221–230 of 236 posts
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Ironic, coming from LBJ.
Why ironic? Honest question. I do not know enough about the career of LBJ to get it. My understanding is that he was an extremely effective legislator. A bit of a bastard, but very effective.
Don't people use adblockers anymore? I swear there was a time where EVERYONE used one, what happened? And why are there now people that seem to actively avoid adblockers? This is one of the reasons why I don't want to see ANY ads. I don't care if an ad doesn't track me, I don't want to see it because it can still be harmful.
The problem is real but this guys response is a bit over the top. In one tweet [1] he claims Google should know which one is the real restaurant. Does he think there is a person at Google reviewing all search results? Does he not understand that it's possible for two restaurants to exist with the same name? Does he not get that there are billions of searches with billions of search permutations done every minute. 1 -…
I get that it's a hard problem. I don't think this is about "reviewing all search results". This is about reviewing the people who are paying you money to run ads. In this case, there were likely plenty of signals of fraud. This advertiser was advertising to multiple domains, and each domain was relatively young. Those domains would likely also have had low organic traffic. Here are some candidate solutions. I haven'…
To your suggestions... 1- who is going to phone that number? They have millions if not billions of advertisers. Also, don't they want new businesses (with likely newly registered domains) to come and start advertising and paying money?
2. see above but "who is going to review the paperwork" also, easy to create fraudulent documents
3. Most small restaurants probably spend $100 on ads, likely aren't going to advertise if they need to put down a bunch of cash.
To Google, this just looks like a restaurant coming to advertise. So what if it has the same name. Two Dominos pizzas in my town could both set up ads and they should accept them.
I totally get why this is bad, but I think it would be very difficult for Google to control in a way that the OP twitter user is suggesting. This isn't an old school ad business where you meet with clients. Google is a trillion dollar company because you can run ads in 1 minute of work.
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>Nevermind that if you are relying primarily on agents of the state to prevent fraud, your society is already fundamentally broken. Huh? Why's this? It seems like a core component of a functional state to me, and if the state is doing a decent job, why should a bunch of private parties be sticking their noses in too?
The same argument comes up in atheism-- "if you don't believe in [eternal damnation], what stops you from just killing people indiscriminately?" It reflects the sad state of the asker's moral compass. Same with Catholics and confession-- another broken system in which you are free to sin arbitrarily through confession and repentance. The point of the doctrine itself is to transcend the cycle and be better than that.…
This moral argument may be applicable to individual people, but this is yet another example that companies under the current system (and, by extension, their governing bodies) only have one goal: maximizing profits.
In the abscence of fear of punishment by a more powerful actor, if the common good gets in the way of profits, the latter will always prevail.
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Google is literally getting paid to advertise fraudulent businesses or websites and / or to deliver malware. If they can't sanitise their primary means of profit then... Nothing, because there's no regulation after how many years?
Exactly, why isn't the regulation going after those fradulent businesses? Why are actual criminals being unpunished while you wring your hands on how megacorporations aren't playing the police?
I also block ads like my life depends on it.
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I get that it's a hard problem. I don't think this is about "reviewing all search results". This is about reviewing the people who are paying you money to run ads. In this case, there were likely plenty of signals of fraud. This advertiser was advertising to multiple domains, and each domain was relatively young. Those domains would likely also have had low organic traffic. Here are some candidate solutions. I haven'…
I don't disagree that a trillion dollar company should be able to prevent this, but to be facetious, do they want to? To your suggestions... 1- who is going to phone that number? They have millions if not billions of advertisers. Also, don't they want new businesses (with likely newly registered domains) to come and start advertising and paying money? 2. see above but "who is going to review the paperwork" also, easy…
I agree they wouldn't want to voluntarily do it--but I was responding to the perceived impossibility of it.
Another option: deal with it by franchising--small potatoes customers would go through a middleman. The middleman would charge a markup, and be the one whose reputation or money was on the line, and so have incentives to prevent fraud.
Google does something similar for AdX relationships currently--big publishers can go direct, midsize publishers go through a third party middleman.
Again, I'm just spitballing ideas here. If Google wanted to be a better steward, I believe they could be. I'm not even saying they're obligated to do this, I'm just saying I believe they could try harder to vet advertisers.
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Law makers seem to universally ignore the unintended consequences of the laws they propose or endorse. I wish there were a requirement to list all the foreseeable consequences of any law that's proposed, both positive consequences and negative ones.
"all the foreseeable consequences" If this was feasible why wouldn't you do this for every decision in life.
Public policy affects millions of lives. I don't think enumerating 1st order or 2nd order effects is too onerous. And if it is, that's why government officials have assistants and interns.
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I'd agree on this. For a while I'd bid on the names of competitors (Not being scammy - just trying to win the #1 result placement); however, I found I was spending a bunch with basically zero conversions because - I assume, if someone is searching for something, they're expecting that something, so when they click it and realize it's not - they just exit. On the other hand, bidding my own name: pennies.
> Not being scammy - just trying to win the #1 result placement From the end user's point of view, how is "win the #1 result placement" for a competitor's name not a blatant scam?
It's the difference between bidding on the keyword BrandX when my company is ABCBrand with an ad that says:
"Come shop at BrandX" .. when it's going to my ABCBrand, and possibly even having a landing page pretending to be BrandX
vs.
"Come shop at ABCBrand" ... and going to my ABCBrand, as it should.
In India, Google search for a pretty specific string, " ambulance phone number," showed up a bunch of scammy ads. In our distraught state (an elderly relative had just had a fall), we accidentally called the top ad which turned out to be a scam ambulance service. A beat up van showed up, without any EMT, a sketchy stretcher without straps, and no tracks or fasteners to hold it down inside the van. We were outraged an…