Google removes some IAC browser extensions for 'policy violations'
reuters.com
reuters.com
For all the highly paid data scientists google paid, they somehow thought IAC's business in this space was consumer positive when every metric must have been screaming that it was user unfriendly.
For me a lot of stuff people complain about google don't make sense, removing subdomains from URL bar, I can see the argument for safety there. But this was straight google funded crap.
I wish some of the enforcement focused more on this type of stuff - straight forward google funded anti-consumer behavior. I wonder what made google decide to finally cut off the crapware.
Instead we are told google can't cut of the absolute trash from IAC because it would be anti-consumer / anti-competitive to do so. Regulators have their heads on totally backwards in this space.
Why don't they go hard after the crap that clearly and obviously hurts users (there is so much of it).
"I'm extremely pleased to announce the extension of our 14-year relationship with Google," said Joey Levin, CEO of IAC. "We've generated nearly $10 billion in revenue to date through the life of our partnership, and this extension makes clear that we have plenty more to deliver. Google's search and search advertising products remain the strongest in the world, and we believe that this renewal puts us in a solid position for the years ahead."
Does google have data scientists looking at ad revenue? For sure. How that revenue is generated is a core business, and there is no question they had metrics on quality of that traffic which would be the first hop before landing on the ad. The idea they thought this was all quality organic traffic - no chance.
I get regulators are cracking down, but the fake reviews, fake shopping sites and now these fake ad revenue generators don't deserve regulatory protection.
Fair point on the extensions side though.
Malicious actors are almost certainly incredible revenue drivers for Google, and people on the ads team are protecting them because they make their metrics look good.
This is one of the downsides of a Google monopoly (/single advertiser market): they don't have to care about click fraud besides making sure it doesn't show up in headlines. Even if Google suddenly had a reputation for click fraud, not advertising on YouTube and the rest of the web can be a death sentence to staying competitive in your respective market.
The facebook targeting back 2 years ago at least, amazing. There is a niche for hyperspecific advertising and facebook just crushed it (I'm not posting on facebook / no facebook app, so I think they suck for human health).
What a lot of HNers don't understand is that:
1) if you're a digital marketer with a budget, you have to spend the budget. Even if you know the metrics don't add up, you just keep spending until somebody finds a platform with a better ROI.
2) ad platforms don't like to talk about their secret sauce, because that would attract scrutiny.
And anyway GDPR/CCPA type legislation is probably a better route, which if anything makes fraud detection even more difficult.
It gets especially shady with IAC in particular, as they run a bunch of these “search engines” (not actually a search engine anyone has ever intended to use without being tricked into it) purely as a venue for PPC arbitrage: they run ads on Google for generic search terms, which link to their own search results pages, which display “search partner” Google ads. These results pages are highly optimized to trick people into clicking the ads, which they then get a cut of revenue on.
The traffic source that originally lead me to this rabbit hole was an IAC-owned Google search partner property, and our ads were running on their results pages. The ads had their full title linked and colored blue, and the “results” only had a tiny arrow link at the very end of the description, the titles were not clickable. Clearly this was sufficient to meet Google’s standards as a search partner.
This system is terrible for both regular internet users and for unsophisticated advertisers. It’s clearly and intentionally manipulative to both parties. I don’t know why I was surprised to learn that Google was not just enabling but actually encouraging this kind of stuff, but it still gives me heartburn. They are very clearly making tons of money from it, and have every incentive to keep the cash flowing.
Seriously, bingo. And the idea that Google "didn't know" this is total garbage. Google's advertising business is not a neglected corner of the business.
Given so many sites run google analytics - google can run the metrics from click to dwell time etc.
What's weird - I don't have a phd in data-analytics, and I'm not google analytics expert, but it's pretty clear when some source of traffic is being tricked or the other one I had issues with (paid) to click through. Because they don't convert, and some bounce within a fraction a second.
And google couldn't determine this stuff was low quality?
It's very little work, very low risk, and has a huge upside if you're "successful" at it. I also wonder if the people doing it think they're clever.
And still they don’t have any option other than to surrender to Google and Facebook if they have to reach their audience on web.
I assume almost all commercial media is chock full of product placement.
I saw a pretty genius idea recently. I logged into a Bank of America cash rewards credit card account, and under a recent transaction at a pizza place, there was a link to a competing pizza place offering 10% cash back, double my usual cash back if I ate there by a certain date.
