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Comment by sanswork | Hacker News Reader

For a long time ask.com had one of the only Google ad feeds allowing them to programatically request ads from Google to show on their search pages and for some reason instead of implementing it themselves they used a company I worked for to do it so for some time a lot of the ads on ask.com were actually google or yahoo ads running through a random ad server I wrote. I remember having to move our systems to make sure we were in a data centre as close as possible to them and Google/Yahoo since we had (I think?)50ms to receive a request from them, contact google and yahoo for ad inventory, merge them and return it to ask to show on the page.

(This was all like 15 years ago now)

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"I remember having to move our systems to make sure we were in a data centre as close as possible to them and Google/Yahoo…"

Hurricane Electric comes to mind. A friend rents rack space there and I tagged along a few times when he was installing a new server, etc. Wild place. A bit of security to even get in. In one of the huge rooms where his rented rack is, 5 meters or so of racks with the same noisy hardware—"Might be Pinterest", my friend suggested.

Other racks literally enclosed within a welded wire cage…

I ended up with a host called GoGrid since they were able to offer a mix of dedicated servers and cloud for when we needed to burst and they had space in 365 Main Street SF. I went to visit their team while in town and they took me for a tour of the data centre and it was very much like that with them pointing to random racks as being owned by X, Y, and Z. It feels embarrassing to say but I was a bit star struck by the servers.

I worked at GoGrid and this is one of the first times I’ve heard someone mention it who wasn’t an employee.

And yeah, the data center was fun to visit.

My company's cage was the unfortunate neighbor of Google's cage at Exodus SC3 in Santa Clara. Even then, Google's compute density was much higher than industry standards. They didn't rack-mount their servers; they basically extracted every part that wound be in a case (motherboard, PSU, disks, heat sinks, etc.) and laid it on a cork board shelf. They then placed the boards two units deep, so if you needed to service the unit in back, you'd have to remove the unit in front first. These were all wired like spaghetti to an HP switch sitting on top of the cabinet. It looked like a meth head's house. Here's a photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_data_centers#/media/Fil...

Anyway, the heat emanating from their space was absolutely insane. Our servers would have random thermal shutdowns because their excess heat was penetrating our space, and this impacted our overall ability both to serve and to get some sleep as we were paged 24x7.

This was before modern cold/hot aisle DC designs, so the only thing that could be done was for the colo facility to add more air conditioning. They set up some spot coolers that helped, but we moved to a different facility about as fast we could.

They were arbing keywords through this: they'd place ads directly on Google for low-cost keywords, which would link to an ask.com search results page that itself would display Google ads through that partnership, but with a UI designed (more than Google itself) to trick people into clicking them. Seemingly they were able to find combinations that made this profitable.

The "Search Partner network" in general is one of the ways that Google Ads milks (scams?) unsophisticated buyers: unless you turn it off, you're paying for ads that are shown to confused users on sketchy results pages that you have no real insight into, not just the Google results page itself. The traffic from them is garbage.

> you're paying for ads that are shown to confused users

Knowing some scammy advertisers, I think that many are happy to pay to show their ads only to confused users

>one of the ways that Google Ads milks (scams?) unsophisticated buyers

The average advertiser has no clue about this. Google's role in the advertising ecosystem has been as a scammer and monopolist for many years now. Unfortunately, every major ad network learned from them, and they all have a similar trick default setting.

The latest scam from Google is PMAX, where you YOLO your placements/ad creative/landing page combos to Google and they optimize it automatically. This serves as an optimal mechanism to funnel your ads to the most fraudulent publishers, who's army of employees fills out your forms and bypasses bot protections most effectively. Google's team will then helpfully recommend to "ummm... maybe block their IPs?". Absolute racket.

I'd love to see a write-up of this if you ever get the chance.

There really isn't too much more to it but happy to try and answer any specific questions. I wasn't involved in the business dealings at all so I have no clue why it happened. System was originally written in PHP and I later rewrote it in Erlang as we got more sources so I could contact all the networks for ads at the same time. It was a very lightweight system the click handler was the heavier one.

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