Let Google Eat Their Own Ads

Posted on February 18, 2016 by technologybloopers

Google makes a huge amount of money serving up ads, which funds a lot of interesting, though not always quickly successful, ideas. Most everyone tolerates these ads because their search engine is such a helpful gadget. But we wonder if it wouldn’t be more effective if it would serve up ads that we are more interested in. We suspect that they have already collected plenty of data about our habits that could be parsed to make both Google users and Google advertisers happier. Regarding the off-target ads, we advise: let Google eat their own ads.

Does it really make sense to keep hammering on us month-after-month to buy more of the same item we have bought? (The high-tech rubber duckie Edwin Duck that we bought for a Christmas gift appears daily … sometimes several times.) And although in general a repeat customer is the best customer, there are lots of specialty items that advertisers should know are bought only once by individuals and used for years, so isn’t it better to spend their ad dollars to chase non-owners? Strangely, Google doesn’t seem to have taken a lesson from Amazon, which does a far better job of suggesting stuff that actually COMPLEMENTS what we have recently bought.

We thought that Google had gotten religion recently when we ran across a link leading to an “Opt Out” headline. But the religion they had gotten must have been from insane or malicious gods, because you can only opt out of “interest-based” ads, i.e. ones related to your interests, previous visits to other websites, or demographic details. WHAT??!! It seems to us that those are the ads you might WANT to see. So apparently, after opting out, you will only receive ones that are based on nothing and even more likely to be irrelevant.

How Does YouTube Choose the Next Videos After the One You Wanted?

Posted on December 15, 2015 by technologybloopers

Anyone who uses YouTube more than a couple of times, and plays the video s/he selects, can’t help but notice that YouTube–all by itself—chooses a bunch of other YouTube videos and queues them up to play one after the other. YouTube says that The autoplay feature on YouTube makes it easier to decide what to watch next. After you watch a YouTube video, we’ll automatically play another related video based on your viewing history. If so, their memory of the viewing history must be pretty short or awfully inaccurate … or perhaps it was reacting against the highly-materialistic nature of my chosen video, or trying to tune my aura, or something. Because when I played Cuda Janet (Birthday Song for my wife who was and is the proud owner of a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda), the next three videos were very touchy-feely: Light Transmission by Mirabai (Please view this video in silence and open your heart to receive), Mantra to remove Negative energy, and and Mantra to increase Good luck and positive energy. While it was nice for YouTube to try improving my mood, it wasn’t very useful. And apparently this autoplay feature, and changes to its implementation, have been extremely unwelcome to lots of other folks.

Can Thoughtful U.S.-Wide Economic Planning Enable Orderly Growth?

Posted on November 14, 2015 by technologybloopers

Skyrocketing house prices and apartment rents, long and slow commutes, overcrowded schools, etc. not only dramatically diminish peoples’ quality of life but can choke off economic growth in places like Silicon Valley. (And Silicon Valley is not unique; e.g., Boston has a similar problem.) What can be done about it? We need to think bigger, in terms of geography. Every sizable city or cluster of nearby cities has some form of LOCAL regional economic development authority. But those authorities are sub-optimizing. We believe that what is needed is a nationwide advisory council AND a change in thinking by large companies. Germany is a good example of what is possible. We can understand to some extent the economies of scale of microchip manufacturers for examples, but it especially baffles us that technology giants like Facebook, Google, Oracle, eBay, and LinkedIn, which are principally software companies, insist on building mega-campuses in Silicon Valley. Seems to us that—using their own technology and realizing that software can be written anyplace—they could do large portions in regional centers. Even Apple, who farms out much of their manufacturing to Chinese companies like Foxconn, very likely would benefit if their employees spent more time working and less time commuting to their new giant building (which will almost certainly exacerbate the already horrendous traffic jams in that area).

There are lots of other attractive cities in western states with a critical mass of local services and attractions that would welcome an influx of well-paid, well-educated employees: for example, Austin, TX; Denver, CO; Seattle, WA; Portland, OR, Los Angeles, CA; San Diego, CA; Sacramento, CA; and Phoenix, AZ. Similarly for eastern states.

Will There be a Useful Truce Among Ads and Ad Blockers and Ad Blocker-Blockers?

Posted on September 2, 2015 by technologybloopers

History buffs may liken this situation to the spy-and-counter-spy among countries. It surely seems to us at Technology Bloopers to be a great waste of resources and a great inconvenience to the more than 3 billion current users of the Internet today. Most users have already been spoiled by the “free” goodies they enjoy in return for their viewing increasing volumes of advertising. This arrangement has been around for at least 150 years in newspaper and magazine publishing, although most of the important hard-copy publications make their revenue from a combination of subscription fees and advertising purchases. By contrast, the much more recent Internet is mostly free to users and paid for by advertisers. Some interesting exceptions are Wikipedia, language-learning site Yabla, and purchase or rental of plugins and themes for WordPress. In the opinion of Technology Bloopers, there are many Internet sites for which users would pay reasonable fees, which would reduce the conflict among the titans of Silicon Valley. Google has contributed great gobs of technology but financed it heavily with ads. But users have had their fill of ads, leading to a rapid growth of ad blocking software. And some of the ads are so intrusive (the ones on SpanishDict.com are the worst in our experience, interrupting users with highly-distracting audio and video) that they cry out for ad blockers … and boycotting of such sites in favor of more ones that are less obnoxious. The advertisers have been spooked by this software, leading to a rapid growth of software that undoes the blocking. Most recently Apple has jumped into the fray with its own ad blockers, which is a welcome counter-force, though actually Apple has its own ads buried in its Apps, so the only beneficiary is Apple, while Google loses business and consumers continue to be annoyed by ads.

