[Mr. Slippery]

either there is a univerally applicable moral law to which all accountable, or there is not.

"Accountable" in what sense? Are you basing your ethics on fear of punishment and hope of reward? That's a pretty poor motivation.

But, if morals are nothing more than a set of conventions or rules produced by humans, then they are not universal.

A reasonable ethical system is a set of ideas produced by humans based on observation of actions and their results, not arbitrarily. For example, it is a fairly universal law of human behavior that people who treat others badly don't get invited to the good parties. It's also a good rule of thumb that people like to go to the good parties. Ergo, when considering the fundamental ethical question of "how shall I live my life", one of the points in the answer is "Don't treat others badly".

If you want to call this observation of how things are "transcendental", fine. But it's got nothing to do with deities.

Each individual is free to invent any type of moral system that seem right to them -- there is no higher authority to judge them differently.

Of course people are free to invent any type of system that seem right (or that even seems wrong) to them. People do it all the time. Unfortunately, usually their inventions are based on inaccurate observations and faulty reasoning, and lead to suffering for themselves and others.

Indeed, people are also free to invent any type of gods they want, and do it all the time - also usually based on inaccurate observations and faulty reasoning.

The adjective "non-supernatural" is also misleading.

No, it's an entirely accurate way to describe ethical systems which do not rely on assumptions about the supernatural.

Re:Not "evil"

[marcello_dl]

I am not pushing "diametrically opposed" (which is impossible) meanings, I just object on you picking a tormentor god with no plausible quote. I didn't pick one of the alternatives, it's irrelevant.

> Conversation over.

'zis is Slashdot, we don't Shush here!

Re:Not "evil"

[watchingeyes]

Your comment sure didn't read like a joke..it read more like a completely uninformed person commenting. I apologize for not reading your mind and linking your comment to some other random comment on this story which currently has 261 comments.

Re:Not "evil"

[ozmanjusri]

http://www.jeffcohenstudio.com/bagoftoast/comic.cgi?comic=71

Re:Not "evil"

[G-funk]

Nope, that only fixed it about 30% of the time for me, I eventually found that link myself. But I do appreciate the help :)

Cool for them...

[ect5150]

Cool for them, now can someone recommend me my new search engine?

Re:Cool for them...

[BubbleDragon]

Clusty has some neat things to offer.

Re:Cool for them...

[Topherbyte]

friends don't let friends Google while surfing.

try Scroogle

Re:Cool for them...

[langelgjm]

Google recommends AltaVista: Do "I'm feeling lucky" for "search engine".

Re:Cool for them...

[fatboyslack]

Agreed, one of the reasons I go to places like Google, slashdot etc is that it is (was?) a generally clean simple uncluttered layout.

Such is life.

Re:Cool for them...

[ichigo 2.0]

Why change for the content when you can change the content.

Re:Cool for them...

[d3ac0n]

I use Ask.com myself. The search results are just as good, and the additional search tools like the page preview and optional search terms bar make my searching much more efficient. Oh, and it has a much cleaner and more attractive interface than Google's.

Re:Cool for them...

[Anonymous Coward]

live.com is surprisingly competent.

Re:Cool for them...

[martinX]

Freaky. It's almost as if this thing that is aware of so much in the world has no self awareness. Or someone screwed up the coding.

Re:Cool for them...

[regular_gonzalez]

ask.com has made significant advances since the time it was askjeeves.com.
They are using Teoma's algorithm. In a few head-to-head comparisons I've done with Google, the results differed slightly but were about equally accurate and useful.

Re:Cool for them...

[Anonymous Coward]

I got directed to the wikipedia entry for search engine

Re:Cool for them...

[watchingeyes]

Well considering that this is posted on a site with notoriously incorrect summaries and headlines on a daily basis, and the headline and summary don't say that this is actually happening, and even if it does happen it will most likely be like their video ads on third party sites (they only play after you actually click the play button), don't you think you're overreacting just a tad?

Re:Cool for them...

[watchingeyes]

Depends what you're looking for. Google's index is refreshed amazingly quickly. It can sometimes take a month for a page to make it into Ask, with the same page making it into Google within a day. I actually used Ask for a few months, and then switched back to Google for that reason.

Re:Cool for them...

[courtarro]

The best search engine for a given individual is the one that returns the most desirable results when searching for one's own name.

Re:Cool for them...

[evilviper]

IMHO, there is only one search engine that poses competition, and is (in any way) better than Google, and that is http://www.clusty.com/

If you search for a diverse subject, or a key word that is used many different ways, for many different things, Google just becomes a mess of irrelevent links, and trial-and-error GUESSING what other key words you need to use in conjunction with what you want to find is rather difficult, time consuming, etc.. Clusty actually provides a list on the left of categories.

IMHO, the one problem with Clusty is a higher amount of spam, generally towards the end of the list of results. However, these seem to exclusively come from "Wisenut" results they've included. By visiting the preferences page, you can disable search results from Wisenut quite easily.

Ask: Tries to categorize, but does so incredibly stupidly... A search for "Putty" turns up categories that are all something about "silly putty".

Yahoo: Gives results that aren't much worse than Google most of the time, anymore, but that's not the makings for a real alternative... Just an also-ran.

AllTheWeb: Actually rather funny it's still around... It's a dinosaur. A remnant of the old days, when a search for any subject turned up a bunch of irrelevent links, often to porn. Until recently, hit #3 for "slashdot" was goatse. More ironic, since it appeared just before Google took over the scene, and forced every other (even older) search engine to change.

Re:Cool for them...

[mr_matticus]

Maybe it is intentionally not self-aware. We wouldn't want Google taking over the world and building Googlebots to enslave us. It could probably glean enough credit card numbers and bank information to finance the whole operation, and who is smarter than Google?

You'd have to Google for "kill google" and that just wouldn't end well.

Re:Cool for them...

[houghi]

http://vivisimo.com/

Re:Cool for them...

[SageMusings]

Thanks for pointing me to that search engine. I quite like it. My plan is to use it for a week and see if I miss Google all that much. This is one of the coolest aspects of frequenting Slashdot; all the cool links and tools I would never find on my own.

Re:Cool for them...

[dodobh]

Freaky. It's almost as if this thing that is aware of so much in the world has no self awareness. Or someone screwed up the coding.

That's what Google wants you to think.

Re:Cool for them...

[evilviper]

Haven't visited it in years? Visvisimo has been Clusty for a long time now.

