| To: greenspirit who wrote (6693) | 1/28/2006 5:01:59 PM | | From: Thomas A Watson | | | | I really don't see that as amazing technology. It's s rather mundain application. On the other hand I find it amazing the fools in China think that such use of tech will make them look extremely foolish.
As the example you show really shows how dishonest China really is to the rest of the world. And it's quite easy to set up a proxi that obscures the source of an internet request and thus it is easy to defeat such applications. |
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| From: KeepItSimple | 1/28/2006 6:13:23 PM | | | | | | Apparently GOOG got slammed by Barron's this weekend.
Anyone got a copy of the text?
Said clickfraud is getting out of control and GOOG has no choice except to lie about it until the wheels come off the wagon. |
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| To: KeepItSimple who wrote (6757) | 1/28/2006 8:00:56 PM | | From: Gabriel008 | | | | Google was mentioned in an Editorial Commentary only. Although somewhat negative it was obviously biased Google -- selling for multiples of future earnings and cash flow that imply impossible growth -- is already a disaster waiting to happen.
I only hope that GOOG opens down on Monday, because of this article, it will give my investment fund the opportunity to buy more. |
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| To: MGV who wrote (6705) | 1/28/2006 8:20:33 PM | | From: EnricoPalazzo | | | | >It would be an impossible culture clash.
Google is more like MSFT than any other company I know of... and Google has a lot of former MSFT employees. |
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| To: Trader J who wrote (6751) | 1/28/2006 9:41:46 PM | | From: Bob Frasca | | | | Hi,
I'm new to the board and I don't frequent SI much anymore but I was curious about the GOOG board so I decided to see what was going on.
I agree with most of your remarks regarding the "real" power of GOOG except in one area. I don't think it's their brand leverage into vertical markets that's particularly significant. Rather, it's all about those new paradigms you mentioned. In fact, Google is completely horizontal and is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Google Talk, Google Base, Google Mail, Google Tunes, Google Books, Google Video, Google Earth, Google Maps etc. How many of the so called "vertical" markets are touched by these as well as their other "products" (and I use the term loosely)? Can you think of a market that couldn't leverage Google in some fashion? Google is always where the people are without having to engage in the "content" battles. They don't need to, they are a worldwide portal that puts Yahoo and AOL to shame and they don't have to build and support some monolithic portal infrastructure. They are not an abstraction. It's Thomas Friedman's flattening world at work. I have to laugh when people say, disparagingly, that Google is "just" a search engine. By and large, most people just don't get it. Then again, no one foresaw the Microsoft juggernaut either.
I am an Information Architect by trade and I am frequently searching for information about Microsoft's various products. Isn't it interesting (and amusing) that there is a Google search site just for Microsoft related literature?
google.com
Am I worried about Microsoft as a competitor...LOL...hardly. They are already what Microsoft wishes they could be and they're a lot nicer. The really funny part is that it's passive. Google doesn't even advertise to the best of my knowledge, or at least, not like Yahoo and Microsoft do. You can use their service, or not. If you do, they'll try and return stuff that's meaningful to you and, in order to keep the doors open, they'll show you a little advertising as well in case you want to take advantage of one of their customer's products or services. Quiet, dignified, low key and devastatingly effective. |
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| To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (6745) | 1/29/2006 12:46:23 AM | | From: Lizzie Tudor | | | | From John Battelle blog and other... more on the automakers buying ads
GM says “Google Pontiac” - Mazda Cashes In
Monday January 23rd 2006, 7:19 pm
Filed under: Local Advertising
In follow up to my recent post on GM pointing users to “google pontiac”, i’ve noticed that some companies are cashing in, namely mazda.
When you advertise on keywords on google, you have a set budget and once you hit that budget your ads stop showing up. It would have been great if local dealers could have cashed in on all this interest as opposed to Mazda. In this screenshot you can see that Pontiac has essentially used up its budget and its ad is no longer on google:
localzing.com |
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| To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (6762) | 1/29/2006 1:29:56 AM | | From: sandeep | | | | | Did you read one of the replies? I am pretty sure that it is more complex than what John or the reply suggests. He is a just privileged sob who initially got his connections from his family and now milking the Google bandwagon. |
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| To: Mick Mørmøny who wrote (6672) | 1/29/2006 11:20:46 AM | | From: Mick Mørmøny | | | | How to Outwit the World's Internet Censors
graphics8.nytimes.com
KEEPING TABS Google blinks.
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
Published: January 29, 2006
When Google announced last week that it would censor its new search service in China, the company became, to many, the latest component in that country's sophisticated system of information control.
With strategies ranging from automated keyword filtering and Web site blocking to Internet traffic surveillance, the Chinese government is unmatched in its ability to censor and monitor its citizens online.
Of course, no system is perfect.
The OpenNet Initiative (www.opennet.net), opennet.net an international human rights project linking researchers from the University of Toronto, Harvard Law School and Cambridge University, tracks Internet censorship and the techniques used to evade it. To surf the Web in China and elsewhere without censorship and in marginal safety, said John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor and a member of the initiative, the primary tool is an old standby: the proxy server.
