Comments on: Is Google Progressive or Reactionary?

By: CodeMonkeyMike

CodeMonkeyMike — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 13:41:14 +0000

They consider Landover Baptist to be news.. Personally, I think that takes the cake any day over what y'all are objecting to.

By: saurab

saurab — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 15:00:07 +0000

hey you were talking about removing google ads from your weblog … I still see them …. hmmm makes me think !

By: Ray

Ray — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 18:36:16 +0000

I really liked Google News in the first few days it was available. The search engine automatically picked everything, including what was “news”. Guess what happened? Most of the interesting stuff came from non-mainstream sites. I imagine a lot of people complained that that wasn’t what they expected, and slowly it morphed into an aggregator for “official” news sites.

What a shame. It was much better when the sites were just picked for content by an automatic algorithm.

By: Lonewacko

Lonewacko — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 18:32:55 +0000

I'm with robertsq 99%. Here's more about what google is faced with. See, for instance, the bit about the a$bestos blog. Or, see this: He's basically making money off increasing the useless noise on the Internet.

By: Paul in NJ

Paul in NJ — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 14:58:00 +0000

Google is sleazy in its advertising practices.

Here’s something else that’s sleazy: Google’s AdSense lets advertisers buy keywords that call up the ads when you type in certain search terms. Those keywords include registered trademarks.

Enter any brand name product you can think of, and ads pop up to cash in on it.

This practice isn’t kosher in the real world. On the web it’s currently a gray area in the law, but ultimately I think Google (and other search engines which do the same thing) will lose.

By: robertsq

robertsq — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 14:28:08 +0000

Roger,

If you’re quitting AdSense as a protest for Google News, that’s one thing.

I was responding simply on the basis of your point about the lack of transparency. You make an analogy between Google AdSense and your book agent’s contract. There are many areas of business where such disclosure does not exist. Does your accountant disclose his overhead to you? Does Wal-Mart tell you their cost of goods sold? Google considers its take to be confidential and there’s nothing particularly unbusinesslike about that. (You could visit the SEC Edgar site and try to reverse engineer their 10-Q if you’re really interested in what they make from AdSense.)

As for the lottery aspect, it’s a given for auction-style pricing, and it would be no less of a lottery if you knew Google’s percentage, since the thing that Google (and you) take a percentage of fluctuates based on moment-to-moment market demand. The reporting interface for AdSense lets you track this on a pretty close to real-time basis if you wish. Most people just follow their monthly average payment per click, and if it shows a downward trend versus some other advertiser, they change advertisers.

By: richard mcenroe

richard mcenroe — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 14:22:56 +0000

Ed… bit of a writer’s in-joke there. Gotta remember to post my irony tags…

By: triticale

triticale — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 13:23:45 +0000

I feel left out. I don’t have the traffic to have ever bothered with ads, and the search function is a cgi script on the mu.nu server. Oh well, I’m with you in spirit.

By: Hoodlumman

Hoodlumman — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 13:16:46 +0000

Manual Trackback In a move of solidarity with Roger L. Simon, Google Ads have been removed* from this site. I agree whole-heartedly with him and LGF's complaints. FIU patrons can do without, for the meantime. File it under

By: paleocon

paleocon — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 12:21:10 +0000

Forgot to mention, it will ask you to register using your Amazon data, but said registration is not required. There will be about three functions you can’t use if you don’t, but they seem to be functions I don’t need.