Awesome!

[brxndxn]

Now we can be notified about special offers and promotions that are disturbingly close to what we actually want!

Re:Awesome!

[gbulmash]

Now we can be notified about special offers and promotions that are disturbingly close to what we actually want!

This may be tongue-in-cheek, but it's disturbingly accurate too. Part of their AdWords algorithm is to start incrementally raising the price on cost-per-click ads that aren't performing well. And they break this down by keyword. So if your ad is getting a really poor clickthrough from a certain keyword, they'll make you pay more and more for the keyword until you either drop it or improve your ad's clickthrough rate.

While that business method optimizes/maximizes CPM for Google, it also means that people who just bid on 500 loosely related keywords are going to gradually whittle that down to just those keywords that are are actually performing in terms of CPC and conversion. It stands to reason that if an ad is generating more clicks and more conversions for a specific keyword, that ad is more appropriate for it. In a way, it's almost Darwinian. Ads die off in keywords where they don't succeed and flourish in ones where they do.

- Greg

Re:Awesome!

[d3ac0n]

In a way, it's almost Darwinian. Ads die off in keywords where they don't succeed and flourish in ones where they do.

Headlines in 5 years: Google Execs charged with child endangerment because "ads now display nothing but porn"

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweet, When will they finally start putting video ad's on my Google Desktop Search?

Linux users might be doomed...!

[bogaboga]

I am afraid Linux users might be doomed if Google goes through with this development. You see, most distros will not install Adobe's flash player by default...and even when it's installed, it chokes on web videos because it is not that up-to-date. Sometimes, it's because of conflicts within the Linux product itself.

On a personal front, I will be pissed if I have to watch a video just because I searched for my favorite item.

Re:Linux users might be doomed...!

[callinyouin]

I don't understand where Linux users are doomed if flash isn't installed. Wouldn't this be the optimum choice for surfing google if they started using video ads? A little notification that flash isn't installed across the top and, lo and behold, no annoying video ad!

Re:Linux users might be doomed...!

[elyk]

If they do implement video ads in their search results, they will probably do it in the same way as the adsense units do, where it doesn't play until you click on it. So its unlikely that you will be forced to watch a video. However, this is still a huge step for google, because it would be the first time that they have had any sort of graphical ads in their search result. This was hinted at as a possibility when they bought 5% of aol, and they denied it then, but I wonder if that influence has finally broken through. Of course, this could all be hype and nothing come of it. All I have to say is that if google does do this, they had better move really carefully, or risk alienating a lot of users.

Re:Linux users might be doomed...!

[Derek Loev]

Since my switch to Linux I avoid the majority of Flash sites like the plague. It is almost impossible for me to even exit out of a page with flash on it because of how much it slows down my computer.
If Google goes this route they damn well better have something compatible with Linux or they are going to be losing a lot of users.

Re:Linux users might be doomed...!

[bogaboga]

If Google goes this route they damn well better have something compatible with Linux or they are going to be losing a lot of users.

A lot of users? I doubt that to be sincere. And by the way...to who will these users run? Yahoo? I doubt because Yahoo were pushing IE7 not so long ago...and their media site (Launchcast) still makes Linux and even Firefox choke!

Re:Linux users might be doomed...!

[wizardforce]

You see, most distros will not install Adobe's flash player by default...

that's only a problem if you don't know how to install anything in which case you have bigger problems.

and even when it's installed, it chokes on web videos because it is not that up-to-date. Sometimes, it's because of conflicts within the Linux product itself.

not once have I ever had flash crash anything on Linux- I have however, seen it on Windows. And even in the case that it ever did fail it would have absolutely nothing to do with anything Linux did, it would be because it being closed-source would not be cobbled together with duct-tape and anything else they found lying around. had this shit happened in Winodws there'd be a national riot and Bill G would be in some space prison somewhere...

On a personal front, I will be pissed if I have to watch a video just because I searched for my favorite item.

between adblock, noscript, greasemonkey and platypus ads dont exist, seriously you have to actually *try* to get ads at that point

Re:Linux users might be doomed...!

[wizardforce]

Noscript
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722
Adblock
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/186 5
Noscript options>>Advanced>>Untrusted>>check forbid java, forbid flash etc. then allow only the flash/java files to play one at a time instead of automatically by default.

Re:Linux users might be doomed...!

[notthe9]

Flash doesn't run great for me on linux, but I've never experienced anything anywhere near that bad. In any event, I use Flashblock on whatever set-up I'm web browsing on (Debian or Ubuntu at home, XP in my office). I don't block ads in general, but I can't help but feel my system to be a little hijacked when I load up a bunch of pointless flash stuff.

Re:Linux users might be doomed...!

[watchingeyes]

Considering Linux's extremely small desktop marketshare, and the fact that all of Google's current video ads on third-party sites don't even play by default, I'm sure they're not too worried.

Re:Linux users might be doomed...!

[watchingeyes]

Ummm, what does Yahoo pushing IE7 have to do with anything? What a stupid comment. Google pushes it too ffs. Doesn't meanyou have to USE it. Furthermore, Launchcast has absolutely nothing to do with Yahoo! search, so again, what is your point? And last but not least, many of Google's apps don't yet support Linux, or are years behind in their support.

http://www.google.com/toolbar/ie7/

Congrats, your comment takes the cake for most stupid comment I've read all day.

Re:Linux users might be doomed...!

[ross.w]

So you get a little jigsaw puzzle piece instead of an ad? Did you really want the ad?

A more accurate title

[Digital Vomit]

Here's a more accurate title for this topic:

Google Mulling Over Giving Up Its #1 Search Engine Spot

Seriously: video ads? WTH?!

Re:A more accurate title

[SnowZero]

Actually, based on TFA, the title should be:

"Google considers limited and careful experimentation with video ads"

Seriously, read the article, the title is not what the quoted guy said at all.

Re:A more accurate title

[moderatorrater]

What are you talking about? Slashdot editors, especially kdawson or zonk, would never, ever misquote an article and give it a sensational title when it's not warranted. If they started doing that, they'd lose mindshare to digg.

who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I block all the ads (including google) anyway.

Adblock & noscript are a godsend.

oh well

[Anonymous Coward]

If they put flash ads in, the only result will be another result in my adblocks blacklist.
text adverts are fine - they are unobtrusive most of the time ( apart from those linky popup-ads which i dont think google do ). Image ads are reasonable if static. animated ads are a no-no and video ads you can just forget about.