A proxy server is simply a generic computer through which people who want to be anonymous drive Web traffic before it reaches their own machines. This helps dissociate a computer address from the Web sites its user has visited.
It's not perfect. You never know, for instance, how trustworthy any proxy really is, and servers go up and down unpredictably. But people regularly use proxy servers for all kind of reasons — from the political to the pornographic.
Every day in China, Mr. Palfrey said, an underground economy of proxy server addresses comes alive — usually connecting to servers made available by volunteers around the globe. These addresses are passed along and traded, using elaborately coded language, on electronic bulletin board systems or chat channels.
Elsewhere on the Web, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) eff.org helps maintain Tor, a communications network that helps make Internet communications anonymous, and it appears to be accessible from within China. Peacefire.org peacefire.org offers a program called The Circumventor that lets anyone turn a Windows-based machine into a proxy, allowing others to use it to circumvent local Internet restrictions.
Even two small commercial companies, Dynamic Internet Technology and UltraReach Internet, offer software or Web services that try to poke holes in China's "great firewall."
Of course, these precious few leaks are most likely little consolation for the dozens of Chinese citizens languishing in prison for saying or doing the wrong thing online. And they are all the more reason that human rights workers keep discussions of circumvention tactics short — and vague.
"I don't ever want to make it any harder for people," Mr. Palfrey said.
nytimes.com |
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| To: KeepItSimple who wrote (6757) | 1/29/2006 12:58:21 PM | | From: William F. Wager, Jr. | | | | Barron's...Truth in Advertising.
Why Google's technology contains the seed of its destruction
By THOMAS G. DONLAN
AS MANY LESSER BEINGS KNOW BY NOW, the name "Google" is a mathematics joke. An idle professor designated it as the number one followed by 100 zeros. Google the company carries the name to resonate with the nearly infinite amount of information on the World Wide Web, and to boast of its search engine's command of that information.
What could be funnier to a mathematician than a company called Google, housed in a place called the Googleplex? (Which is the number one followed by a google of zeros.) Is Google a bigger joke than its name? It may be just a math joke, or it may be an investment joke as well.
There's a very old saying that half of every advertising dollar is wasted -- the challenge to the executive is to figure out which half. Once ads are printed on pages or sent into the broadcast and cable waves, the advertiser has no good way of knowing what happened or what they achieved. How many eyeballs were fastened on that ad? How many of the eyeballs were attached to minds possibly interested in buying the product?
Tracking the effect of advertising used to be the exclusive job of market-research firms, who polled, sampled, group-focused and ultimately guessed how effective media were at reaching target audiences and how effective ads were at impressing those audiences once reached.
Much of the attraction of television advertising was its universality, now lost in the transition from three broadcast networks to hundreds of cable channels. In the days of three networks, an advertiser could plan a two-month national campaign that would hit 90% of the country's eyeballs. He couldn't miss the target audience, even though it was certain he was also advertising to people who had no interest in his product.
That's how old media worked in the old economy. Now, with new media, a new-economy advertiser can find out how well his ads work. It's called click-through, and it's dynamite. The question is, whom does it blow up, the advertiser or the advertising medium?
When an advertiser buys access to a privileged position in consumers' Google searches on particular subjects, or buys ads that Google places on independent Websites, the advertiser pays Google every time someone clicks on his ad and is linked to his Website.
Google's standard business arrangements call for advertisers to pay by the click, at a rate set by auction, with the highest bidder getting the best spot. The minimum price at Google is a penny a click.
But who's clicking? Are they legitimate customers? Over the past few years, advertisers and Internet media companies have been dealing with a rising tide of click fraud. A simple example: If your competitor is paying for clicks, then you can raise his costs by giving him too much of what he's paying for. Hire a click farm in which people are paid a little to click on ads all day -- buying nothing, of course. This is a task that also can be automated, and there are many variations, but all such frauds are designed to raise costs for the advertiser and degrade the effectiveness of his ads.
Google and similar outfits say they have the problem controlled with traffic analysis and refunds of fees generated by spurious clicks. But they don't reveal details, or report how much click defenses cost them.
Those few speculators who are bearish on Google cite the threat of click fraud. Their scenario runs like this: Fraudsters move more quickly than defenders, so unthwarted click fraud increases. The cost of advertising to generate a sale increases, making alternative advertising media more attractive. Google has to cut prices; revenue-per-click declines and so do clicks. Google stops being a growth stock and its multiples start to shrink.
The only problem with this thesis is its dependence on the idea of click fraud. Just as dangerous to Google is Click truth. Google's best selling point -- advertisers can learn which clicks produce sales -- is potentially its biggest hazard, because advertisers can also learn which clicks don't produce sales, and scale back their advertising budget so that less of it is wasted.
This may not kill Google in the world of advertising, but it will force it to change every bit as much as Google and its Internet cohorts are forcing TV, newspapers and magazines to change.
Forced change is an opportunity to stumble. And in the world of stock-market speculation, Google -- selling for multiples of future earnings and cash flow that imply impossible growth -- is already a disaster waiting to happen, although nobody knows when or how the market will force a revaluation. |
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