How do you get to that idea from the article? To me it seems to be saying the opposite: the Chrome Trust & Safety has been saying the extensions were malicious, not that these are positive to the consumers. It also states that the reason the extensions haven't been removed are anti-trust fears.
Are those fears justified? Given the quote from IAC in that article, that's clearly how they're going to spin it. And various competition authorities seem to very sympathetic the idea that Google should continue serving search results for garbage sites that real users aren't interested in as long as there's any appearance of conflict of interest. This seems analogous to that.
I'm ok with that because you can turn it off; right-click the bar and check "Always show full URLs."
1. Hide useful feature behind a hidden menu.
2. Remove feature for lack of use.
3. Claim to be responsive to users.
A default setting plus an option behind a right-click menu is basically a mark of death. Just a matter of time.
The next step will be a per-page option that resets every time you navigate. I.e., you can see the full address for the current page but have to do it manually every time.
> can imagine insurance companies and various other organisations involved in from phone sales to outright scams had a "talk" with Google to have this removed from the phones as consumers had too much power.
Seems like a conspiracy theory to me. The call recording functionality isn't exactly known by most people, not to mention it's trivially bypassed (see above).
Only if: 1. You are somewhere where using a speaker phone won't annoy other people (or leak secrets to them) 2. You have another device to hand, and you have audio recording software set up on that device 3. The amount of background noise is low enough that the call is intelligible.
Isn't that an issue even if you're not using speakerphone? Companies regularly ask you for your name/address/birthday/secret question/credit card number, so you'll be leaking that info regardless of whether you're using speakerphone or not.
>2. You have another device to hand, and you have audio recording software set up on that device
that doesn't seem too hard. most people have a old phone or a laptop/tablet, failing that they can borrow one from their SO.
>3. The amount of background noise is low enough that the call is intelligible.
I'm struggling to think of situations where this would be an issue, that isn't already covered by the first point. Are you canceling services on the side of a road or something?
https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00084187/
You'd also presumably be getting a video dump, but you could always just extract the audio layer from it.
A feature that Google themselves once made a big point of offering with Google Voice, but one wonders if that's just because it was a feature of Grand Central they didn't feel they could cut without losing too many users---not that Google Voice has ever felt like a very active product on Google's end, with the decade plus UI stagnation and Google Hangouts integration.
There is some technical complexity involved here because, at least on older phones, during phone calls the baseband seizes direct control of some audio hardware, so the speaker audio may not "pass through" the operating system at all. But it used to be that call-recording was straightforwardly possible on older devices as a baseband feature and for the large part it seems to have been intentionally removed after the first generation or two of Android devices.
also, this price action should be incorporated into the opening auction, so really you should sell before the market opens, not when it opens
In the words if George Carlin (may he rest in peace), “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” The second half are who this part of IAC’s profit thrives on.
IAC buys random up and coming websites/apps/etc and turns the firehose of traffic on them.
I was expecting a bigger drop.
Will be interesting to see what actions or non-actions Google takes.
Here’s detailed research on their practices from 2006: https://www.benedelman.org/spyware/ask-toolbars/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAC_(company)
It is almost the story of an internet giant you have never heard of (or at least that I had never heard of, even though I work for the original founder of one of their properties.)
Oh I knew I knew these asshats from back in ye olde days. Just about ruined the community.
Your second question is valid though
This is the stuff that skynet is made from.
This particular one seems noxious, but there are others which do make useful stuff, e.g. Kraft? Nestle? DuPont? P&G? come to mind.
> Many users of IAC extensions expressed agitation, the audit found. “Tricked into installing it and can’t delete it,” said one user in a review on the Google Chrome store, which the audit called representative. “DO NOT INSTALL” warned another.
“IAC’s business model appears to rely almost exclusively on unintentional installs,” members of the Chrome safety team wrote in the audit.
Of special concern in the audit were ads that IAC ran against search terms such as “how to vote,” “vote by mail” and “voter fraud.” Users who clicked on the ads didn’t get voting-related information, the audit found. Instead, their browser home pages were reset to MyWay, and the separate, IAC-owned Ask.com toolbar was installed on those users’ browsers, the audit found. The audit found that IAC continued to run such ads even after Google told the company to stop.
How is that possible? Or are we simply looking at someone who doesn't know how to use her computer?
Once your adware is installed as a native application, you simply install two copies, each of which immediately reinstalls and restarts the other should it get removed/stopped.
...is how a little-known Google employee named Sundar Pichai rose to fame in the company by bundling Chrome.