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Unfortunately this article uses a terrible example to "expose" Google's practices. The site http://www.sourcetool.com/ http://www.sourcetool.com/ is trash. The

Unfortunately this article uses a terrible example to "expose" Google's practices. The site http://www.sourcetool.com/ http://www.sourcetool.com/ is trash. The whole point is to force you to click through as many pages before getting a decent list of results, and of course every page has a nice block of ads. For instance, I picked a category at random. Eventually I got to a page to choose between two sub-categories. One was "Brominated retardants"...so I clicked it. The next page just had a single sub-category "brominated retardant". There are plenty of examples like that including one where clicking a sub-category just took you to the same page over and over. The whole site seems to purposefully bury information in as many pages as possible to force you to view as many ads as possible. I'm not saying that people should give Google a free pass, but honestly, I'm glad to see they are giving that site a hard time.

josefresco 18y ago
Your analysis is flawed, ST doesn't make money when you 'view' ads, but rather when you click them. The many layers of pages are probably meant to inflate the sites overall size/page count. If ST was interested in making the most money from ads they wouldn't force the user to keep clicking but would instead trick them into click ads that looked like 'categories'. I've seen much worse out there, example; business.com which is a Google partner, check out how many 'sponsored ads' appear above the 'real' results, it's waaaay worse than what ST does. But agreed, ST is not a perfect example of Google's bad behavior.
- Goronmon 18y ago
  check out how many 'sponsored ads' appear above the 'real' results, it's waaaay worse than what ST does. Actually, ST does the same thing. Once you finally click through a dozen sub-categories, there is a nice block of ad-words right above the results positioned in the same place the sub-category lists were. And I wasn't really making the argument that such a site design is effective. I was just pointing out that from the way the site is designed, it seems they are going for as many ad-views as possible by making as many redundant sub-category pages as possible.

josefresco 18y ago

Your analysis is flawed, ST doesn't make money when you 'view' ads, but rather when you click them. The many layers of pages are probably meant to inflate the sites overall size/page count. If ST was interested in making the most money from ads they wouldn't force the user to keep clicking but would instead trick them into click ads that looked like 'categories'. I've seen much worse out there, example; business.com which is a Google partner, check out how many 'sponsored ads' appear above the 'real' results, it's waaaay worse than what ST does. But agreed, ST is not a perfect example of Google's bad behavior.

Goronmon 18y ago
check out how many 'sponsored ads' appear above the 'real' results, it's waaaay worse than what ST does. Actually, ST does the same thing. Once you finally click through a dozen sub-categories, there is a nice block of ad-words right above the results positioned in the same place the sub-category lists were. And I wasn't really making the argument that such a site design is effective. I was just pointing out that from the way the site is designed, it seems they are going for as many ad-views as possible by making as many redundant sub-category pages as possible.