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The Internet Spam

Google AdWords And Ethics Issues 256

Posted by simoniker from the could-should-and-would dept.
trystanu writes "The Washington Post reports that Google 'will stop accepting advertising from unlicensed pharmacies that have used the Internet to sell millions of doses of narcotics and prescription drugs without medical supervision', following both Yahoo and Microsoft's similar moves last month. The head of Google's U.S. AdWords branch maintains it's not just for the money but that they want their searchers to have the ads most relevant to what they're looking for. It's quite clear some advertisers are using the front door to spam Google rankings. Are some of the 100,000 advertisers now signed up for Adwords tarnishing Google's image at a delicate time?"
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Google AdWords And Ethics Issues More

Google AdWords And Ethics Issues

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  • Why Not? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01, 2003 @12:46PM (#7600302)
    Plenty of sites block or blocked porn in one form or another. They have the right to refuse money from anyone.

    Or so I would hope.

    • Re:Why Not? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @12:51PM (#7600369)
      Not so, or at least not allways. You cannot refuse to do buisness with people based on some criteria such as race etc. However I don't see any problem with what Google is doing.

    • Re:Why Not? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by randyest ( 589159 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @01:08PM (#7600583) Homepage
      Well, I don't think anyone said google doesn't have the right, but the question goes both ways -- why should they remove these sites from thier index? In search of the answer to that, I first noted who seems most interested in swaying google and others to censor search results:

      "These legitimate businesses are an important but faceless part of the supply chain for these dangerous drugs," said Carmen Catizone, executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, which has been lobbying Google and other search engines to stop accepting advertising from rogue Web sites. "If the government is serious, it has to look at these businesses."

      That's right, it's the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, which represents all those who make money by selling these types of drugs the fine traditional way -- via tightly controlled distribution sysems with loads of heavy markups for both the drug developer (good) and the middle-men (maybe not as good).

      Of course, in general, pharmacists add value to the system -- they advise and help people avoid dangerous drug interactions and such. That's good. But note that sometimes, some people have to take a drug forever, and they tend to learn about that drug pretty well and manage to use it responsibly and safely without a white-coated guy handing it to them every week.

      Then sometimes these people learn that the drug they pay $100/week for is available elsewhere for 1/10th or less the price. Same drug. A lot less money. Should these people be allowed to buy their prescriptions online for less money? (Note that I call them "prescriptions", to be clear that I'm talking about people with valid prescriptions from real doctors (Hi Everybody!), not those who just decided they need some oxy's for the weekend (Hi Rush!)).

      My medical plan at work requires me to buy prescriptions online when they will be used for more then 3 months at a time (such as wifey's birth control pills). It's faster, cheaper, and automatic. I wonder how many of these "rogue websites" are actually following the law, requiring prescriptions from real doctors, etc. I imagine it would be a nice bonus for the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy if a few of the legit online drug services took a negative hit from this effort as well.

      Of course, I believe any aduly should be allowed to get pretty much any drug they want and use it anyway they want as long as they don't share with minors or try to kill someone with them (except themselves, which is fine), so this whole issue seems kind of silly to me, but it's always interesting to follow the money trail that often leads up to such "crackdowns."

      • Re:Why Not? (Score:3, Informative)

        by graxrmelg ( 71438 )
        I don't see anything in the article about censoring search results or removing sites from the index. This is about ads, not search results.

        Your points about motivation may still apply, but they're undermined when you bring up irrelevant issues.

      • Re:Why Not? (Score:3, Informative)

        by justMichael ( 606509 )
        I agree with you pretty much across the board.

        I have one small clarification. Google will stop accepting advertising for these companies, I saw no mention of them dropping anything from the index.

        Unless I missed something.

        One could be interpreted as a form of censorship the other is in line with the "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason" signs you see posted in many physical establishments.
        • Well, you can reserve anything you want but you still have to obey the law, and the law says you cannot refuse service to certain people for certain reasons, for instance, their national origin. Just wanted to clarify that in case anyone still thinks signs mean anything. Signs are covered by free expression. They are not necessarily enforceable.
      • Of course, in general, pharmacists add value to the system -- they advise and help people avoid dangerous drug interactions and such.

        When have you EVER gotten any meaningful advice from a pharmacist on anything? Let's assume, that unlike almost every pharmacy I've ever been in, the pharmacist isn't backed up with 100 orders and on the phone constantly.