Ironic

[edwardpickman]

They both figured out how to speed up searches and slow down the speed for search pages to load. I guess that's what passes for progress these days, two steps forward and two steps backward.

Google sends tiananmen square down a memory hole.

[MacDork]

That's evil. The rest is icing on the cake.

Not "evil", just slanted.

[Anonymous Coward]

"People love to quote Google's tenet of "do no evil" and accuse Google of violating it whenever Google opens up a new avenue for earning money."

But making money is evil. Look what it's done to Slashdot?

Re:Not "evil", just slanted.

[VGPowerlord]

No, disrupting my web browsing is evil, no matter whom the source is.

I consider all of the following disruptive:
1. In Your Face animated ads (subtle ones are OK)
2. Anything that makes sounds.
3. Flash Ads. I especially hate the Intel "follow the cursor" ads.
4. Ads that pop up when my mouse moves over a word. Chances are if your site does that, I put it on my personal blacklist.

Re:Not "evil", just slanted.

[VGPowerlord]

Oops, I forgot to list the one that may actually be relevant in this case.
5. Any search result that looks like a normal search result, but is in reality a paid search result.

Re:Not "evil", just slanted.

[ady1]

I think it will be more like embedded youtube video which means it won't play unless you find it interesting and click on it. I don't feel the need to be change my search engine just yet.

Re:Not "evil", just slanted.

[Anonymous Coward]

4. Ads that pop up when my mouse moves over a word.

Sounds like Intellitxt ads. I have a large number of entries of those in my hosts file.

127.0.0.1 extremetech.us.intellitxt.com

Problem is that it is unique for each site. The example above could have a different locale than us. You have to filter each one.

Please, someone tell me a way to do a simple *.intellitxt.com rule in my hosts file. Or maybe an IPTables firewall rule. I tried the *.intellitxt.com for my hosts file, but it still loaded on some pages.

Re:Not "evil", just slanted.

[watchingeyes]

If you consider something that "disrupts" you to be "evil" than you sure have a fucked up sense of morality. I tend to reserve evil for things like, you know....murder, torture, rape, oppression. Interrupting you, or even myself, for a few seconds is pretty far down on my "evil" list. Annoying, sure. Evil? Give me a fucking break.

Evil has become the new Web 2.0...a completely meaningless word that is used at the most inappropriate times.

Re:Not "evil", just slanted.

[svunt]

No hyperbole at all, annoying you while providing a freel, arguably indispensable service is 'evil'. So now what word are you going to use for something well thought out and utterly horrible...evilsquared? Geez, tone it down a little, people. Evil is about the strongest word we have for bad behaviour & intent, applying it to frigging web ads is a bit much.

Re:Not "evil", just slanted.

[evilviper]

1. In Your Face animated ads (subtle ones are OK)
2. Anything that makes sounds.
3. Flash Ads. I especially hate the Intel "follow the cursor" ads.
4. Ads that pop up when my mouse moves over a word. Chances are if your site does that, I put it on my personal blacklist.

Nearly all of those disappear if you use the NoScript extension for Firefox. It disables Javascript by default, so in-page pop-ups don't work. You can configure it to block Flash unless you click on it. Ditto for embedded sounds. The only other form of animation is plain GIFs, and a visit to about:config setting image.animation_mode=none can disable any movement.

Re:Not "evil", just slanted.

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree entirely. The other day, someone said "excuse me, is this the way to the library?" I was so ticked at him for being evil, I told him I would never talk to him or his family again. That'll show him for being evil.

Re:Not "evil", just slanted.

[mike2R]

*intellitxt* in adblock seems to work.

Re:Not "evil", just slanted.

[Phroggy]

I wouldn't say Flash ads are inherently bad, only that most current Flash ads are bad. It is possible to create an ad, using Flash, that doesn't violate your other rules: very subtle animation, no sound, no cursor following, no popups.

The same idea applies to other uses of Flash. Most of the people who hate Flash do so because it's so often abused to do horribly obnoxious things. (Here on Slashdot, there's also a significant minority who hate Flash simply because it's not Free Software, or because the Linux port isn't the latest version, or some technical reason why it doesn't run well on their machine.)

Re:Not "evil", just slanted.

[catbutt]

Do you seriously think Google meant "evil" as in Hitler or Jeff Dahmer or Vlad the Impaler? They used it in a very common way, which in their case "don't be evil" basically meant "don't be a bad internet citizen."

Language changes, deal with it.

Re:Not "evil", just slanted.

[VGPowerlord]

If you consider something that "disrupts" you to be "evil" than you sure have a fucked up sense of morality.

So, if I consider someone donating $1 to a charity "good," is my sense of morality still fucked up? Evil and good are not absolutes.

Re:Not "evil", just slanted.

[jahudabudy]

Evil is not really the opposite of good. Evil implies a larger distance from the middle than good does. I certainly wouldn't suggest your morality is fucked up, but if you referred to donating $1 to charity as saintly or selfless, I would definitely question your perspective.

Although, another poster said that evil has become a watered down term, so maybe my antiquated understanding of our language is the problem, not other people's perspectives.

Re:Not "evil", just slanted.

[watchingeyes]

I wouldn't call this language changing. I can honestly say, outside of Slashdot which represents an extremely tiny portion of the overall population, I've never heard to any form of advertising being referred to as evil. In-fact, the vast majority of things that are referred to as "OMG teh evil!!!!" on Slashdot, most people don't...well, give a shit about.

Besides, Google's "Don't be evil" slogan is marketing, that's all. It's an attempt to paint the company as more of a charity and champion of consumer rights, and the fact that anyone actually buys into it is astonishing frankly.

Re:Not "evil", just slanted.

[watchingeyes]

Ummm...since when is good the opposite of evil, as another poster pointed out?

Re:Not "evil", just slanted.

[VGPowerlord]

Ummm...since when is good the opposite of evil, as another poster pointed out?

Since people started defining things as good vs. evil.

Re:Not "evil", just slanted.

[CopaceticOpus]

Good points! On the flip side, here's what I consider reasonable. (Reasonable = I won't stop using your website)

1. Ads that don't overlay other content (even if I accidentally move the mouse over them)
2. Ads that don't slow down page loading and viewing significantly
3. Ads that don't mess up the page flow so badly that I'm searching for the next paragraph of real content
4. Video ads, if used at all, should only start playing if I click a clearly marked play button
5. Flash ads, if used at all, should only have moving content/changing colors if I hover over them
6. No sound ever unless I press a very clear play or unmute button

What next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will they reduce the number of results displayed on each page?
Will they start making ad pass through pages to get to your result?
Popups?
Shit, they already have trojans spying on you with the Google cookie, Google toolbar, and Google Desktop.

