Adwords was one of those great ideas that evolved into a monster.

I don't think Google ever foresaw the proliferation of things like MFA sites, though it seems a bit obvious to many of us.

[edited by: Wlauzon at 4:39 pm (utc) on Aug. 12, 2007]

It's advertising - of course it's evil :)

But no more so than any other advertising.

But if you feel it's evil, here's my tip: Don't use Adwords

nuff sed.

personally the inactive stuff and the new pricing now is very greedy....

They are very evil and I hope that their market share falls in the near future.

I have trouble rooting for Microsoft however.

I don't think Google is any more or less evil than anyone on this forum. You can take that for whatever it's worth.

There have been times when I didn't agree with Google at all but at the end of the day I truly believe that virtually all of Google's actions are a direct result of their desire to keep the end-user happy. After all even though we advertisers pay the bills Google's loyalties must remain with the searcher and not the advertisers.

As an advertiser I think google/adwords is pure evil.

Let's see:

1) Google AdWords is evil.

2) You pay money to support evil.

Doesn't that make you evil? Why not keep your self-respect and discourage Google's acts of evil by withdrawing your financial support?

[edited by: europeforvisitors at 12:44 am (utc) on Aug. 13, 2007]

As corporations go, I consider Google's evilness (evility?) to be "below the fold".

The real personification of all that is corporate evil, in my eyes, is a certain cable company who shall remain nameless but whose name has seven letters and starts with a C

Doesn't that make you evil? Why not keep your self-respect and discourage Google's acts of evil by withdrawing your financial support?

What? and go get a real job? You must be crazy..

"Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of man,...the Shadow knows!"...KF

[edited by: King_Fisher at 1:38 am (utc) on Aug. 13, 2007]

Be or don't be evil is google fluff.

You can do or don't do well with adsense without being part of the evil puff.

The perceived evil or lack of evil that resides in Google, abides in us all. Theirs are magnified a million times and ours not at all!...KF

[edited by: King_Fisher at 4:24 am (utc) on Aug. 13, 2007]

"Don't worry about the apple just eat it."

To coin a similar phrase.

I certainly don't think AdWords is EVIL.

It supports my small business for which I pay them a monthly fee. I never have to worry about being on the first page of the serps - I buy my way there.

If you want to talk evil then start with Yahoo - not Google.

AdWords does not adhere to Google's own published principles.

#1. "Advertising on the site must offer relevant content".

I've collected and forwarded to AdWords dozens of examples of this failure. Since they released the Search Query report, I've simply given up. The volume of irrelevant keyword targeting in some cases is mind boggling.

"While many companies claim to put their customers first, few are able to resist the temptation to make small sacrifices to increase shareholder value. Google has steadfastly refused to make any change that does not offer a benefit to the users who come to the site".

Expanded broadmatch is pure temptation to make a sacrifice in user experience and advertiser trust in order to increase short-term shareholder value.

3. "Fast is better than slow."

So they replace the fast cross-campaign tools provided to their advertisers with the slug-slow Adwords Editor. Why? See #1: a small sacrifice to increase shareholder value. It reduces the load on their servers.

6. "You can make money without doing evil."

Expanded broadmatch is theft. It runs ads on keywords the advertiser did not target, producing clicks and click charges the advertiser does not want and does not benefit from. The perpetrator of expanded broadmatch is Google, and Google benefits financially from increased clickthrough on high-bid ads regardless of whether the ad is relevant to the user or the user relevant to the advertiser.

Similar actions in any other medium would get Google sued. Suppose you bought one of those multi-million-dollar spots on the Super Bowl, but the TV network instead ran your ad on reruns of the Brady Bunch. Suppose they were a magazine publisher and you placed an ad in an expensive publication targeted to venture capitalist and private equity firms, but the publisher decided to run your ad instead in a magazine for get-rich-quick schemes. This is what Google is doing with keywords on expanded broadmatch.

"Don't worry about the apple just eat it."

To coin a similar phrase.

Rephrased:
Don't worry about the color of the label on the apple. Just eat it.

I don't think Google is any more or less evil than anyone on this forum. You can take that for whatever it's worth.

Agree. But you don't find most of us parading some corporate slogan about doing no evil. Nor do you find legions of suckers towing our party line, like those who defend G despite the evidence, like they're living some 2001 Google geek revolution flashback.

Wall Street owns Google. Google is every bit as "evil" as Wall Street requires.

Nor do you find legions of suckers towing our party line, like those who defend G despite the evidence, like they're living some 2001 Google geek revolution flashback.

Very well said my brother.. The sycophants come out in force on this board when they think Google is listening. They seem to believe that the success they are enjoying now as a small-time webmaster will continue into perpetuity.

All I can say to them is, "Hey dummy, you're next!"

There's no doubt that the Google top engineers and programmers are some of the best in the world, but they've been taken over by the needs of their shareholders to produce profits. They will do evil when their shareholders tell them to do evil.. It doesn't matter in the slightest bit what the original geniuses who started Google want their company to be like.. It now belongs to people who have invested their money and they couldn't care less if the corporation engages in activities that webmasters find frustrating.

They used us to build themselves up and now they think it is ok for us to waste inordinate amounts of time building our businesses around them (we have to as they are a near monopoly) and then arbitrarily making months/years of work useless by constantly changing their policies and keeping us mostly in the dark about these random "improvements".

Of course Google (and especially their Adwords unit) is pure evil. They do not adhere to their own standards by allowing all those cr*p advertisers into the program. They allow MFAs, parked sites, thin-content sites, email harvesters, scams and other folks to abuse the Adwords system.

This situation will not improve any time soon, because Google needs these "advertisers" to keep the air in their advertising bubble. If they would remove these "advertisers" from the system, Adwords would collaps (by showing that there are only very few genuine advertisers) and the bubble would burst. (This time will come inevitably, but they try to delay it. They want to cash out as much as possible.)

Google doesn't just "allow" MFA pages, parked domains, etc. they PROMOTE them. They have special programs to increase their use. And they perpetuate that traffic by making it difficult to weed out of an account.

The recent change benefits those with the deepest pockets, so they are operating the way most Corporations do: maximum short term revenue (for them) regardless of long term consequences or how their policies affect others. This doesn't actually make sense in the long run for anyone including Google.

Some of what we're seeing is not intentional evil: it is the evolution of their reliance on programs known as neural nets. Any program that has flaws in logic will produce flawed results: "garbage-in, garbage-out". Many of their basic assumptions are flawed; therefore, their systems must and will generate invalid results.

I don't believe this was intentional; however, it isn't simple to fix. Even if you now correct the faulty logic, when your system relies on historical data - and that data is full of flaws - how do you root out all the invalid data? That is possibly not practical - maybe not even possible.

One other point though. I am fortunate to have a good number of Mennonite friends who are more honest than the norm in modern day Society. I attribute that to their being raised in a separate and different environment. There are no negative declarations in their speech. It would never occur to them to "not be evil" as evil is not in their thoughts.

If you've ever known a pathological liar or con artist you may recall that they use phrases like "you can trust me" or "I would NEVER lie to you". The guilty often implicate themselves by constantly protesting their innocence. As Shakespeare wrote, "methinks thou protest too much" may apply.

Or as the old country saying goes " the hit dog barks "...KF

Of course Google (and especially their Adwords unit) is pure evil.

Just out of curiosity, don't you feel even the slightest bit guilty or embarrassed about working with a firm that you characterize as "pure evil"? (There's something odd about rants about evil from people who are enabling it.)