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Google Sues Dodgy Advertisers
angry tapir writes "Google is at its wit's end dealing with illegal sellers of prescription drugs that market medicines on its ad network, so it has decided to take some of these allegedly rogue advertisers to court. Rogue prescription drug sellers have increased in number and become more sophisticated in their dealings, and 'a small percentage' of them have been able to dodge Google's efforts to block them from running ads on its network, according to the company."
How do I order?
It's just a show.
How do I order?
Talk to Dr. William E. Morrow of Layton, Utah who signed for thousands of prescriptions that two of Kyle Rootsaert's pharmacies filled. From that article:
CNN's Special Investigations Unit first examined Rootsaert and Roots Pharmacy, the company he owns in American Fork, in 2008. CNN Correspondent Drew Griffin ordered the antidepressant Prozac over the internet without a doctor's prescription, and the pills were delivered by overnight express the following day.
The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and FBI are very very interested in all of this and as the article notes, Google is quick to show they're on the government's side regarding these pharmacies. Google faces very low risk (alleging breach of AdWords contracts allowing others to back out of contracts) while reducing its liability exposure by way of this lawsuit if any of the 49 "John Doe" owned sites face criminal investigation.
My work here is dung.
Google's ads have been pointless for a long time. I don't understand how they make as much revenue as they do with ads that no one, or at least not anyone I know clicking on them. The ads are mostly spam and scams. Their text format is bad too. I rarely click on ads but those that I do are usualy non flash banners, or I'll unknowingly read a paid for review. A few key word lines of text doesn't have the click me afpeal that oither ad options do. It is about time they cleaned up their advertisers and made them more relevent.
The problem with spam is that there seems to be a market for these products. Maybe if we develop a drug that increases self esteem, viagra won't be needed any more. Oh, wait...
...Google has only one wit.
From reading the article, it seems that they are suing for breach of the AdWords contract. This seems unlikely to me to shut down the illegal pharmacies, unless Google is paying investigators to actually do business with the pharmacies and track them down "in real life" --- in which case, why not just give the evidence they obtain to the applicable LEOs?
I suppose one doesn't prevent the other, but the article doesn't at all address this possibility, in fact, it spins the story like Google might be doing this for CYA in case law enforcement catches these guys all by themselves.
A company that sues its own costumers?
... please do some editing! There is no need to link to another website when you can go directly to the source!
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Stories like this always surprise me for a second because since I haven't seen hardly any ads in years I often forget they're there in the first place.
They are taking them to court because it may no longer be profitable to allow them to continue, They have yet to pull the searches and ads from all these sellers, even the most blatant ones still show up when you search for any popular drug.
Google has "gone evil" years ago - search is a joke for most terms, filled with paid ads, scrapers and domain leeches.
...and maybe now they'll do something about the ubiquitous "Cut down on your belly using this one weird old tip" which redirects to Acai pills or some such bollocks, with a fake news channel report using a picture of a real French news anchor who's got nothing to do with the product.
It seems to me it would be easy to follow the money of these spammers with their V1agra spam emails and ads. All the FDA has to do is place an order and follow the credit card transaction backwards.
The simple reason why these guys still exist is because noone with the legal power has the balls to fight.
Sure, they are porbably offshore companies, but they must be guilty of importing controlled substances.
It's time we made our FDA stand up and give it to these guys.
Whenever I turn-off my ad-blocker, I get those annoying ads with cartoony images of before-and-after fatties, it aggravates me so much that I don't feel sorry for blocking these sites' revenues... I hope they get banned next.
I've seen a ton of dodgy ads for penny stocks and the like on their service lately.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The price is 1/10th retail.
The drugs are effective and actually appear to be the real thing in real packaging.
So how can these guys sell this way at such low prices when my pills legitimately through mail order discount places run $2 to $3 each?
Have to be gross amounts of profit somewhere in the chain.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Google's business model requires dodgy advertisers. Google has created and funded a whole industry of AdWords arbitrage, encouraging web spam. That's a big part of their customer base. How often do you see a Fortune 1000 company in a Google ad?
In 2004 and 2005, Google sponsored the "Web Spam Squashing Summit" In 2006, Google turned to the dark side. They started sponsoring the Search Engine Strategies conference, the web spammer's convention. That's when "Don't be Evil" ended.
We track Google ads at SiteTruth, trying to find the business behind the ad. For about 36% of Google ads (by domain, not hits) not on search pages, there's no identifiable real-world business behind the ad. We call those "bottom-feeders". The "John Does" Google is suing fall into that category. If Google kicked off all those "John Doe" advertisers, they'd lose a third of their advertiser base.
I get people coming to the reference desk asking for information about various treatments for ailments. Sometimes actual science-based medicine, sometimes plausible alternative medicine, and sometimes outright quackery, and sometimes all three at once.
I usually turn the monitor around so that they can see what I am doing. (Sometimes I think this may be a mistake, because they don't understand what I am doing.) If I'm doing a series of Google searches, trying to narrow things down to what we're looking for, they'll stop me and point to the ads. Usually (almost invariably) selling some transparently bogus alternative treatment. (Remember, they're coming to me asking me to help them find out what's what, not necessarily looking for someplace to buy their radiation crystal magnets.) They'll say "OH, OH, THAT'S IT!" when they see a keyword or two in the ad that relates to what they're looking for.
There are a LOT of people who receive information completely uncritically. They can't tell an ad trying to sell them something from an informational article. They can't tell the difference between an emotional appeal or an argument based essentially on sympathetic magic from actual science. THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO CLICK THOSE ADS. They'll reject things if they've been inoculated against it, but only because they've been told that they should, and had that admonition connected to some deeply held belief. They won't do so because they have legitimately considered whether it could be true or false.
That is why advertisers, particularly on Google with its text ads, have the potential to do a lot of harm.
I run an online community and I fully support Google in going after these assholes. They've been spamming our forums for the Google hits (the website has a surprisingly good Google presence despite its relatively small size) and there hasn't been much I can do about it. I'm planning a massive upgrade to new software, which has been long overdue, and I hope it will fix the problem. I'll bet it's the same guys that have been trying to circumvent Google. I'll bet there's some way to use the DMCA anti-circumvention rules for good instead of evil.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.