Ah. I know I will have to get a new email provider within another year. I hope Wikia gets their search shit together. It's gotten to the point where I'd be willing to donate my time, money, and expertise.

The almighty dollar

[Technician]

Google is "finally succumbing to the power of the almighty dollar"

The dollar is quite the temptress and very deceitful. Following the money has led many to the path of destruction. The record companies have tried to collude and through artificial scarcity kept CD prices way above reasonable. Sales have fallen as a result of completion even though i Pod sales skyrocket.

Google has command of the advertising market. If they follow the temptress and try to follow the money, then Google will become just another search engine.

It would be sad to see Google become another ad-laden site with no special attraction to the users. Is Google stupid enough to ditch tons of eyeballs to get a slightly higher price per ad?

Others are ditching the overburdening pages and imitating Google's success. Most of these pages now don't load their page with banner advertisements anymore and for good reason. They lost major market share to Google because of it. They have modeled Google.

http://www.altavista.com/
http://www.dogpile.com/
http://www.live.com/?searchonly=true&mkt=en-US
http://search.yahoo.com/
http://www.hotbot.com/

If Google gets tempted by the money, they may find themselves quickly in the company of almost dead search engines that they stomped. They know how the other search engines dropped to obscurity. Why are they even interested in putting on that well known way to the bottom of the search engines.

Re:The almighty dollar

[Kelz]

Well my only suggestion would be to save the rant until after you've seen how they implement it.

Re:The almighty dollar

[Nextraztus]

I'd also like to suggest www.vivisimo.com

It has served me well in the past where google has occasionally failed.

Re:The almighty dollar

[Lumpy]

Want to kill a company? I'll give you a simple way.

go public and issue a IPO.

Boom the second you are a publically traded company, progress, innovations and right and wrong are not important, profits, cash flow and quarterly performance are king.

best way to kill a company. it put's the bean counters in finance in charge. and everyone knows that bean counters never do the right thing.

Re:The almighty dollar

[msormune]

It probably should be called "the dollar-that-was-once-mighty".

Just another reason

[fotbr]

That I have google ads blocked as of now.

Sure, their text ads were the least evil of all ads. Too bad it didn't last.

Re:Just another reason

[JanneM]

Exactly. Never had a problem displaying adsense ads. They don't move and distract me from reading the page content. I regularly add any moving or big graphical ads to my blocklist though; the first adsense ad that annoys me will have me block google ads as well.

Just watch your spelling now!

[Kelz]

I'd hate to see the video ad for a misspell of "My brother's ex with a goat".

Re:Just watch your spelling now!

[fractoid]

Why in God's name would you search for such a thing in the first place? Unless your caution is simply the gender of the person with the goat...

Of course, you could just mean 'with' as in 'next to', not as in 'getting with'. But this is the interweb, so I doubt it. :P

Re:Just watch your spelling now!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you'll be getting goat sex even if you spell it right.

What do you mean finally??!!

[kiwioddBall]

Google are a listed company - their main purpose is to succumb to the power of the mighty dollar - I'm pretty darn sure that the shareholders weren't under the impression that they were donating to a charity!

There is some impression that having better than average PR -ie writing intelligent blog entries / Apples Steve Jobs writing smart open letters means that they are genuine and open and not out to make lots of $$$ - this isn't the case!

Re:What do you mean finally??!!

[vorpal22]

I, for one, am getting really sick of this attitude, and I think it's ultimately responsible for the failings of capitalism. Google's main purpose may be, as you say, to generate revenue, but if they adopt certain publicly stated principles that may affect their ability to do so (e.g. "Do no evil"), the shareholders are investing fully aware that Google is not willing to engage in certain behaviours simply to make money. I, for one, applaud companies that adhere to a well defined code of ethics in spite of the fact that it reduces their profitability: it harbours goodwill and demonstrates respect for their customers. If the shareholders don't like it, they have no obligation to buy.

Companies really need to, IMO, stop putting the interests of their shareholders so far above the interests of their customers, which sadly seems to be the case for so many. The market has failed us because we, as consumers, generally have a choice between crappy company A and crappy company B, and hence, often no way to state our displeasure in a meaningful way.

Re:What do you mean finally??!!

[p3d0]

Companies really need to, IMO, stop putting the interests of their shareholders so far above the interests of their customers, which sadly seems to be the case for so many. Alternately, they could recognize that it is not in the interest of their shareholders to maximize profit at the expense of ethics. I own shares in a number of companies, and I don't consider it in my interest for them to be ruthless on by behalf.

So what if google turns evil?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use www.ask.com and shut up already, because we all know that using live.com is out of the question for the anti-MS/pro-google crowd.

I got tired of everything that touches google being filled to the brim with ads, and I made my decision to simply not use them.

Use Opera

[l33t gambler]

Use Opera and add an "enable plug-ins" and "enable GIF/SVG animation" buttons at a convinient spot. I can't really understand why websites use flash or gif animaitons in their articles or news, it makes everything look very messy and unprofessional. Feels like a Tabloid magazine with TV-shop running in the background.

Re:Use Opera

[ikkonoishi]

Or for a more targeted approach use any adblocking system and block http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/google adplayer.swf

I don't care

[RichPowers]

As long as AdBlock shields my eyes from such crap. Honestly, does any out there like video ads? For the past several years, people have been doing everything in their power to skip or fastforward through video ads...

Porn users might be doomed...!

[Anonymous Coward]

"On a personal front, I will be pissed if I have to watch a video just because I searched for my favorite item."

Why would Trojan and Viagra ads bother you?

Re:Porn users might be doomed...!

[senatorpjt]

Why would you need condoms or viagra if you're searching for porn?

What search engine is everybody switching to?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that Google has finally completely and fully gone to the dark side what search engine is everybody switching to?

Adblock time

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA:

"You could think of a local butcher. Maybe a 10-word text ad explaining that local butcher's business probably is not going to be enticing and get the user to click on the ad. But if you could have a video of the butcher explaining his business and showing all this fresh meat...then maybe the user would get much more value out of that. And the advertiser would also get more value as well."

