June 2nd, 2008
by
Brett Bumeter
Microsoft this week unveiled an agreement with Hewlett Packard to have Microsoft’s Live Search Engine set as the default search engine on new HP machines.
Under the agreement, Microsoft’s search engine will also be the default on Internet Explorer, which is preloaded with HP machines.
Microsoft did not disclose the terms of the agreement, which will begin in January in the US and Canada.
PC Pro: News: Live Search to be preinstalled on all HP PCs
Google has a little over a year and a half left on its own deal with number two computer manufacturer Dell, who is keeping their options open after 2009.
Whether or not this new deal will work for consumers will likely depend on the results. If a person searches for President Bush’s Watch and comes up with results for Rolex President, consumers may not be terribly pleased. However, as Google’s search results have been on the decline over the last couple years, this might be an opportunity for Microsoft to eek out an extra couple percent of market share and possibly break past the 10% range.
February 5th, 2008
by
Brett Bumeter
Today, I noticed a large rise in traffic on many of my sites. As I have many political sites it was not surprising as today is Super Tuesday and people are looking for information and sharing information like crazy.
However, my adsense earnings for the day were off, by like 98%!
I was trying to figure out what was going on as I had not changed anything. Then I noticed on one of my political sites an Ebay ad placement go through after I published an update about the election results.
Now these ads are not just an image, where if you click on it your readers goes to a single ebay auction or even some other site. Each of those links by the prices are clickable, just as they look to be clickable.
Plus, you will also notice that these ads are SPAM. The were posted in the Elections category, even those the things that are for sale are things like pendants and lapel pins and Hurricane Katrina garbage. These things have nothing to do with John McCain or recent updates with Hillary Clinton in New York any more than chrome accessories have anything to do with Brittany Spears psychological condition. Someone is obviously abusing Adwords and by extension harming my sites.
The url behind these ads was rover.ebay.com and that was along with ebay.com were the two urls that were added to my URL ban list in my Adsense setup.
December 26th, 2007
by
Brett Bumeter
It is ironic that Google one of the largest providers of blogging software is unfriendly to bloggers. Google suffers the common bloggers of the world as a means to an end for serving up more Google Adword/Adsense ads across the internet. They privately also use the writing of bloggers to help index the internet for their search engine.
However, Google looks at bloggers like a cruel child looks at an ant farm. Casually observing the coming and going of the ants, and every now and then toying with the ants by channeling some heat from the sun through a lens, just to watch the blogger ants squirm.
It demonstrates a serious lost opportunity for Google. Google prides itself on its intelligence. That pride might be one aspect of their undoing and continued attacks on Google’s Adwords advertising platform offers up a glimpse of an example.
There is a virus spreading throughout computers. The virus is a trojan and infects computers such that when the computer surfs the internet, the computer user thinks they are seeing Google Adsense ads paid for by Google Adwords advertising customers that link out to Google approved websites. In reality the ads are delivered up by the perpetrators of the trojan virus.
They send people to unintended websites and may install even more malicious code or strip private information from those users. So you may see an advertisement for furniture stores, click on it and end up going to a site that serves up an automatic virus to your computer.
The trojan redirects queries meant to be sent to Google servers to a rogue server, which displays ads from a third party instead of ads from Google, BitDefender said in a statement.
ITPro: News: Google ads attacked by Trojan
Now if Google were to look at bloggers as an opportunity for public relations as opposed to annoying ants, they could have benefited from the power of millions of bloggers to help spread the word about this trojan that is attacking Google’s primary source of revenue.
In the past, Google suffered from an integrity attack from click fraud, where a limited number of people worked to directly and fraudulently attack the Adword advertising system. A person committing click fraud had to knowingly act to perpetrate click fraud.
However, this trojan virus has the means of potentially turning and unknowing casual internet browser into the source for click fraud. This particular attack does not yet appear to be mature enough to cause Google serious harm (more than a billion dollars lets say). However, it can and will cause harm.
The question becomes what will Google do to prepare for future iterations that will probably be even more dangerous. It would surely help if Google had the ability to get the word out and fend off these attacks. Unfortunately, Google has grown into a very large and very bureaucratic company with one silo operating independently of another and this level of coordination may be forever out of their reach.
