Ad Planner: Bait and Switch

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I almost used Ad Planner. I signed up, because a free ad management service was irresistible. But my current systems were sufficient for my low levels of income, and I didn’t proceed. Millions, however, would now be using and relying on Ad Planner.

Now it will fail to work unless it is only used to run Adsense ads:

Starting September 5th, 2012, the new version of Ad Planner will be dedicated to supporting research on placements on the Google Display Network, which comprises more than 2 million sites from across the web.

What does this change mean for you?

  • You can no longer research domains or ad placements that are not part of the Google Display Network
  • Publisher Center, the feature that allows publishers to claim their own sites, list relevant ad placement availability & pricing, will be deprecated

This is a classic bait and switch, and perhaps borders on illegal, given their monopoly status. Google can no longer be trusted. And this isn’t the first time – last year many sites had to start paying to use Google Maps on their site. What’s next?:

  • Only use Google Search if you are a registered Google user?
  • Google Analytics only available to Adsense publishers?
  • Embedded YouTube videos cost 10 cents each to display?

Imagine if Microsoft told customers that you need to pay $5 to receive future security updates?

Imagine if Toyota stopped making cars and doubled the price of spare parts?

 

More Google Services Get The Axe

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Google Video no longer accepts uploads, and will soon disappear into YouTube. Makes sense, should’ve happened years ago.

iGoogle will be shut down in 2013. Makes less sense. Just because a product is making billions of dollars, doesn’t mean you should shut it down. Millions of daily users will change their start page.

The others to go are:

  • Google Mini (enterprise search app)
  • Google Talk Chatback (replaced by Meebo)
  • Symbian Search App

Adwords Bans 800,000 Accounts in 2011

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It’s an extraordinary number of accounts to ban, so either every second marketer on the planet is trying to promote something fraudulent, or bad sorts have been automating the creation of new accounts. According to Google, it is the latter: there are relatively few malicious players.

To ban 800,000 accounts, Google obviously needs automated systems:

One method we use to test the success of our efforts is to ask human raters to tell us how we’re doing. These human raters review a set of sites that are advertised on Google. We use a large set of sites in order to get an accurate statistical reading of our efforts. We also weight the sites in our statistical sample based on the number of times a particular site was displayed so that if a particular site is shown more often, it’s more likely to be in our sample set. By using human raters, we can calibrate our automated systems and ensure that we’re improving our efforts over time.

I wonder if Google has estimates on how many automated bans were made in error? Their previous post also goes into great detail at how they find the bad guys, but so far there is no mention of how they fix their mistakes. Wrongfully banned Adwords users will point out the speaking to a real person to get the suspension reviewed can be very difficult.

It has been suggested that the mistakes are simply collateral damage and bad luck to those who lose their accounts. Unfortunately those most likely to be affected are those who rely on Adwords for their business. And Google has a monopoly in many countries.

Google Drive Officially Launched – Cheap Too!

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Google Drive is now official and real, see the press release.

Surprisingly good is the low upgrade prices for those who want to use more than the free 5GB:

  • 25GB for $2.49/month
  • 100GB for $4.99/month
  • 1TB for $49.99/month

Google Drive is therefore cheaper than Amazon S3 (prices here), although Amazon is targeted at enterprise customers, who are much more likely to use up their full allowance.

And substantially cheaper than DropBox.

Google Drive vs DropBox

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Leaked a week before it is officially released are leaked details of Google’s storage service named Google Drive.

Here’s how it compares with Dropbox:

Google: 5GB free
DropBox: 2GB free

Google: Very best & fast servers
DropBox: Probably not nearly as good

Google: Reliable
DropBox: Reliable

Google: Trustworthy?
DropBox: Trustworthy?

Google: Loathed as a company
DropBox: Loved

DropBox has first mover advantage. Most likely DropBox will keep their existing customers, because people are loathe to mess with switching providers, no matter how easy it will be. But Google will certainly snare customers from their other products who are considering such a service. With time most internet users will have a need for cloud space, and Google is certainly capable of being the biggest provider.

Google Enlightens on Spam Decisions

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Ever wondered why spam ends up in your spam folder? I’ve always been curious, and because I have a (very minor) hacker bent, I’ve been keen on having more control over it – for example I’d like to spam anything that is not written in English (because clearly they don’t know me…).

Google isn’t providing control, but they are now divulging reasons for why an email gets pigeon-holed as spam.

The five key categories are:

  • Phishing scams
  • Messages from an unconfirmed sender
  • Messages you sent to Spam
  • Similarity to suspicious messages
  • Administrator-set policies

Look at any particular email in your spam folder and you’ll now see a message like this:

Why is this message in Spam? It’s similar to messages that were detected by our spam filters.

Visit Google Support for deeper details.

Stealth – New Google Competitor

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As search engines increasingly gather and store data about their users, there is an opportunity for a new search engine that just provides good results, and nothing else. Which is easy to achieve when you are starting out – but if such a search engine ever does well, there will be pressure to start doing the very things they were against, for the $$$. Of course Wikipedia have stuck to their no-ad promise, so it’s possible for a search engine as well.

Stealth doesn’t record any info, and routes your search query through other servers so that the link you click on doesn’t pass on referrer data (browser, IP, search query, cookies etc).

In their F.A.Q there’s this:

Where does Stealth get its search results from?

We do a good bit of our own crawling and also utilize many different API’s (Google’s Ajax API, Bing’s search API, etc) as well.

From looking at their search results, I think it is fair to say the results are 100% lifted from Google. So for now, if you like Google results (just web, not universal) and care about privacy, use UseStealth.com

Maybe ranking services could use it, and maybe it could become the de facto standard for determining a site’s ranking in Google.

New: Symptom Search

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One day we will be able to self-diagnose. The next step towards that goal has been provided by Google. Now, if you search for a symptom or multiple symptoms, Google might return “related searches”. That’s all Google will dare call them, because it is just the algorithm making the connection, not a person and certainly not a doctor.

While this start is exciting, I hope people don’t mistake the first 5 results for being the only possible illnesses related to the symptoms…

Google Now Indexing Symbols… Like +

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I was wondering if and when it would happen. Google have a product called Google+, which they have high hopes for. Yet they chose a brand name that could not be searched for in Google!

Google can’t show themselves favoritism, so they now index a wide array of symbols:

I’ve recently noticed that Google started to show results for queries like [.], [,], [:], [;], [#], [%], [@], [^], [)], [~], [|], [“], [<], [$]. When you search for [%], Google shows the results for [percent sign] and that happens irrespective of the interface language, so it’s not a synonym generated by Google’s algorithms. [source]

It’s not perfect, because obviously some are used for advanced search features within Google – so a search for a phrase within quotes won’t only bring up pages where it appears in quotes…

And if you search for : you get anatomical results because it is searching for the name of the colon symbol rather than the symbol itself