I haven't blocked google's ads yet. I will block any flash ads.

Web pages are static content, like newspapers. They are not TV. You put these things at the top of a page, they make it very difficult to read a page. I used to have to put my hand over them because it was so difficult. Can you imagine trying to read a newspaper with the ads blinking and moving?

hmm

[thatskinnyguy]

Yes it will suck to have yet another popular site with annoying video ads that probably take priority when the page loads. But there is something you can do about it. There are browser add-ons that block such unwanted stuff. I mean, I haven't had a single banner ad interrupt my browsing on /. or any other site in months!

Can't be as bad as Slashdot

[QuantumG]

who take money from Microsoft and play anti-Linux FUD on the front page.

Thing is, most Slashdot users don't even see it.. thanks Adblock.

Re:Can't be as bad as Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

I have always found that somewhat disturbing. It seems a bit hypocritical to decry Microsoft's anti-competitive business practices and then turn around and indirectly profit off of them.

Re:Can't be as bad as Slashdot

[quantaman]

who take money from Microsoft and play anti-Linux FUD on the front page. I actually enjoys those ads, I mean how often is it that Microsoft sponsors its own bashing!! (well other than funding vista of course...)

Re:Can't be as bad as Slashdot

[greyphi]

I agree with you completely, those Get the Facts ads are both amusing and very good for getting the word out. Never before have I had more people ask me "So what's this linux..." and "Is it as good as microsoft?"

Not I said the fly

[Joebert]

Does that mean you will soon be seeing TV commercials at the top of Google search results page?

Not me, I have Flash disabled unless I'm expecting to see/use it, so unless Google moves the entire search result system to Flash I'm not going to see anything, that is if they use Flash to display the video as I expect.

what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look again, they have had ads forever with search results, top and on the side. Or do you mean you block all of them?

Re:what?

[Hatta]

Yeah, they're on the top and on the side. They're not in the search results.

Re:what?

[jlarocco]

Not for me :-) Completely blocked.

cost x benefit

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe they will put that in the search portal or search results. Video or graphic ads could destroy usability by slowing response and adding a lot of bandwidth costs.

This is just an intermediate step

[FUD spreader]

Google has been in collusion with Microsoft for years, so that every move you do on a windows PC, as well as everything you search for will be reported to the government, so they can implent a big brother style surveillance system around every citizen 24/7. Don't support Google or Microsoft! Need proof? Check out this.

Re:This is just an intermediate step

[Anonymous Coward]

dont forget that tinfoil hats amplify the signal of the mind control satellites... :rolleyes:

hey kdawson

[Anonymous Coward]

glad you fucks like focusing so much energy on this and beating up on the current administration while muslims continue to murder people for speaking their minds, deciding not to be a member of their religion or simply ignoring them.
 
muslims have us by the balls and we continue to sleep through it. soon we will have no choice but to bow to allah or be shot.

Re:hey kdawson

[Anonymous Coward]

can we shoot you first? please?

Re:hey kdawson

[Anonymous Coward]

hey, muslim sympathizer, why don't you just go and die? you're part of the problem of barbaric religions killing people for no reason as your religion and god are lies.

Re:hey kdawson

[Anonymous Coward]

Arent all gods fictional?

riiiight...

[solios]

... like the damned interweb isn't slow enough already. I thought the point of broadband was to have more interwebs faster, not to have the same interwebs at the same speed. Guess I was wrong.

Give this crap a few more years and video ad penetration and prevalence will be even worse than it is on television. At least TV doesn't run their ads embedded in the content.* And the comic books I read have the decency to run the ads in the back or not at all (I pointedly do not buy anything that runs ads inline - if it's something I want to read I'll wait for a trade paperback).

Looks like Google is increasingly flexible about the definition of "don't be evil." :P

* Network popunders popovers are one thing (it's the net shilling its own product, after all) - I mean, like, a frigging Preperation H advert and a Depends advert running on opposite sides of the screen while you're trying to focus on Battlestar Galactica or the weather report or whatever.

"Evil" is not quantifiable.

[liftphreaker]

So we see yet another round of people getting riled up for google for breaking their "don't be evil" policy. Just what the hell is this so-called policy? How do you quantify "evil"? How much more should you go through before you realize this motto is just what it looks like - fluff?

While you may consider someone murdering your kith and kin, and running away with all your life savings to be pretty evil, this may be a great money making tool and perfectly acceptable for some companies.

the good news

[bcrowell]

I hate being involuntarily subjected to video, e.g., in the dentist's office, the airport, and the supermarket. The good news is that when it comes to ads on web sites, the power is ultimately mine. When a lot of sites started using animated GIFs, which I found distracting and annoying, it motivated me to start using adblock. When I came across a site that used those incredibly annoying adbrite ads, that motivated me to add adbrite to my adblock ads (http://*.adbrite.com/* is the pattern that works). If google is smart, they'll serve up their video ads from urls that fit some pattern like http://video.googlesyndication.com/*, so that users will be able to block the video ads without blocking all google ads. I've never been annoyed by a google text ad, so I've never been motivated to block them. I wish I had the same power to get rid of the TV ads in the checkout lane at Albertson's.

bye bye google

[timmarhy]

annoying flashing crap is why i stopped using yahoo. google can kiss my traffic byebye if they think i'll put up with the same. there's 100's of other engines ready to take up the slack, trust me.

Does video include sound?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple question: does google's definition of video add include sound?

Because my scale of irritation goes something like:

0. relevant stuff.
1. text adds.
3. graphical adds.
10. animated/video adds.
bignum == pass the relevant filter and start plotting gruesome revenge: sound/noise/singing frogs.

Re:Does video include sound?

[Quiet_Desperation]

Because my scale of irritation goes something like:

0. relevant stuff.
1. text adds.
3. graphical adds.
10. animated/video adds.

11. People using add instead of ad.

And don't EVEN claim to have meant "additions" or I WILL unleash Hell.

MOD PARENT UP

[VGPowerlord]

I fully agree with what the parent said. Flash Ads are evil.

Right now, I still don't have Google Ads blocked because I don't mind text ads, or even unobtrusive banner ads.

Flash is an entirely different story, as it starts sucking up CPU cycles.

I don't remember whom The Register uses for their ad network, but I blocked them explicitly because of those annoying Intel ads with the dogs/cougars/whatever looking at the mouse cursor as it moves around the screen because:
1. It's distracting.
2. It actually slowed things down on my computer. To follow a mouse cursor around the screen.