        When I've tried to talk to them, I get two generic answers: "Your doctor will have to answer those questions" and "The PDR doesn't describe any specific
        • Um, my pharmacist has frequently reminded me about things that may not be dangerous, per se, but are certainly helpful to know. The last batch of antibiotics I took, he reminded me to take it with food, that exposure to sun may cause sunburn quicker than normal while using the antibiotic, and that taking this antibiotic within 2 hours of a mineral supplement would lessen (significantly) the absorption of the antibiotic.

          I do mail order my common 'scripts, and those I know how to deal with pretty well, but I
  • I was making some nice coin from those online perscription affiliate programs...

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @12:47PM (#7600313)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:notice (Score:5, Funny)

      by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @01:00PM (#7600498) Homepage
      No AdWords, but a search for "goatse" yields the following helpful hint:

      Category: Society > Religion and Spirituality > ... > Scientology

      • I thought that was funny until you fill in the ...

        Society > Religion and Spirituality > Opposing Views > Scientology
      • No AdWords, but a search for "goatse" yields the following helpful hint:

        Category: Society > Religion and Spirituality > ... > Scientology

        Scroll down a bit further and you get a link to the Netcraft page [netcraft.com] that says goatse.cx is running IIS on Linux. That's as wrong as the "stinger" image.

  • Of course (Score:2, Insightful)

    by SargeZT ( 609463 ) *
    Of course this is tarnishing google's image. This is basically the same thing that has happened to every single search engine. Yahoo was a great search engine in its time. They started getting millions of hits a day, and they decided to sell space on the site. Then, yahoo sold ranking on the engine, and you start having skewed results. Finally, People stop coming because of the pop-ups and bad search results. This isn't a great position for google.

    • Re:Of course (Score:5, Informative)

      by turtlexit ( 720052 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @01:10PM (#7600604)
      Unless I am misinformed, this has no impact on Google's search engine - only sponsored links (the AdWords service). Although it is pretty shady to mix in sponsored results with real results like other search engines do, Google places their sponsored links to the right of search results, clealy labeled - and it is entirely their prerogative who they will accept ads from.
  • This is big pharaceuticals leaning on them to try and limit the ability of people to shop for perscription drugs outside the US and (gasp!) actually pay a fair price (and a price they can afford) for them!

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @12:57PM (#7600453)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • And what exactly is a "fair price" for prescription medication?
    • This is big pharaceuticals leaning on them to try and limit the ability of people to shop...

      I would call "tin-foil hat" on you if it weren't for Viagra. Once the big-name pharma companies decided to enter the it-must-be-lucrative p3ni5 enlargement market, a million spammers suddenly found themselves in the sights of Pfiser & co.

      What's next? Big Oil [gp.org] sending me letters asking me to help them "TRANSFER 40 GAZILLION US DOLLERS CURRANTLY IN THE LAST NATIONEL BANQUE OF NIGERIA"?

    • Re:Bullshit it's not about the money! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by HeghmoH ( 13204 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @01:17PM (#7600662) Homepage Journal
      This is the wackiest conspiracy theory I've seen all day.

      How exactly are the big pharmaceutical companies "leaning on" Google? Talk of Google's IPO has included mention of the company's value, which is several billion dollars. They aren't a small company that anybody can just push around. The only "leaning" tactic I can think of that would work would be a fleet of armored cars, loaded with green paper cargo, driving to Google's headquarters and unloading.

    • Exactly Right!! (Score:3, Informative)

      by Lysol ( 11150 )
      I know this for fact since I am working on a system I put together for partners here and in India for selling prescriptions online. Our site is 100% legal, yet we don't have a huge budget, so Google and other search engines were our main hope. However, this looks to have now changed.

      For proof of fact that it is big money lobbying congress and the search engines, take a gander at this [silicon.com] article (one of many on the subject). Drugstore.com and others are part of VIPPS, which is a 'licensed' group of online phar
    • If Americans cannot find the offshore pharmacies, they will have to pay the inflated prices of American pharmacies. So the Big Pharmaceutical Companies may have paid google to do this. Mo' money Mo' money Mo' money for Big Pharmco...and less for Americans....

      Google better watch its ass...we geeks MADE google what it is by being the early adopters who spread the word to the general population.....we can also make google's sucessor.

      Is there any decent search engine that does not use google as an input?

  • Reassuring (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ActionPlant ( 721843 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @12:48PM (#7600329) Homepage
    This actually helps bolster my confidence in the teetering giant. I've been interested myself in signing up to run google's adwords for the launch of my next portal; this helps establish that they ARE sensitive to the needs of the people who really count on them. It doesn't matter who did it first; what counts is that google IS doing this. I respect that.

