5 ms·

I never quite understood the appeal of giving some unknown third-party the right to put links and text and javascript onto your site. It might be labour intens

I never quite understood the appeal of giving some unknown third-party the right to put links and text and javascript onto your site. It might be labour intensive to have human eyes on every ad that is sold when you're at Google, or even Bing, scale. But it seems a little bit too hands-off, and irresponsible, to take money without vetting the input and then letting every scammer get into that very "blessed" and visible top spot of a search page. If you want something done right, do it yourself. You can't expect scammers to not to be scamming.

arminiusreturns 8y ago
I spent some time trying to understand googles ads and seo structure for a project, as a sysadmin. My conclusion was the reason greyhat and blackhat techniques werent dealt with was because they make too much money from it... I wrote a big report on it, but that was the gist. Im sure the same is true of MS et al.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  If the report is public, would you link it?
  - arminiusreturns 8y ago
    Its not, sorry, I dont even have a personal copy, but it could be worth redoing it publicly on my own.
mikeash 8y ago
A lot of tech company woes come down to an insistence on automating things that really need human attention. Your recommended children’s videos are actually disturbing parodies? Easily solved with human curation. Some Alex Jones story makes its way into your news aggregator? Having people check the story would fix this. Scammy or malware-ridden ads on your site? See above. Obviously this isn’t practical for everything, but tech companies take it way beyond what’s necessary, then act like the problems are impossible to avoid.
variable11 8y ago
TV, radio, and newspapers earn money through ad revenue and are regulated so that the ads they run are not blatant scams or criminal enterprises--the gray area of escort ads aside. Google and others makes most of its money through ad revenue, they need to be regulated like a media property.

arminiusreturns 8y ago

I spent some time trying to understand googles ads and seo structure for a project, as a sysadmin. My conclusion was the reason greyhat and blackhat techniques werent dealt with was because they make too much money from it... I wrote a big report on it, but that was the gist. Im sure the same is true of MS et al.

solarkraft 8y ago
If the report is public, would you link it?
- arminiusreturns 8y ago
  Its not, sorry, I dont even have a personal copy, but it could be worth redoing it publicly on my own.

mikeash 8y ago

A lot of tech company woes come down to an insistence on automating things that really need human attention. Your recommended children’s videos are actually disturbing parodies? Easily solved with human curation. Some Alex Jones story makes its way into your news aggregator? Having people check the story would fix this. Scammy or malware-ridden ads on your site? See above. Obviously this isn’t practical for everything, but tech companies take it way beyond what’s necessary, then act like the problems are impossible to avoid.

variable11 8y ago

TV, radio, and newspapers earn money through ad revenue and are regulated so that the ads they run are not blatant scams or criminal enterprises--the gray area of escort ads aside. Google and others makes most of its money through ad revenue, they need to be regulated like a media property.