Ad non Sense. Net

The ongoing practice of phishing for personal information, especially financial details like credit card numbers, makes it a low risk/high reward endeavor for criminals. They pump out thousands or millions of emails, hope a few suckers pass along what they want, and use or sell the data.
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Later this month, Google plans to begin weighing Web page load time as a factor in assigning search keyword Quality Scores, which influence ad placement on Google and Google Network pages and search keyword bid prices. This means that ads leading to landing pages that take a long time to load will perform worse than ads linked to svelte pages.
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Over the years Google’s content network has built up a bad rap in some circles. Advertisers were concerned about the proliferation of made-for-AdSense sites, a rise in click fraud, and a lack of detailed reporting options. In 2007 Google responded, introducing a series of enhancements designed to benefit the advertiser, consumer and publisher experiences.
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So you’ve probably already read about the comScore data published yesterday suggesting Google’s paid clicks are no longer growing as fast as they once were. The measurement firm believes paid clicks in October were up 37 percent over the year ago period, a distinguished growth rate, but that they fell precipitously from there.
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Speculation as to why Google’s paid clicks have flattened in January has led to further speculation that a recession has caused consumers to do less search-initiated shopping. Hitwise’s Bill Tancer has information that suggests otherwise.
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After nearly a year in closed beta, Google is expected to announce tonight that its AdSense for Video program is now open to publishers. When the program’s pilot was announced last May, AdSense for Video was intended to serve up video-in-video ads. Today the video part is gone, replaced by CPM banners and CPC text overlays.
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With Blogspot’s fancy pagerank and with Google’s recent introduction of real-time content indexing of blogs using the service, the interest of blackhat SEO-ers into the efficient registration and posting of junk content with the idea to monetize the traffic that will come from the process, seems to continue evolving as a process.
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Google and Microsoft face yet another patent lawsuit in the reputedly plaintiff-friendly Eastern District of Texas. On Tuesday, Paid Search Engine Tools LLC, a corporation based in Liberty Township, Ohio, filed a patent-infringement claim against Google and Microsoft in the Eastern District of Texas.
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Internet metrics company Hitwise on Wednesday published a cautionary tale about the dangers of excessive search engine optimization. Search engine optimization (SEO) aims to make a Web site appear higher up on search results pages for keywords related to the Web site’s business.
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With all the speculation about how much Yahoo is worth to Microsoft, or how much Yahoo would be worth if it outsourced its search-advertising platform to Google, it seems like a good opportunity to clarify how Google’s system works.
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Web Browsing, Search, And Online Ads Grow More Risky, Google Says from InformationWeek reports on a recent Google Study named All Your iFRAMEs Point to Us that shows 1.3% of Google searches returned at least one malicious result.
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Peter Scharr, the head of an EU group preparing a report on Internet companies’ privacy practices, told the hearing that IP addresses should be regarded as personal data. Google collects IP addresses, it says, to improve search results and to show Internet advertisers that they’re paying for legitimate click-throughs.
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For a while now webmasters have fretted over why all of the pages of their website are not indexed. As usual there doesn’t seem to be any definite answer. But some things are definite, if not automatic, and some things seem like pretty darn good guesses.
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Proximic says it can not only handle more ads but also do a better job than Google at matching buyers and sellers. That’s a big claim for a company with just 14 employees. After all, in the first three quarters of 2007, Adsense generated around $3.5 billion for its partners and has built up relationships with hundreds of thousands of publishers.
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One reason historians study the past: Events are cyclical. What happened before happens again. The Federal Trade Commission should have more closely studied past mistakes before approving Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick. Google is becoming the new Microsoft, only much worse.
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