    Damon,

  • But what about... (Score:3, Funny)

    by xtermz ( 234073 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @12:50PM (#7600348) Homepage Journal
    ....Porn ads... ( allow me to get my asbestos pants on real quick ) ... Sure, its fine an dandy for people to not be able to get prescription meds, but you can do a search for 'free movies" and get bombarded with adword ads for all the pr0n you can ever need. if their trying to look out for the good of its users, little timmy doesnt need to see "finding dildo" when he's trying to get "finding nemo"

  • IMO, Google (and the other search engines) are being foolish to reject pharmacy adverts. They should take the money, record the personal data, and then forward a copy to the DEA (and of course make sure this is allowed in the AdWords contract).

    If someone is going to be stupid enough to attach a big red light to their forehead saying "Hi, I'm doing something illegal right here!", why not let them hang themselves?

  • Stick a fork in it; google is done. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by RLiegh ( 247921 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @12:52PM (#7600389) Homepage Journal
    Now that people are starting to exploit googles' page ranking system on a regular basis and since google is having to bow to legal pressure and thereby lose their outsider "street cred"...they're in the exact spot that yahoo was in in 1999.

    All they need now is a half-assed web hosting service.

    How many times are we going to see this repeated online until we learn that a jack-of-all-trades really IS master of none?
    • Do you have suggestions for a better search engine than Google, one that does not censor content like this, but works well and indexes as many pages?
    • I stopped using Yahoo for exactly the reasons illustrated in the parent post. I believe that search engines shouldn't make results more relevant because some people paid for rankings and other people did not.

      If Google is done as a search engine, so Slashdotters have any suggestions for an alternative?
      • Read this carefully, word by word, and then let it sink in:
        • AdWords
        • Does
        • Not
        • Affect
        • Normal
        • Search
        • Results

        AdWords does not affect normal search results! This is about the sponsored links, and they are very obvious, and also separated from the actual search results.

        Can we please quit it with the FUD and misinformation now? What is this, Google Watch [google-watch-watch.org]?

  • Sickening (Score:3, Interesting)

    by moehoward ( 668736 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @12:52PM (#7600393)
    I'm am deeply sickened that Google names these companies as being legitimate. These are the companies MOST responsible for spam these days, not to mention getting drugs in the wrong hands. The affiliate programs run by these drug companies are nothing short of a license to spam on their behalf. The drug companies deny responsibility because they "can't control the affiliates". Bull.

    These drug companies are scum. And Google is culpable by so emphatically stating that these companies are legitimate. Google had better watch who they decide to defend.

  • Is that what they're calling Canadian pharmacies? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Malc ( 1751 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @12:53PM (#7600401)
    Illegal and unlicensed pharamacies - is the label they want to slap on Canadian pharamcies? It seems to me that they're doing Americans a favour by selling them at prices they can afford better. What a disgusting rip-off the drug market is. And you thought the RIAA and MPAA are bad.

    • Re:Is that what they're calling Canadian pharmacie (Score:5, Informative)

      by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @12:58PM (#7600472) Homepage
      Quite the opposite, actually. "Canadian" is what many illegal and unlicensed pharmacies are calling themselves -- in many cases, so-called "Canadian pharmacies" consist of a website run off a server in .us, and a bunch of people in India shipping the drugs. The Canadian government isn't happy about the country being given a bad name, but since these organizations don't conduct any business in Canada, it's hard to take action against them.

  • What I'd be interested in seeing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FearUncertaintyDoubt ( 578295 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @12:58PM (#7600474)
    Is the actual overdose rate for people who self-medicate vs. those who get the same drugs from a doctor. You get a big bottle of pills either way, and nothing stops you from taking too many, regardless of whether you had a prescription. Also, how many of the addicts got that way under doctors' orders? It's easy to blame drug web sites for the problem, but take note that they are marketing to people who already are on Vicodin or whatever.

    Perhaps the government should be looking at why it is that we have so many painkiller-addicted people in the first place. We have a $ystem that encourages doctors to pump people full of pills, rather than take more time-intensive solutions such as actually developing a long-term plan to treat the underlying sources of pain and illness.

    Incidentally, if Rush Limbaugh knew what he was doing, he could have used these sites instead of having his housekeeper run his drugs.

