Google admits profiting from illegal Olympic ticket ads

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16468846

 

Oh dear ... another Google Gaff!

 

And somehow people will blame Google for it.

 

I already forgive Google. I forgive Google anything.

 

Are you the owner of this?

And those who blame Google are, at least in part, right.

 

Lol, now why wouldn't they take some blame? It's their system, and an easily gamed one. Can they expect and plan for every single thing? Of course not. But this is nowhere near the first time "sponsored links" have caused a problem, and they need to put more effort into keeping issues like this at bay, rather than sitting back and collecting the cash.

On the flip side of that, it was stupid for the user to just search for such a generic term and then click the first they they saw..but then we're getting back into average user idiocy again.

 

Partly to blame, sure. But they took it down when noticed and I don't see how you can blame them for someone else abusing their system. If I start posting illegal content on Wilders are you going to blame the admins because this forum is too accessible to bad people like me?

If it were a common occurrence you might say "Hey add a better captcha" but what can you really expect them to do beyond further (costly) validation?

 

They can check millions of links for their search engines but can't follow the links the advertizers put on it? That's nonsense.

 

Oh? When did they start checking each one?

I was under the impression that they had bots handling this with algorithms to decide placement.

It would certainly be quite a feat if they managed to check every single link and every single advertizer lol

 

Their bots found those links in the first place. Apps that check links have been around for a while. It would be no big deal for them to build a bot to run the ad links and check them for malicious or undesirable content. This is nothing more than an example of using minimum compliance to maximize profits. They could easily do better but don't want to as it would hurt their bottom line.

 

Really? They would somehow detect that the ad wasn't just a regular ad but in fact a fake ad? That's some hell of a heuristics engine.

If it's easy explain to me how you would create the engine. No need for fancy code, you can use plainword pseudocode. How do you differentiate fake ads from real ones?

 

How about the same methods they use on normal search links or to sort for relevance? They crawl them.

 

What your asking for really isn't realistic (and probably not possible with current technology.) "They crawl them" doesn't mean anything. They rank sites based on some criteria. You can not just say "oh well make one of the criteria be if they're a scam!" that's not really how it works. The best you can do is blacklist the ones that you find and move on.

 

When their search engines can link to content that isn't expressed in the page title, it's clear that they have the ability to examine pages for content and are using it. That same ability can check the ads, by keyword, by domain, by blacklists, etc. They don't want to.

 

If you say so.