News Release: Lynx becomes world's top browser

[EmbeddedJanitor]

According to traffic analysis by Google Inc there has been a remarkable resurgence in the use of Lynx. In unrelated news, GOOG trading down.

I'm mulling as well

[teslatug]

When they start doing that is when I start using Adblock on Google as well. Up to now I've excluded Google as I felt the ads were unobtrusive. Once they cross over, I'm nixing all of them.

Why does anyone call it a search engine anymore?

[frank_adrian314159]

Remember... the search part is ancillary to it's actual economic function. I'd start calling it what it actually is: Google! The Ad Delivery Engine!

Re:Google sends tiananmen square down a memory hol

[Thorrablot]

That's evil. The rest is icing on the cake.
It's OK to be importing an unprecedented amount of Chinese goods and exploit the cheap labor for every other aspect of the western economy, but Google is evil because they set up a satellite search service that institutes the required Chinese national policies?

Since the suppression of information is happening regardless of Google's presence, that should clarify that the root of the suppression is not due to U.S. companies agreeing to Chinese government demands, but is the Chinese government itself.

Frankly, it's also better for U.S. interests to have a "bubble" of Google servers that have a set of blacklisted/censored material for the time being, instead of watching Google lose out entirely in the fastest growing economy to the Chinese domestic engines (e.g. Baidu)

These politicians who (while it was a popular subject) wanted to crucify Google don't have any qualms about continuing to support China by importing their cheap goods and exploiting the cheap labor costs.

Hypocrits.

your sig is gay

[Anonymous Coward]

According to your sig you take it up the ass.

Re:your sig is gay

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't jump to conclusions. I'm gay, but my ass is virgin.

Adblock

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you Firefox, for truly not being evil I'll be able to stand video ads on google since I wont see them. At least until the slow decline from being dickwads degrades the search quality enough that I switch to another site.

oi retardo!

[Anonymous Coward]

ever heard about 'adblocking'?

who gives a fuck how many pulsating pieces of shit there are on a page? it's not the 1990s anymore, there's more to teh intarnets than internet exploiter...

at least it ends one argument

[senatorpjt]

Google's text ads were the one argument that made any sense against using Adblock. If all ads are obtrusive, there's no reason to not block all of them.

lol

[Anonymous Coward]

where's the OMGITSDAWSON! tag?

you will not be distracted by ads on Google

[dulitz]

I'm the product manager responsible for the way ads look on Google. You will not be distracted by image ads or video ads on Google search results pages. Period.

Just because other companies use image ads and video ads with the _purpose_ of distracting users doesn't mean Google will do that. Images and videos can be useful and entertaining, if you see them when you want to see them. It's taken us a long time to figure out how to do it right.

BTW, how many _years_ do we have to be in business before people learn Google isn't motivated by short-term greed? Yes, we want to make money. We want to make money 10 years from now. The only way to do that is to build great products that people want. I think we've done a pretty good job of that so far, and we're not planning to stop.

Re:you will not be distracted by ads on Google

[5pp000]

Don't forget the story about the early days of Google when the developers would occasionally receive a mysterious email message containing only a number. I've forgotten the exact number, alas, but it was always the same -- 31, let's suppose. Eventually they figured out that whenever they put more than 31 words on the Google home page, they would get a message with this number 31. I don't know if the sender was ever identified, but at least at the time, Google evidently took the message to heart.

I hope this story is still part of the company culture.

All that said, your post is reassuring. I hope you really mean the part about "if you see them when you want to see them".

Re:you will not be distracted by ads on Google

[Anonymous Coward]

What if I never want to see video ads on google? How will these ads know that I don't want them to ever even show up?

Re:you will not be distracted by ads on Google

[dulitz]

He sent us the number of characters (?) on our homepage, whatever it was, just to let us know someone was watching. :-) And yes, we thought about it and decided he had a point. People want their Google fast, so that's how we'll serve it up.

Lots of us work pretty hard to try to figure out what users want to see. It's not easy, since we can't actually interview users, but we listen very attentively to the data to find out what people are "saying."

Re:you will not be distracted by ads on Google

[Anonymous Coward]

What a troll! "we can't actually interview users" gives it away. Why, is Google's budget down to like $0.17, not enough for a phone call from a pay phone, with their phone service shut down because of too many missed payments, e-mail also being down? I suppose if Google can't afford gas to drive into work, it can't interview users, being stuck at home without phone service or e-mail access. Is that what's going on?

Re:you will not be distracted by ads on Google

[dulitz]

Sure, we can interview a handful of people, hundreds or even thousands, but that's not very helpful for figuring out what ads people want to see. By and large, people don't think about how they search; they just do it. It's part of life. If we ask someone to think about it, they'll say something, and it might be very interesting. But it won't help us do the right thing when they _aren't_ thinking about it.

So as a complement to interviewing, to get more useful data, we see where people click.

And no, I'm not going to respond to other sarcastic replies. :-)

Re:you will not be distracted by ads on Google

[Antony-Kyre]

I think it'd be annoying if this simply means implanting video advertisements in the search results we get from www.google.com. Do I understand the article correctly?

I prefer text advertisements. Any graphic advertisements make me want to boycott whatever is being advertised. Plus, forcing graphics upon users will make them find a better search engine that is willing to become the next Google.

Re:you will not be distracted by ads on Google

[blackest_k]

There is one way that you could do video ads without being annoying about it.

Give the user the option of setting video ads on or off in preferences, you can't be any fairer than that.

Stating the obvious here but you will know when it gets annoying, and when you have hit a sensible balance.
If every page load contains a video ad, then that will be annoying pretty quickly, as an option that I can turn on or off. It might be an enhancement.

I use google for lots of things, shopping is just one of those things. If I am thinking of buying something then is the time to OFFER to show me a presentation of a particular product. You could even show me an advert for a competing product.

Unfortunately most Ads run automatically, it is kind of like opening your front door and finding a queue of salesmen outside who immediately launch into their pitch and more often than not simultaneously.

Oh one more thing you really could do is store a list of automatic -search strings. in user preferences.
If I really don't want dealtime or ebay or wikipedia results then let me specify that I don't.

Those shopping aggregation sites are the worst, you search for product A they get returned in the results, click on the link and you get unrelated product B.

Of course I am not your customer, I am your product but surely your customers would prefer to target their ads at someone who is interested.