    • Perhaps the government should be looking at why it is that we have so many painkiller-addicted people in the first place. We have a $ystem that encourages doctors to pump people full of pills, rather than take more time-intensive solutions such as actually developing a long-term plan to treat the underlying sources of pain and illness.

      We also have a system that doesn't consider pain as being something worth taking seriously. Consequently, if you need powerful painkillers, the easiest way to get them is

  • Great! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Stile 65 ( 722451 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @12:59PM (#7600483) Homepage Journal
    There goes my sex life. Where am I going to buy cheap Viagra now?!

  • What they should be doing (Score:3, Informative)

    by Count of Montecristo ( 626894 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @01:01PM (#7600509) Homepage
    is filtering out all the crap that comes from linkfarms.

    all that spam only clogs the engine, and most of it are really crappy pages.

    for a while, whenever i do a search, i haven't found relevant results on the first search page, sometimes the second will have something useful. specially when searching for hardware or manuals for devices.

    it's really REALLY annoying.

    • for a while, whenever i do a search, i haven't found relevant results on the first search page, sometimes the second will have something useful. specially when searching for hardware or manuals for devices.

      My technique is to either search by manufacturer name to find the website of the manufacturer, then search on that site by product name, or to search by product identification number.
    • The linkfarms have gotten incredibly good at appearing as legitimate sites to the pagerank algorithm. You might immediatly see that they are "really crappy," but try writing a computer program that can.

      I've seen blogspam that plagerizes whole posts from other authors on other blogs with similar topics! That's pretty sophisticated, and nearly impossible to defeat.

  • What's to prevent a malicious person from generating a script to 'click through' on ads from random searches? It doesn't cost the malicious person anything, but it costs the advertisers dollars every few clicks. What would google do to separate the real users from the malicous person. Or even worse what would they do if the script became distributed?

    Someone might have already addressed this, and I'm sure Google has some plan (hopefully) but does anyone know what they might do?
    • They do have all sorts of measures in place to fight this - they watch IP addresses, access patterns etc. A friend of mine got his University department's IP range banned from Google by writing a script to click repeatedly on ad-words. It didn't take them long to spot it.

  • It all needs to go to froogle anyway! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kcornia ( 152859 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @01:18PM (#7600678) Journal
    When I do a search for something (Simcity 4 strategies this weekend for instance), I don't want the first 4 pages to be links to stores where I can buy the Prima guide. If I want that, I'll go to froogle.

    And yeah, so what if most users don't know its there. If that's the case, make the first link that's returned say something to the effect of "Were you looking for something to BUY?" If so, click here. You get the idea.

    Or add froogle as a tab on the front page, with a bubble that tells users what it is.

    Anything to make searches for information return links to just that, not 2000 mom and pop websites that link to amazon.

  • Google already refuses certain advertising (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cubes ( 152204 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @01:24PM (#7600749)
    Some time ago, we tried to sign up for AdWords and were refused because we sell supplies for making fireworks. We don't sell fireworks, explosives, or chemicals; we sell items like paper, string, paste, and equipment used by professional fireworks manufacturers as well as (serious, legal) hobbyists. We don't even sell how-to books or instructions. The reason Google rejected our advertising was not because of the items we sell, but because we market them as fireworks building materials.

  • tarnishing Google's image? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @01:27PM (#7600774)
    Way too many folk look at google thru rose colored glasses. Poor innocent google.

    Assuming google shines at all is going too far in my book.

    Disagree? Then explain why so many of the links I click on to buy things direct me to ebay, instead of the site I expect. If I cut/paste that link into a fresh window, it goes where it should. And this is just one issue...there is still the problem of sites buying a ranking from google instead of earning like they should. google is crafted, bought and falsified rankings run wild - give me an unbiased search engine/site any day.
    • Never had that experience. Can you give an example?

    • My guess is you've inadvertantly installed some malware which is hooking into Google links and sending you somewhere else.

      I've only seen this behavior on Windows, and after clearing things up with one of those programs which removes malware, the problem went away.
    • This behavior is caused by the destination webserver serving different pages depending on the referer link specified, and has nothing to do with google.

      This is easiest to demonstrate with wget. Get the same url twice, once with "--referer=http://google.com", once without and compare the results.

    • I also like how google says words like "the" are not included in it's search.

      Compare results:
      http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UT F -8&q=does+math [google.com]
      versus
      http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe =UTF-8&safe=off&q=does+the+math [google.com]

      The is a very common word, and was not included in your search, my ass. If that's true, why does a search for does math and a search for does the math (no quotation marks on either) come back with different results?

