Google named in lawsuit for ad clicks on parked sites: related news

Google named in lawsuit for ad clicks on parked sites...

Google is reportedly placing a percentage of its AdWords ads on parked and error sites, which carries no benefit for paying consumers. This practice has landed the search engine giant in hot water, with a federal class action lawsuit filed on Thursday in a US District Court in San Jose, California. Lawyer and Google advertiser Hal Levitte noticed the practice back in 2007, then filed a complaint late last week claiming Google is unjustly enriching its promises. The lawsuit was filed by Kabateck Brown Kellner, and, if approved by the judge, could involve a large numbers of litigants who advertised with Google in the last four years.

Top Torrent Sites According to Google - Mininova tops the list of favorite torrent sites

A report today over at TorrentFreak takes a look at the way that Google ranks Torrent sites and finds that Google’s information seems comparable to that reported by the sites themselves which hasn’t always been the case when looking at Alexa rankings for the sites. Using Google, it was determined that Mininova is the most popular Torrent site and The Pirate Bay comes in second. Rankings indicate that Torrentz and Isohunt compete closely for third place and then there are a handful of other torrent sites that also rank fairly high although the popularity of these sites varies between countries. The stats also indicate that Torrent sharing via all of these sites is on the rise.

Google rebrands DoubleClick's affiliate ad program

JotSpot became Google Sites, Writely became Google Docs, Picasa might become Google Photos. And as of this week, DoubleClick's Performics affiliate ad network has become the Google Affiliate Network as part of Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of the ad firm. The premise remains the same: publishers get a commission when someone not only clicks on their ad, but then goes on to buy something.

Google re-brands DoubleClick's affiliate ad program

JotSpot became Google Sites, Writely became Google Docs, Picasa might become Google Photos. And as of this week, DoubleClick's Performics affiliate ad network has become the Google Affiliate Network as part of Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of the ad firm. The premise remains the same: publishers get a commission when someone not only clicks on their ad, but then goes on to buy something.

Google's Big Mistake - Getting Rid of Google Page Creator

Are you kidding me? Google getting rid of Google Page Creator, this must be a joke. No, it's for real. Google says they're going to be transitioning all Google Page Creator websites into their new Google Sites. Excuse me, but Google Sites doesn't come close to being as good as Google Page Creator. Why in the world would Google choose to keep the lesser of the two?

Google Chrome, the Google Browser

Philipp Lenssen writes "Google announced their very own browser project called Google Chrome — an announcement in the form of a comic book drawn by Scott McCloud, no less. Google says Google Chrome will be open source, include a new JavaScript virtual machine, include the Google Gears add-on by default, and put the tabs above the address bar (not below), among other things. I've also uploaded Google's comic book with all the details (details given from Google's perspective, anyway... let's see how this holds up). While Google provided the URL www.google.com/chrome there's nothing up there yet."

Battelle: Google Ad Planner No comScore-Killer After All

imageComplaining about how comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) undercounts unique visitors compared to their internal numbers is a fairly constant refrain from web publishers. So when Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Ad Planner was released with the promise of better figures (i.e. higher unique visitor counts) than comScore, Federated Media head John Battelle was initially enthused. But after comparing the first set of numbers between the two, Battelle writes on his Searchblog, that Google Ad Planner is hardly the hoped for comScore-killer. While the comparison data Battelle received is from comScore, he says given that comScore’s reputation depends on not juicing the stats, he is inclined to trust that the research is bias-free. Battelle’s review follows others, such as ad agency and web publishers, who also found that Google Ad Planner was, in the words of Fo

Google accused of ad fraud over AdWords on parked domains

How would you respond if you had paid Google $136.11 for advertising that appeared not on quality sites like The New York Times, but on parked domains and error pages? If you were lawyer Hal Levitte, you might file a federal lawsuit in California over Google's behavior and then seek class-action status for the claim.

Google Sued For 'Parked' Site Fraud

Google is defrauding its advertising customers by charging them for clicks from ‘parked’ Web sites that Google knows are worthless, according to a federal class action lawsuit filed today by Kabateck Brown Kellner, LLP in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California in San Jose.

Google lets advertisers measure ad views

Google developed a system that lets advertisers limit and measure the number of times users view ads on its partners' sites. Clients will be able to better place ads based on the number of views they get and the number of users that visit a Web site after seeing it, Mountain View-based Google said Thursday in an e-mailed statement. The technology will be available within months, Google said. The product comes out of Google's acquisition of online ad company DoubleClick, bought in March to boost sales of promotions with pictures and videos.

Google Ad Planner vs. ComScore

Back in June, when Google announced Google Trends For Websites and Google Ad Planner, I wrote a post comparing Google's data to comScore's data and concluded that Google had a lot of work to do to get their data right.

Google acquires Russian ad service Begun for USD 140 mln

Google has signed an agreement with Rambler Media to acquire Russian context advertising service Begun for nearly USD 140 million. The Google acquisition of Begun is expected to provide advertisers with access to a broader network of sites to advertise on, while publishers will enhance the set of adverts running on their sites. The transaction is scheduled for completion in the third quarter. Begun counts over 40,000 advertisers and 143,000 Russian sites in its network. Rambler Media has also signed an agreement to use Google's search and contextual advertising services for its site ww.rambler.ru.

