Reuters: Google unveils vetting process for drug rehab ads . “Google told Reuters Monday it would resume accepting ads from U.S. addiction treatment centres in July, nearly a year after the Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) unit suspended the lucrative category of advertisers for numerous deceptive and misleading ads.”
Search Engine Land: Keyword infringement: Edible Arrangements files $209M trademark suit against Google. “Google is being sued in federal district court in Connecticut by the company behind Edible Arrangements for trademark infringement and unfair competition. The central claim is that when users search for ‘Edible Arrangements’ (or versions of that name), they’re seeing product ads for competitors, such as 1-800-Flowers. The company is seeking more than $200 million in damages for lost profits and trademark infringement. The company claims that consumers are confused about which results are genuinely associated with Edible Arrangements and says it has received phone calls supporting that contention.”
NewsBTC: CoinHoarder Steals Over $50 Million in Cryptocurrencies Using Google Ads. “According to a report published Wednesday, February 14th by Cisco’s Talos Intelligence Group, a team of Ukrainian hackers dubbed CoinHoarder has stolen more than $50 million in cryptocurrency from users who were under the impression they were accessing Blockchain.info, one of the most popular providers of virtual currency wallets.”
TechCrunch: Google temporarily bans addiction center ads globally following exposure of seedy referral deals. “Google is temporarily halting advertisements worldwide for addiction and rehabilitation centers, following a report last week showing it was acting as a platform for shady referral services earning huge undisclosed commissions.”
Financial Express: Google cashing in millions from health referral ads in Britain: Report. “Google is secretly reaping millions of money from vulnerable people, seeking treatment for addictive diseases, by charging advertisers secretly working for private clinics’ in Britain, a media report said on Sunday. The internet giant charges the middlemen — known as referral agents — as much as 200 pounds each time someone visits their website via search page advertisements at the top of a Google page, an investigation by The Sunday Times has revealed.”
Gay Star News: Google apologizes for banning use of words ‘bisexual’ and ‘gay’. “Faith Cheltenham is the VP of BiNet USA, an American nonprofit organization for the bisexual community. She tweeted a picture of an email she received yesterday about BiNet USA’s AdWords account being flagged. Google AdWords told her they flagged the account because they were using ‘sexually explicit’ keywords. The specific words mention were bisexual and gay.” Another Google rep told her they did NOT have a policy banning those words. So who knows. She did have screenshots of the e-mail received.
New York Times: How Climate Change Deniers Rise to the Top in Google Searches. “America’s technology giants have come under fire for their role in the spread of fake news during the 2016 presidential campaign, prompting promises from Google and others to crack down on sites that spread disinformation. Less scrutinized has been the way tech companies continue to provide a mass platform for the most extreme sites among those that use false or misleading science to reject the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. Google’s search page has become an especially contentious battleground between those who seek to educate the public on the established climate science and those who reject it.”
Business Insider: A fourth class-action lawsuit against Google claims the company rips off publishers and their advertisers. “Google has again been sued in US federal court by a web publisher alleging that the search giant does not refund advertisers when it discovers they have spent money on “invalid” clicks, and instead wrongly retains the money for itself. The suit is at least the fourth in a string of suits against Alphabet’s Google search unit making similar allegations. One case won a ruling granting it class-action status in July of this year.”
Business Insider: Lawsuit based on a surreptitiously recorded phone call claims Google doesn’t refund advertisers who spend money on fraudulent clicks. “A web advertising company named AdTrader, whose staff surreptitiously recorded a phone conversation with a Google executive, claims in a class-action lawsuit that Google does not refund money to advertisers when it discovers that those advertisers have spent money on fraudulent or invalid clicks.”
Newsroom NZ: Word Holocaust ‘dangerous and derogatory’: Google. “A New Zealand photographer says he could no longer use the word ‘Holocaust’ to promote his video series on Holocaust survivors after it was disallowed by Google. Auckland photographer Perry Trotter says he used Google’s AdWords to promote his Shadows of Shoah exhibitions but all his ads were recently disallowed because they contained ‘dangerous and derogatory’ content.” This is almost a Facebook level of ridiculousness.
CNET: Searching for Amazon? Fake Google ad sends users to scam site. “Some Google users searching for ‘Amazon’ on Thanksgiving were shown a phony ad that redirected to a scam website, one day before the biggest shopping day of the year.” Look at the screenshot with the article. Utterly ridiculous that this got through.
New York Times: Google Serves Fake News Ads in an Unlikely Place: Fact-Checking Sites. “The headlines are eye-catching. Melania Trump is leaving the White House! Home renovation cable star Joanna Gaines has abandoned her HGTV show and husband Chip Gaines! Televangelist Joel Osteen is leaving his wife! None of the stories were true. Yet as recently as late last week, they were being promoted with prominent ads served by Google on PolitiFact and Snopes, fact-checking sites created precisely to dispel such falsehoods.”
Vivaldi: My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil. “As the biggest online advertising company in the world, Google is often the first choice for businesses that want to promote their products or services on the Internet. Being excluded from using Google AdWords could be a major problem, especially for digital companies. Recently, our Google AdWords campaigns were suspended without warning. This was the second time that I have encountered this situation. This time, however, timing spoke volumes.”
Neowin: Google plans to introduce new ad filters to give advertisers more control over ad placement. “Following an unfortunate incident on YouTube, in which an ad from The Guardian was displayed on an extremist video, leading to several publishers withdrawing their ads from Google’s ad network, the web giant plans to introduce new ad filters that will allow advertisers to select the content against which their ads will appear, thus avoiding any unpleasant surprises.”
Bleeping Computer: Ads in Google Search Results Redirect Users to Tech Support Scam. “The malicious ad used a feature of the Google Ads service that allows ad publishers to display a URL but redirect users to another link. For example, in the rogue ad, the displayed link was “target.com,” but users were redirected to ‘tech-supportcenter.us.’ Surprisingly, this got past Google’s ad quality control service.” Considering that three years ago I had an AdWords ad flagged as a cigarette ad because it had the word “Winston” in it (Hey Google, WINSTON-SALEM IS A CITY) I’m pretty surprised too.
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