We Thought That CAPTCHA’s Were Obsolete, But …

Posted on July 27, 2015 by technologybloopers

We recently suffered through a spate of websites at which we wanted to leave our valid queries in order to be contacted and provided additional information. In fact, we sat here with money in hand, ready to spend it if the goods or services were the ones we sought. Instead, we were blocked, or at least delayed, from proceeding further by the need to squint at some weird-looking letters or numbers (or solve some dopey riddle). For the uninitiated, these inconveniences are called CAPTCHA’s, something that was invented to prevent robotic spammers from filling our email InBoxes or Contact Us databases with unwanted messages (mostly ads). Aha, we thought: an opportunity to collect some of the worst of these and post them for the enlightenment or entertainment of visitors to our website. Alas, this was truly old news, as already in 2008 there was someone chronicling the worst of the worse. Fast forward to 2014, when Google has put an end to this with its No-CAPTCHA aproach, which uses information it already has about a user’s behavior to separate the valid visitors from the spammers. For us, the bottom line is that if you are presented with a CAPTCHA it is a good bet that the site was developed a long time ago, and you may well want to suspect the currency of the rest of its information.

Allí no hay ni almuerzo grátis (inglés:“There ain’t no free lunch”)

Posted on May 15, 2015 by technologybloopers

Most Internet users have been spoiled by so much apparently “free” content. Well, of course it’s free to them because advertisers are paying for it, and are putting ads next to that content, just like newspapers and magazines have done for many decades. However, some of the same sort of technology that have brought us all this cornucopia of useful (or at least entertaining) content, is now being employed to strip the ads off this content, as described in some detail by The Financial Times.

Google itself has already (very recently) started a small initiative that lets people pay to watch YouTube videos sans ads. Those are all or mostly for mass market entertainment content, so the cool creative stuff (“coolness” is in the eye of the beholder, so even cat videos count here) may still be afflicted with ads. But we suspect that millions of people would be willing to pay reasonable amounts of subscription money to use sites they value. One proof of that is the large total contributions per year that are made to support Wikipedia. So we can hope that other sites with value-added start to offer alternatives like this new one from Google.

The worst ads are ones that have video (or animation) or audio, which are REALLY intrusive. One of the worst sites in this regard that we personally use is spanishdict.com. (But despite this unpleasant behavior, spanishdict.com, is highly-ranked by Alexa, 1,818 in the world as of May 14, 2015 with a whopping 907 improvement in the preceding three months.) Ironically, when one narrows the viewing window, the ads—which are mostly on the right side—get chopped off. No wonder they have to resort to using audio, video, and animation to attract attention.

How Do I Scam Thee (with SEO)? Let Me Count the Ways.

Posted on April 25, 2015 by technologybloopers

The count must be in the billions. Our sister websites, Wilddancer.com and WhyMenDieYoung.com had been getting a few sales pitches from people who were able to breach our FormToEmail Comments security or leave comments on our WordPress blogs. But, thanks to professional advice and implementation, we were pretty immune to the automatic web crawlers, so scammers had to make considerable effort to get through. When we added our Blooper Jar, a kind of “incoming blog”, though, we started getting frequent posts from from an apparently clueless company called SwingSEO Solutions, starting with the following from Brigitte: “Hi, my name is Brigitte and I am the marketing manager at SwingSEO Solutions. I was just looking at your Worst User Interface | Blooper Jar site and see that your site has the potential to get a lot of visitors. I just want to tell you, In case you didn’t already know… There is a website network which already has more than 16 million users, and the majority of the users are looking for niches like yours. By getting your site on this service you have a chance to get your site more visitors than you can imagine. It is free to sign up and you can read more about it here: http://anders.ga/w-6×2 – Now, let me ask you… Do you need your website to be successful to maintain your business? Do you need targeted traffic who are interested in the services and products you offer? Are looking for exposure, to increase sales, and to quickly develop awareness for your site? If your answer is YES, you can achieve these things only if you get your website on the network I am talking about. This traffic network advertises you to thousands, while also giving you a chance to test the service before paying anything at all. All the popular sites are using this service to boost their readership and ad revenue! Why aren’t you? And what is better than traffic? It’s recurring traffic! That’s how running a successful site works… Here’s to your success! Read more here: http://stg2bio.co/10fz – or to unsubscribe please go here: http://todochiapas.mx/C/36p” There were small variations in the sender’s name, title, organization name, etc., but the pattern was mostly identical. Likely these were being done by a “Mechanical Turk” being paid a very small amount for each.

Likely the number of misleading missives sent by one Mechanical Turk is small in comparison to the number of companies claiming to conduct Search Engine Optimization (SEO) intended to skyrocket your site’s ranking to the very top of web searches. There must be a few legitimate experts, but they must find it tough sledding against all the illegitimate ones. Our advice: if you truly want to use one of them, do your homework first.

Google’s Counts: Worth Every Penny You Pay For Them

Posted on December 29, 2014 by technologybloopers

The Internet theoretically is a statistician’s dream. Let’s hope it’s not an nightmare. In our March 10, 2014 post about the irreproducible results of an Ngram search we warned that nothing prevents Google from changing their definitions or conventions … and not telling us about them. But since they tell us precious little, it seems wise not to base important conclusions or critical decisions solely on any relatively lengthy history of the counts data. And that “relatively lengthy” may be even as short as a month or a quarter, because it is easy for Google to change their mind and their software. This was brought to our attention in the December 21 New York Times by economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, who apparently makes a career analyzing counts produced by Google searches of certain key words or survey data collected by other surveyers. Overall, the New York Times article showed mostly upbeat behavior during the holiday season, which one would hope for. Whether the annual trends are accurate or not, likely only Google knows for sure. And we are not opining that Google is doing anything malicious in making their changes; they may all be done with the goal of improved accuracy and usability. But without more transparency we will never know.

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