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Google Patents Censorship of "Annoying" Content
An anonymous reader writes "Google has been granted a patent for a rating engine that reserves the right to approve or reject content that is published on the Internet. The patent especially refers to advertising and those rather invasive and disturbing blinking ads that exploit the entire range of color pairs that are found displeasing to the human eye: 'The embodiments described herein enable Flash and animated image documents (e.g., advertisements). Some of these types of ads are annoying.' However Google notes that ads are just an 'illustrative example' and the idea could be applied to 'content pages (e.g., web pages), search results, emails, applications, IM messages, audio content or files, video content or files, other files, other data or applications that may reside on one or several (e.g., a network) of computer systems, or other definable concepts or content.'"
Google will now apply this patent to censor all the annoying crap that gets published by or about Oracle. Payback is a bitch, Larry.
but they really have a tasteful approach to their advertising. On their sites and services, the plain-text ads go almost un-noticed. I'm glad to see them making an attempt to get rid of the 'You won! Shoot the monkey to claim your prise!' type ads. Next up: content farms.
mod patent down.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
On the same note, while they're at censoring ads, I'd like to see crap censored that includes:
- before/after images that either aren't even the same person, or are the same thing with a different zoom factor. Seen it from penis enlargement pills to diets to God knows what else. Yeah, it's soo not insulting my intelligence to try to sell me a diet where the before and after aren't even the same person.
- all those retarded "free IQ test" ads that actually have nothing to do with IQ, but are just ambiguous images that have no right or wrong answer. Sorry, if I'm to trust anyone to give me an IQ test, it kinda helps if the ad doesn't convince me up front that they're drooling morons who don't even understand what IQ means.
Though a new low in stupidity was such an IQ ad recently which was about solving a maze... where blatantly one end was completely walled in and quite within a short distance of it too. As in, next square.
- ads which are unskipable movies, and with sound too. I don't give a fuck about what colours they are in, nor about whether they blink or not. In an age where bandwidth caps are becoming the norm, and are sometimes measured in single digit gigabytes, serving a 100 MB video as an ad is just plain old evil. I don't care how important some cretin PHB thinks his new product is, if they waste so much of everyone's resources for it, they should be not just censored, but taken out back, put in a sack and beaten savagely with a stick. But I'll settle for just censorship too.
- ads served in the wrong dimension. I mean, not only it's some annoying animation, but now it's something that was in horizontal banner format and is squeezed and stretched in a vertical banner box. So not only it blinks and makes funny noises, but I can't even read what the fuck is it trying to sell me, even if just to avoid those idiots.
Etc.
Yeah, yeah, I know, there are plugins that do that. But, hey, if Google is going to take over the web, they might as well solve that problem for everyone. Right? :p
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Correction to above -- "being able to block whole domains and/or TLDs"
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
So you mean it works like /.'s comment moderation system?
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
You mean like the sorts of people that would point out that it's Schizo, not Skitso?
Hm, your gaming example reminds me that most large gaming websites have templates for any game title whether they have actual content or not, searching for a review of an obscure game will spew out pages full of IGN, Gamespot and so on advertising themselves as the best source on the game when all they have is a page stating the title and basically "we know nothing about this". I'd like to see Google do something about that.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.