      This is j

  • great ad filter (Score:3, Interesting)

    by unk1911 ( 250141 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @01:35PM (#7600867) Homepage
    i hate spam and advertisement. even google's seemingly unabtrusive adwords are annoying when i need to do research and need pages to come up fast.

    i have found the mozilla firebird adblocking css script to be immensely useful for those who want to try it out, the instructions as well as the script itself is located at http://texturizer.net/firebird/adblock.html

    this is by far the greatest adblocker that i have come across, it blocks a vast majority of the ads and works much better than the "block images from this server" feature which was very neat as well.

    -m
    • even google's seemingly unabtrusive adwords are annoying when i need to do research and need pages to come up fast.

      What are you running? A 386? How long do you think it takes your browser to render a DIV tag anyway?
  • Are some of the 100,000 advertisers now signed up for Adwords tarnishing Google's image at a delicate time?

    No. It's Google's own fault for tarnishing its own image. They have control of how they function and others have merely taken advantage of it. Google allowed it to continue until now, when they realized problems were in the making.

    But then again, tarnishing its image towards whom? Advertisers, users of Google, the government, or everyone?
  • If people want to buy pills without a prescription, then by all means let them. What's the big deal?

    I've been lookin' at some of those sites lately because I would like some Ambien. I've had sleeping issues for years now and doctors are very reluctant to prescribe them to me because they're "too addictive", which is total BS. They might be, but I don't have addictive personality. The best sleep I've had in my life has been while on those pills. Considering it's my sleep being affected, I really don't see
    • If people want to buy pills without a prescription, then by all means let them. What's the big deal?

      The big deal is this.

      Some children don't want to go to school. They would rather drop out, etc. Why don't we just let them? Some parents would rather not send their kids to school, even if it is free. Why do we make them?

      It is because society wants to protect itself. You do not want to be paying the large medical bills of stupid people who abuse drugs, hurt themselves seriously, can't afford pr

    • Re:If people want it.. let 'em. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by lkaos ( 187507 ) <anthony AT codemonkey DOT ws> on Monday December 01, 2003 @02:57PM (#7601766) Homepage Journal
      I've been lookin' at some of those sites lately because I would like some Ambien. I've had sleeping issues for years now and doctors are very reluctant to prescribe them to me because they're "too addictive", which is total BS.

      Ok, for once a doctor is not prescribing something. He cites the main reason as it being too addictive.

      They might be, but I don't have addictive personality. The best sleep I've had in my life has been while on those pills.

      So you have "sleeping issues" and think that these pills are going to solve it. Because you had them before and now you need them to be able to live your life normally. Um, that's an addiction pal :-)

      If you're not diagnosed with a sleeping disorder (and sleep problems are just a symptom of something else), then sleeping pills are not going to help you in the long term. If it's not stress/lifestyle/health, then go see a sleep specialist. Some sleep disorders are very very serious (read: life threatening).

      This is why self-medicating is bad. If being able to buy these things online prevents you from going to see a specialist and inevitably leads to you not getting diagnosed with a serious illness then that would be a Bad Thing(TM).

      Check out SleepNet [sleepnet.com] for more info.
    • Who's Google to step in and play the police?

      The question is, who are you to step in and police Google? It's not like they owe you anything. And I'm sure you don't need Google to obtain some Ambien.

  • It's not just a good idea, it's the law. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs, which is what these adwords are, is extremely tightly regulated in the US. It was only legalized recently, under strict controls, and is still illegal in many (most?) jurisdictions. Some people think that any DTC advertising is a bad idea.

    If you publish an ad for a drug, and the FDA didn't sign off on it first, you're breaking the law. Google is almost certainly required to do this -- I'm amazed that they got away with it for so long.
  • As one of the blockees of the latest Google Dance and such, it's not hard to find conspiracies and shadows hiding around each dance. The truth is, Google is reorganizing, and that's that. We as marketers and web site designers need to ultimately get away from SEO (search engine optimization) and put more focus on [a] delivering quality content and [b] decreasing our reliance on a single source of traffic. Google is great for finding stuff, even if it isn't my stuff, and I can't fault them for doing what the
  • no less than 4 popups to read one article. I guess times must be difficult for *them*.
  • I run a VW enthusiast website that primarily consists of people discussing the modifications of their Volkswagens. However, I do have a forum which "anything goes" and it happens to have pr0n posted once in a while. I ran Google AdSense for a few weeks and then they emailed me stating I had to censor the content or remove the ads. Needless to say, I removed the ads. I respect Google's intentions - most advertisers don't want to be affiliated with "risque" content...and they are just protecting their int
  • Search for anything remotely computer related and they have an ad for it. For example:
    Vax - Cheaper Prices
    Find prices, tax, shipping, store ratings & reviews for Vax.
    www.nextag.com