Alternatively somebody could write a firefox plugin which does a wget on every advert meeting a particular criteria and outputs the results to dev:null. That'll soon get expensive for advertisers paying per click.

Re:you will not be distracted by ads on Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit, I use a Duron 500MHz as my system for browsing and generally use google because the interface is clean and fast. If you add video ads which will bog my system down, then I'm gone.

Re:you will not be distracted by ads on Google

[Reapman]

All I ask is please, PLEASE, don't make my computer talk (audio) when I do a search. I often have about 4-5 tabs open with various search results. If you want to do video that's cool, I appreciate your a company, and there's nothing wrong with making money.

I admit I haven't rtfa'ed, but I just want to be clear since you seem to be someone that has some say / cares about what we think. Audio makes me cry (and use adblockers :S)

Keep up the good work guys...

Re:you will not be distracted by ads on Google

[bennettp]

Yes, we want to make money. We want to make money 10 years from now. The only way to do that is to build great products that people want. I think we've done a pretty good job of that so far, and we're not planning to stop. It's always refreshing to hear this sort of thing. The bottom line in any business is money. If you fail to develop something that people want to use, then it will never, ever make any money.

Adsense is the "killer app" of online advertising. From the users' perspective, there is only one reason why adsense is so great: it's the first advertising solution that doesn't annoy the **** out of them! To include images and videos in adsense would completely nullify this feature.

FlashBlock....

[thejuggler]

One more reason why I have the Flashblock plugin installed in Firefox.

Bad move

[theguyfromsaturn]

I'm burntout with all those image ads, and yet google ads have never bothered me. Google may be alienating the surfers with that plan.

Exactly Wrong

[Kreisler]

If I remember correctly, the choice not to use image/video ads was exactly the thing that made Google famous in the first place. I know all the nerds like PigeonRank http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html, but the real reason normal people like Google is that it's CLEAN.

Re:Exactly Wrong

[40ozFreak]

I completely agree here. Part of why I began using Google so much in the past was because of how streamlined and fast it was. I've always liked adsense, and the color-coordinating text-only ads along the perimeters of websites, lying unobtrusively in wait for me to CHOOSE to look at them. Video ads, flash ads, and other types of hey-asshole-look-at-me gimmicks are what regularly drive me away from websites. It is disappointing that Google feels that direction is a good one for them. Why not stick to what has made you so successful, and seek profits in other avenues? I think the majority of net users could do without more animated nonsense cluttering our browsers.

Banners are better than text ads

[pQueue]

Text ads are harder to block with adblock and noscript. Videos, flash, and graphical banners will be trivial to block. I hope they get rid of text ads so I never have to see ads on google.

Strange...

[Anonymous Coward]

For me it points to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine

Switch to MSN...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well then, I suppose you will be switching to some other search engine. Google is a commercial company in the business of generating money for its owners. They do not force you to use their service, which is "free" to you. Switch to MSN...

Re:Switch to MSN...

[JazzLad]

Sign me up - there's no way MSN will ever go evil on us ...

pure and simple, from the eigth dimension!

[Scrameustache]

Anyone who says ads are evil has a whacky moral compass, and they're diluting the term. Evil is as evil does. Starting a nasty rumor isn't as bad stabbing someone, but it's still evil. Ads can be evil, they can mislead people into thinking that smoking is a good idea, they can make people buy products you know are tainted, they can blink in a corner and stop anyone with ADD from reading the text on the screen, or start an epileptic seizure, startle someone with a weak heart, etc.

Just because there are worse things in the world don't make the small ones immune to evil.

Re:pure and simple, from the eigth dimension!

[heinousjay]

Thank you for the specific examples. It really doesn't change my point.

A Google exec? I can't pass up this chance!

[Quiet_Desperation]

Do you go home at night and bang hookers on piles of $100 bills?

Re:A Google exec? I can't pass up this chance!

[britneys 9th husband]

You know those signs that say "this store does not accept $100 bills?" This is why.

Not "evil"-Just selective.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I have to disagree. Morality can exist independent of religion. Many religious people make this mistake of assuming that only religious people have morals."

And I get dragged into another off topic. So here goes. Human morality vs Religious morality. Tell you what. If one can judge a tree by it's fruit? Then how should one judge Human Morality looking at it's fruits?

If they go evil, there's CustomizeGoogle

[Animats]

CustomizeGoogle is a special-purpose ad blocker for Google search results. You can turn off "sponsored results", for example. If Google goes over to the dark side, tools like CustomizeGoogle can be used to filter out the ads and dreck.

So there's a backup plan in place if they go evil.

this should be illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

will these video ads crank up the bandwidth used when simply browsing the internet?
duh. absolutely.

if my ISP puts a cap on my bandwidth...say 50 gigs down a month..... (and they do)

I don't want a bunch of rich corporations ===> STEALING === the bandwidth I pay for by forcing larger ads into my browser.

didn't i just read something not too long ago about the internet reaching the maximum capacity because of internet tv? Wouldn't this just add to the problem?

its too bad you can boycott google.

*sigh*
i remember when they used simple gifs for advertising...

Re:Google sends tiananmen square down a memory hol

[evilviper]

These politicians who (while it was a popular subject) wanted to crucify Google don't have any qualms about continuing to support China by importing their cheap goods and exploiting the cheap labor costs.

Indeed they are hypocrites.

That doesn't necessarily make them wrong, and doesn't absolve Google.

Google is unwilling to risk losing the Chinese market, and will do plenty of evil to keep it.

FOSS Solution

[Warbringer87]

As with many things, there is a FOSS solution, http://www.mozdex.com/

yes, evil, but with conditions...

[rucs_hack]

it is something of a misunderstanding. However, the term is bandied about a lot on the interwebs in reference to technologies, and people will use words in the context they experience them.

I doubt anyone would say a flash advert is evil in the same way as hitler was. Its a matter of scale. Pong and Unreal 2007 are both computer games games, and can be spoken of using some of the same words (multiplayer, zero sum, graphical). The magnitude differs is all. A flash advert that winds you up by forcing iteslf on your attention when you want to read an article is going to engender feelings of irritation, and possibly discomfort as it tries to wrest your attention from the content you visited a site for.

I, like many people who routinely use firefox addons, never see these adverts. If advert producers found a way to force me to experience them then I would start thinking the ad providers themselves were a tad on the evil side. Not in a big way, but in a 'wrecking my online experience' way.

Re:yes, evil, but with conditions...

