Other Google admits profiting from illegal Olympic ticket ads

I was correct in calling it BS, nowhere in the article does it say Google knew the nature, and why the hell do you keep mentioning the Canadian drugs? I thought this topic was about illegal olympic tickets?

 

So Google didn't know it was illegal to sell those tickets in the UK? What was Google's legal department in London for again?

 

It shows Googles form on their adword ethics and showed that once challenged they seemed to have backed off and paid out.

 

How would you have proactively stopped the listing of sites illegally selling these tickets? You seem to expect that every ad posted is vetted by a lawyer

 

Someone does otherwise you would have it highlighting porn and class a drugs from sponsored suppliers when you type it in.

 

Its reactive!
Some one probably did after it was raised to them by a concerned citizen or the police. Now you'll find that those Olympic ticket sales have been delisted, once upon a time there would have been sponsored links to all kinds of disreputable companies.

 

@snips

 

Yes, it may have escaped Google's radar. But the point is they should be more careful. With all the money made on the ad's, there should be a system in place so they are vetted.

 

It uses an automated system which flags an ad for manual review

I imagine it is pretty difficult to automatically check if a ticket seller is genuine or not, or infact that it was an issue at all before it was brought to Google's attention via the police.

 

Regarding the Canadian drug ads: Google said that in hindsight they should have reasonably known, which is why they paid the fine. They did not claim to know before the act. They merely admit that reasonably, they could or should have known. Hence they held up their hand, said "my bad" and paid up.

Regarding the London Olympic tickets: there is no way you can tell just from the ads whether the company involved has a licence to sell them or not. The reason you don't see porn adverts or class A drug adverts is because like with warez, the very subject, the very name makes it clear a priori that it is an illegal ad, what with it advertising illegal goods and all. it is very easy to automatically flag up and filter out ads containing key words such as: "Cialis", "Viagra", "penis", "nude" or whatever.

Olympic tickets are in themselves not illegal goods, even if their method of distribution can be. There is nothing inherently dodgy about the words "Olympic" or "tickets", so you can't just automatically filter them. Just like Microsoft Office is not an illegal good, but if someone sells you a pirated disc its means of distribution is. Of course there is no way to tell that from an ad for Microsoft Office. You'd have to buy the product to find out.

 

Seriously have you any comprehension how big Google is? It's not reported how much they made on the Olympic tickets but the $500m they gained and subsequently lost to the US govt. was approximately 0.059% of their profit that year! The Olympic tickets are stupendously small fry.

 

Of course I do! However, I don't care how much money Google gained or lost. I am more concerned of the fact that some people was scammed out of their hard earned cash and perhaps Google should review their procedures.
Unfortunately, not everyone is as astute as others when shopping online.

 

Looks quite dashing actually! What's up, got no more arguement in you to resort to that?

 

The words "Olympic Tickets" should at least have been tagged for a review. Google did not see a potential for scams here?

 

How could they ? For example up until today i didn't even know you in UK have such law.

 

If infact those were the words that were searched for, more likely "Olympics 2012" or something, I imagine the set of companies that bid for those adwords is pretty large.

 

I just seached for "Olympic Ticket" - there are 134.000.000 results. Do you have any idea how long it would take to sift through all of them?

 

Which is it?

They didn't make proportionally much money on these ads they probably didn't make very much money at all.

I sympathise with these people losing cash but this is hardly the fault of search engine, if they had been directed there by some muppet on Yahoo answers would we be having this conversation? I doubt it.

 

Ahh, I do love reading a hot debated topic like this. Very amusing.

Sam

 

It is extremely hard to address emotive arguments with rational debate. I think he just decided to match position, so to speak.