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Google to deliver wrong search results to would-be jihadis

5 points by eplanit 11y ago

justncase80 11y ago
The George Orwell in me hates this... a lot. Today it's jihadis tomorrow its labor organizers.
dragonwriter 11y ago
The last two paragraphs explicitly indicates that the headline (and much of the earlier part of the article) is misleading in its references to "wrong" or "opposite" search results: A Google spokeswoman said the pilot project referred to by Dr House would bring up counter-narrative messages in "AdWords" - the sponsored links which are returned at the top of a Google search - and not the search results themselves. Dr House said later: "We offer Google AdWords Grants to NGOs so that meaningful counter-speech ads can be surfaced in response to search queries like 'join Isis'."
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  And in some ways that is sort of worse. Does that mean that Jihadists are buying AdWords? Is Google trying to set an auction floor on the price of those keywords by offering grants which, they watch to see how high they can push up the ISIS bid price? How is this not like letting a shill at an auction bid up the price with the company's money? So the NGO wins? Fine they feel good about putting an opposing message in the ad slots, the Jihadists win the bid? Hey double win for Google, they get more Ad money and they didn't have to give any to the NGO to buy that Ad. What's next, giving Grants to people who want to buy Anti-vaccine creatives next to searches of "measles" or "rubella" or "polio" ?
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Does that mean that Jihadists are buying AdWords? No, it doesn't mean that. And if Google knew they were and were accepting money from them for that purpose of buying AdWords for recruitment, there'd be all kinds of legal liability.
    - ChuckMcM 11y ago
      There are two ways they could implement this, and one would be to whitelist[0] who could buy Ads on those keywords. The other is they could make them ineligible for AdWord buys and supply their own selected ads when the words were used. But that would mean they wouldn't need to give out grants since those Ads would be "free" to the NGOs. They (Google) haven't historically been good at keeping bad actors out of AdWords (see the FTC penalty for showing Canadian Pharmacy ads[1]) but I could believe that things have improved since then. The challenge is how it was phrased, "Grants to buy AdWords" which implies that the AdWords are already buyable, (which could be pretty easily tested with an AdWords account), and the difficulty the Ads crawler has with discovering pernicious redirects, how could Google even know that they were selling an AdWord buy to a Jihadist? But if it is possible, one has to assume that it happens right? These folks are pretty savvy with the Internet. And if it happens, we all know Google's Ad system is a bidding system right? So everyone bids, highest bidder gets the Ad at the next lowest Bid rate [2]. So funding a competitor to bid on these Ads will, by definition, force up the price paid for the Ads. Which effectively translates to Google improving its advertising revenue by funding an alternate bidder. [0] which only works if you are able to keep the bad actors off the list. [1] http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-million-generated-online-ads-prescription-drug-sales-canadian-online http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-million-ge... [2] http://www.wordstream.com/articles/what-is-google-adwords http://www.wordstream.com/articles/what-is-google-adwords

5 points by eplanit 11y ago

The George Orwell in me hates this... a lot. Today it's jihadis tomorrow its labor organizers.

The last two paragraphs explicitly indicates that the headline (and much of the earlier part of the article) is misleading in its references to "wrong" or "opposite" search results: A Google spokeswoman said the pilot project referred to by Dr House would bring up counter-narrative messages in "AdWords" - the sponsored links which are returned at the top of a Google search - and not the search results themselves. Dr House said later: "We offer Google AdWords Grants to NGOs so that meaningful counter-speech ads can be surfaced in response to search queries like 'join Isis'."

ChuckMcM 11y ago
And in some ways that is sort of worse. Does that mean that Jihadists are buying AdWords? Is Google trying to set an auction floor on the price of those keywords by offering grants which, they watch to see how high they can push up the ISIS bid price? How is this not like letting a shill at an auction bid up the price with the company's money? So the NGO wins? Fine they feel good about putting an opposing message in the ad slots, the Jihadists win the bid? Hey double win for Google, they get more Ad money and they didn't have to give any to the NGO to buy that Ad. What's next, giving Grants to people who want to buy Anti-vaccine creatives next to searches of "measles" or "rubella" or "polio" ?
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Does that mean that Jihadists are buying AdWords? No, it doesn't mean that. And if Google knew they were and were accepting money from them for that purpose of buying AdWords for recruitment, there'd be all kinds of legal liability.
  - ChuckMcM 11y ago
    There are two ways they could implement this, and one would be to whitelist[0] who could buy Ads on those keywords. The other is they could make them ineligible for AdWord buys and supply their own selected ads when the words were used. But that would mean they wouldn't need to give out grants since those Ads would be "free" to the NGOs. They (Google) haven't historically been good at keeping bad actors out of AdWords (see the FTC penalty for showing Canadian Pharmacy ads[1]) but I could believe that things have improved since then. The challenge is how it was phrased, "Grants to buy AdWords" which implies that the AdWords are already buyable, (which could be pretty easily tested with an AdWords account), and the difficulty the Ads crawler has with discovering pernicious redirects, how could Google even know that they were selling an AdWord buy to a Jihadist? But if it is possible, one has to assume that it happens right? These folks are pretty savvy with the Internet. And if it happens, we all know Google's Ad system is a bidding system right? So everyone bids, highest bidder gets the Ad at the next lowest Bid rate [2]. So funding a competitor to bid on these Ads will, by definition, force up the price paid for the Ads. Which effectively translates to Google improving its advertising revenue by funding an alternate bidder. [0] which only works if you are able to keep the bad actors off the list. [1] http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-million-generated-online-ads-prescription-drug-sales-canadian-online http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-million-ge... [2] http://www.wordstream.com/articles/what-is-google-adwords http://www.wordstream.com/articles/what-is-google-adwords