[heinousjay]

Engendering feelings of irritation and discomfort are evil? Cool, does that mean I'm allowed to kill someone who bumps into me on the subway?

Re:yes, evil, but with conditions...

[rucs_hack]

yes, but only with a level 5 or below mace.

Jiggle Britney's Sagging Tits and Win an Ipod!!!

[Tentacle_Rape]

News like this makes me glad that I'm stealing from the internet with AdBlock Plus.

Fine but...

[EddyPearson]

Thats all well and good, we've all got to earn a living. However, I hope they give the option to turn off video ads and replace them with images/text. Otherwise you'll see a big migration toward Yahoo from the dial-up users (and no, a lot of the world still uses dial-up, look at the 3rd world countries)

Re:Google sends tiananmen square down a memory hol

[moderatorrater]

You forget that Google will probably still have cracks, whether on purpose or not, that information gets through. A filtered internet and search service is better than none at all.

What else are they expected to do?

[jibjibjib]

"finally succumbing to the power of the almighty dollar."

They're a business. A profit-making enterprise. There was no point at which they did not care about the "almighty dollar." By using one type of media instead of another in ads, they are not somehow becoming more greedy or more evil or more Satanic. They'll show these ads, and if it increases their profits, they'll keep showing them, and if it decreases their profits, they'll remove them.

The summary for this article is basically a troll, intended to give people the feeling that Google is somehow surrendering to evil, just because they decided to try a new type of advertising.

Given Google's track record of some of the best and most non-intrusive advertisements on the web, shouldn't we at least let them try it and see how it looks before we criticize them?

Bye bye USP

[gilesjuk]

The clean minimal look was always Google's unique selling point. The fact that that're going to add clutter and bandwidth wasting junk is the start of the end of Google's popularity.

What are people complaining about?

[Rexdude]

Especially this being Slashdot, where people can be expected to know about adblocking!
If you don't mind paying and getting commercial software on Windows-get Ad Muncher. The most comprehensive adblocker I've seen-it can filter any application and is tiny and easy to use. It passed the ultimate test for me-running an unpatched IE6 on a bunch of warez/porn sites and nuking nearly everything off the page. Yeah, i live dangerously :D

For the rest, there's always the Adblock Plus extension for Firefox. I've been filtering ads for years because they're all US centric and I don't buy stuff online anyway.
There's no point linking the 'do no evil' slogan to their ad policy. They showed text ads till now as a differentiation from other engines, at some point they gave in to the lure of the cash and decided to go all out with video ads. Or they must have deduced that showing video ads is profitable. As a publicly owned company, whose primary goal is to maximize shareholder value, what are they doing wrong? (Too bad if you thought of them any other way)

noise

[kurtis25]

I've started to look for a replacements to Google services. I will not nay I cannot use sites that make noise. I thought everyone realized that sound was evil during the pre-blog personal homepage boom. If a site makes noise without me telling it to make noise (youtube, cnn.com, mp3 sites, et al) It shouldn't make a peep. The last thing I want is to have my NPR feed covered up or interrupted by some ad. Google can use video ads all they want but don't make them audio/video ads. I remember when AIM put audio/video ads into the chat client. I'd be sitting there having a peaceful and silent conversation only to be scared when my computer started talking. The first few times this happened I fired up ad-aware, spybot and my AV software to check my computer for something wrong. Further I would imagine this would make their wireless customers angry since they have a certain amount of bandwidth that a Google search will start to eat pretty quickly.

Not so much evil as annoying

[bberens]

Google won my heart by proving that non-annoying ads could be wildly successful and profitable. Google has always been a favorite of mine because the pages just give you what you want without all the extra crap. Compare google.com to yahoo.com for instance. Simple and to the point. While dilluting the page content with moving stuff and chewing up my bandwidth with videos and animated gifs isn't evil, it will likely make the GOOG less desirable to me. What might make me feel like it's evil is that it's a betrayal of the rampant support I've given them over the years. *shrug*

That's what being "publically traded" means...

[ceeam]

... well, a new search engine will inevitable come up then. Google's algorithms were not _that_ great anyway.

Not "evil", just manipulative.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Language changes, deal with it."

Language changes, but not always for the better. Here's a challenge for you. Find a common word that will describe the Khmer Rouge, or Bady Doc, or 9/11, or Stalins purges? Looks like you all used up the applicable word just for the sake of emotionally manipulating your audience. A trite use for an irreplacable word.

Video and image ads are fine

[skoval]

if you browse with Elinks

So you don't mind if American corps make a profit

[MacDork]

at the expense of the rights of people?

It's OK to be importing an unprecedented amount of Chinese goods and exploit the cheap labor for every other aspect of the western economy, but Google is evil because they set up a satellite search service that institutes the required Chinese national policies?

Strawman argument. You brought up cheap Chinese goods and labor, not I. I am in no way defending the exploitation of the chinese worker.

Since the suppression of information is happening regardless of Google's presence, that should clarify that the root of the suppression is not due to U.S. companies agreeing to Chinese government demands, but is the Chinese government itself.

Fact: Google actively filters information on behalf of the Chinese government. The great firewall of China was built with American technology. Google is a part of that.

Frankly, it's also better for U.S. interests to have a "bubble" of Google servers that have a set of blacklisted/censored material for the time being, instead of watching Google lose out entirely in the fastest growing economy to the Chinese domestic engines (e.g. Baidu)

If you'll refer back to the link I posted, you'll see that at least a few members of the US Congress do not believe Google's behavior is in the best interest of the US. Chris Smith went so far as to propose a law to make Google's actions there illegal here. (Of course, his hypocritical solution allows for the filtering of content in the United States to continue, yet would make filtering the exact same material in China illegal.)

In game theory, it seems you would consider the situation a deadlock. I would consider it a prisoner dilemma. I believe human rights are more valuable than money. You must consider money to be more important than human rights. The mods seem to agree with you. Perhaps you and the mods would like to sell your rights... or is it only the rights of other people that you consider to be less important than money?

These politicians who (while it was a popular subject) wanted to crucify Google don't have any qualms about continuing to support China by importing their cheap goods and exploiting the cheap labor costs.

You can thank almighty capitalism for that. Chinese currency manipulation is largely to blame for the "cheap" goods and labor. What follows that is inevitable in a free market. Spineless politicians are more deserving of blame in regards to "one way" free trade with China. In effect, China is exploiting loopholes in a debt based global economy in an attempt to dominate said global economy.