Verizon and Google Close To Mobile Search Deal - Google is coming to a phone near you

Google and Verizon have often been on opposing sides of deals and issues (like those issues that arose during the 700 Mhz spectrum earlier this year). However it looks like the two companies are about to put the past behind them as they are rumored to be nearing a deal which would make Google the default search engine on all Verizon phones. The two companies would split ad revenue so that both would benefit. The deal has not been commented on by either party but sources say that a major point of contention is that Google seeks to save user search information in order to improve targeted ads and Verizon wants to keep that data to itself. Google is already the default search engine for Sprint phones and has a search partnership with Nokia plus the first Android phone has just gotten FCC approval so this is another step for Google towards do

MessageLabs Intelligence July 2008: Spammers Use Google Sites to Host Spam

MessageLabs, the leading provider of messaging and web security services to businesses worldwide, today announced the results of its MessageLabs Intelligence Report for July 2008. Analysis highlights that spammers continued the trend of abusing Google's hosted applications to host spam. Previously abused applications include Google Docs, Google Pages and Google Calendar. Google Sites allows a novice to easily create a web page composed of a string of random letters and numbers resulting in a URL that is more difficult to block using traditional signature-based anti-spam tools.

MessageLabs Intelligence July 2008: Spammers Use Google Sites to Host Spam

NEW YORK, NY and LONDON -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 08/05/08 -- MessageLabs, the leading provider of messaging and web security services to businesses worldwide, today announced the results of its MessageLabs Intelligence Report for July 2008. Analysis highlights that spammers continued the trend of abusing Google's hosted applications to host spam. Previously abused applications include Google Docs, Google Pages and Google Calendar. Google Sites allows a novice to easily create a web page composed of a string of random letters and numbers resulting in a URL that is more difficult to block using traditional signature-based anti-spam tools.

MessageLabs Intelligence July 2008: Spammers Use Google Sites to Host Spam

NEW YORK, NY and LONDON--(MARKET WIRE)--Aug 5, 2008 -- MessageLabs, the leading provider of messaging and web security services to businesses worldwide, today announced the results of its MessageLabs Intelligence Report for July 2008. Analysis highlights that spammers continued the trend of abusing Google's hosted applications to host spam. Previously abused applications include Google Docs, Google Pages and Google Calendar. Google Sites allows a novice to easily create a web page composed of a string of random letters and numbers resulting in a URL that is more difficult to block using traditional signature-based anti-spam tools.

Google's proprietary approach to software slows down acquisitions, claims TechCrunch

Google buys a lot of software companies -- YouTube, Blogger, Picasa, GrandCentral, Keyhole (Google Earth), Writely (Google Docs), JotSpot (Google Sites), Dodgeball etc -- but there's a tendency for them to stagnate. Nik Cubrilovic at TechCrunch IT reckons this is because of Google's proprietary software stack. In Why Google Slows Down Acquired Companies, he says:

Does Google Analytics Share Data with Google Trends and Ad Planner?

Google is assuring users of its Analytics product that their data is protected. Apparently, the recent announcements of Google Trends for Websites and Google Ad Planner had some web site owners concerned about how much data sharing was going on among the various offerings.

Google URL Index Hits 1 Trillion

mytrip points out news that Google's index of unique URLs has reached a milestone: one trillion. Google's blog provides some more information, noting, "The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. To keep up with this volume of information, our systems have come a long way since the first set of web data Google processed to answer queries. Back then, we did everything in batches: one workstation could compute the PageRank graph on 26 million pages in a couple of hours, and that set of pages would be used as Google's index for a fixed period of time. Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-l

Google Expands Video Distribution Via Adsense In Deal With Family Guy Creator

Late last year we mentioned that Google was tiptoeing into the content distribution game, using its AdSense network. The program seemed very limited (and somewhat confusing). Basically, with all the various sites out there (including us) that used AdSense for some advertisements, Google would let them choose from a (incredibly small) selection of videos to include on their sites. The videos would run with ad overlays, potentially providing a little bit of revenue to the partner sites. The whole thing seemed extremely forced and not all that compelling. Most sites have plenty of options for adding content, and this didn't seem to add much of value.

Google Sued for 'Parked' Site Fraud: Kabateck Brown Kellner, LLP

Google is defrauding its advertising customers by charging them for clicks from "parked" websites that Google knows are worthless, according to a federal class action lawsuit filed today by Kabateck Brown Kellner, LLP in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California in San Jose.

Microsoft Says Google Is Years Behind on Privacy - Draws attention as IE8 enters new beta

Microsoft executive Peter Cullen says that Google might have some great products but that they are about ten years behind Microsoft in terms of protecting people’s privacy online. One cited example is the problem that Google has had with Street Views capturing photos of people that they don’t want online, a problem Google has dismissed by saying that anyone could take those same pictures and put them on the Internet. Cullen says that Microsoft has built privacy into its core design and that Google is going to need to do the same thing as it grows. In fact, Microsoft is trying to use its privacy tools against Google; the latest beta version of Internet Explorer 8 has a privacy mode that has the potential to keep even Google from collecting information to use in ad targeting.

Google Faces "Parked" Site Fraud Allegations

Online retailer RK West has filed a federal lawsuit in the US District Court of California, San Jose, claiming Google defrauded its customers by charging them for clicks from "parked" web sites, which serve ads on otherwise empty web pages.

Google (GOOG) Will Absolutely Not Sell An Ad On The Homepage

Today, on Mad Money, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt said Google will absolutely not sell an ad on the homepage. Mr. Schmidt said Google could reap x number of billions if it sold ads on the homepage, but Google cares more about the end-user experience than just reaping short term profits.

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