  • Buy Oxycontin Ads (Score:3, Funny)

    by stand ( 126023 ) <stan,dyck&gmail,com> on Monday December 01, 2003 @02:11PM (#7601271) Homepage Journal

    A few weeks ago when Rush Limbaugh was in the news for his addiction to prescription painkillers, I remember reading a story on the Web (MSNBC maybe?) about his medication of choice, Oxycontin. It was talking about the dangers of unregulated use and so forth...pretty standard health reporting stuff.

    The funny thing is that at the bottom of the article was a couple of google search word ads (to be fair, I'm not sure it was actually Google, but same concept) offering the chance to buy the drug the article had just warned us about. Talk about your mixed messages!

  • I wouldn't mind getting some alprazolam, but I always figured it would be so easy to track, and it being a felony and all, buying pills on the net seemed to be a remarkably dumb thing to do.

    Do people actually do it and get away with it?
  • Has no place in the corporation.

    If our politicians actually had any backbone, they'd be trying to solve the problem here instead of importing a solution from a country that has already solved the problem. But that'd piss off some pretty big campaign contributors...

  • Use this Spam Report Page [google.com] to tell them what you think is spam.

    NoSuchGuy

  • Forget this.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cheesyfru ( 99893 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @03:05PM (#7601846) Homepage
    This is nothing compared to what Adwords did [joshw.org] to all of their advertisers a couple months ago. It used to be where the default type of keyword matching was to take your exact words, and match them in any order across a user's search term. They changed this so that it expands each search term to "related" words, called "broad matching". These related words are usually anything but relevant. Even words which are spelled closely to your target word are included. Worse yet, they don't give a way to opt out of it, and they don't offer a replacement for the old style of matching.

    The net result is that you have more people competing on obscure keywords (read: higher cost per click), and these new-found competitors don't even *want* to be competing with you!

    And I thought their motto was "don't be evil". Hmm.

  • Pharmacy Spam on Blogs, etc (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mesocyclone ( 80188 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @03:24PM (#7602048) Homepage Journal
    This is slightly off topic, but I noticed a number of people complaining about the same experience I had... looking for information about a medication and finding pages of online pharmacies rated higher.

    However, I also run a blog (Useful Fools http://www.tinyvital.com/blog) and thus can tell you where those high page ranks come from: link spamming.

    I started getting comments in my blog that were a bit odd (some ancient article would get a comment like "nice article" and nothing else). I would check and the associated URL was an online pharmacy. Also, I would get comments that were nothing more than a list of online-pharmacy links.

    I delete all of these. I have modified my blog code to make the automated Movable Type automated spamming more difficult, just to find that the spammers using automated means come back to the site where it fails and manually enter the spam. I also modified my blog so the email notification of a comment to me also includes a hotlink to delete the comment. I am considering sequestering hotlinks until I manually approve them, but that's a bunch more Perl hacking and I hate Perl and don't have time :-)

    This approach causes the google page rank to be artificially inflated. By spreading the spam across a lot of blogs (and I assume BBS's and usenet), the links do not appear to Google's algorithms to be link farms (i.e. they create a widely distributed link farm that is hard to detect). I wouldn't be surprised if there are comments buried away in Slashdot that also contain these links.

    One of my favorite blogs, Samizdata, uses a simple Turing test (an image with a random code in it that you have to enter) to deter automated spam. But this won't stop it all.

    I fear that google will end up derating blog links as a result, which would be a big shame (I *like* the high page rank on my blog, and get lots of interesting comments and email as a result).
  • It's not that google is facing ethichal issues fo blocking unlicensed pharmacies, but how do pharmacies who are not licensed get their drug supply from legitimate pharmaceutical companies in the first place and why is there not regulation in place to block this?

  • Over at wrestleview.com, Google's Ad bot was serving ads for cheap Soma next to an article talking about the death of a wrestler, in which Soma was partly responsible.

    I wrote an article [velutluna.org] about this, after which I filed a complaint with Google, and got a quick response [velutluna.org] from Google.

    After seeing something like that, I'd be hard pressed to fight for the rights of sleezy pill pushers to advertise freely online.

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