Google going down?

October 24, 2005 In Blog, essays

Apparently, there is a powerful current of opinion against google’s adsense nowadays. Why? There seem to be a lot of splogs(spam blogs) and comment spams lately, invading the blogosphere(the part of the internet that deals with blogs) in order to attract visitors to automatically generated blogs, encouraging them to click on google’s ads, thus generating a lot of income for the site owners(but, obviously, for google as as well).

It’s quite a good “make money out of nothing” scheme: better than spam emails(which became illegal in most of the states), since there are no laws against automatic content generation nor the automatic clicks. It makes use of the high price of ad-click for special words and is encouraged by notorious success stories in the blogosphere: the first I know of was about some guy who made a blog on azbestos only because the ads paid a lot at the time, or another guy making 6-figure revenues because of ads on his e-marketing blog, or even a blogger writing about shoes and earning more than 100000$ a month.

It’s especially annoying since my ad-sense account only brought me on 1$ a month the average ; not worth it, and the reason why I took it down ads and enabled it only for the site’s search engine(should you search the web using as start my google search snippet, a small part of the ads’s revenue will get into my account; less money even than the previous 1$… ).

But it is the most annoying for the guys running blogs on BlogSpot, when confronted with hundreds of comments pointing visitors to spam blogs. For instance, the Galen Imobiliare blog I set up for my father’s small Romanian real estate company was invaded since the first day by spam comments, forcing me to disable comments completely. Not very pleasant for my father, who although not an English speaker, enjoyed seeing that “people” were reading his adverts.

So – to continue our story – Google tried to stop spammers by adding an optional “word check” : if you set it, a random word is generated in a distorted image. You must decode the word in order to be able to post a comment. Thus proving you were not an automatic program. The trick here is that character recognition software is smart and does indeed decode the word. If it is not smart enough, there are some other human-driven ways, as shown here : guys from a third-world country being paid to post by hand the spam comments or at least decode the images, or trading porn for images decoding.

For now, spam comments don’t bother me: Textpattern is not as popular as Blogger, the two-step comment posting discourages spam robots, and I have deactivated the “latest referrals” links.

But Google is in deep shit.

What should it do? First of all, diversify it’s revenue source. Online advertising is booming now because of all the blogs. But not for long. And since I like Google, I’d want to see them do more than just marketing. Become the world’s biggest wi-fi provider, or selling the next-generation blog tools, photo organizers, document search organizers and such. They have the people, they have the coolness factor. They should do something about it. Fast.

What should we do? Invent security measures for our blogs: two-step comment posting (manual comment approval being the most successful of those), rel=noref for all comments in our blogs(preventing comment spammers from being indexed by Google’s spiders); in a word, cenzorship. Because it seems that the free internet is the self-cenzored one.