Mistaken Judgments for Content Labeled Advertising
Last week I applauded the FTC for arguing against the mandatory labeling of commerical emails. In that post, I argued that the labels would increase the rate of erroneous judgments by recipients, because the recipients would mistakenly believe that the…
AOL Advertises on Competitors to Get Traffic to AOL.com
To build traffic for AOL.com, AOL is buying search ads on Google and Yahoo. The article says: “AOL had initially considered spending as much as $50 million on television ads to promote the portal. But that changed after the company…
Update on Click Fraud Lawsuit
I’m a little late blogging this. It appears that the Lane’s Gift and Collectible lawsuit over click fraud is tied up in procedural limbo right now. The suit was filed in state court, the defendants moved the case to federal…
Google’s Spam Rating Guide
I previously posted how Google uses humans to QA search results. Henk van Ess has subsequently posted the training manual for people doing the QA. There’s nothing too shocking in the guide. Some of the techniques it specifically addresses include:…
Web Gambling Advertising Suit Against Search Engines Allowed to Proceed
By John Ottaviani Business Wire is reporting that Judge Richard Kramer of the San Francisco County Superior Court has denied a motion to dismiss certain of the allegations in a class action lawsuit filed last summer against Google, Yahoo! and…
Google’s Human Algorithm
Henk van Ess has been running a series of blog posts at Search Bistro about how Google uses international students to QA the relevancy of its search results. See, for example, his initial post including the advertising that Google ran…
Edelman on “Intermediaries’ Role in the Spyware Mess”
Ben Edelman’s latest post discusses intermediary responsibility for adware. The post details how cash goes from advertisers to advertising representatives (“intermediaries”) to adware vendors to distributors. The Legal Liability Question This implicates an essential question: if someone commits an illegal…
Lostclicks.com and Click Fraud
Three lawyers have launched a website called Lostclicks.com to drum up business for their click fraud legal campaigns. While these lawyers appear to be involved in the Lane’s Gift and Collectibles lawsuit, the site doesn’t contain the complaint–so it’s a…
New Gripe Site Case–Faegre & Benson v. Purdy
Faegre & Benson v. Purdy, Civil File No. 03-6472 (D. Minn. Apr. 27, 2005). Another ruling in the long-running story of William Purdy, an anti-abortionist who uses extreme forms of gripe sites against his targets. This particular ruling was a…
Nielsen on Searcher Mental Models
Jakob Nielsen ran a column describing user expectations about “search”—it should have a box, a search button, and a separate search results page where results are linear and prioritized. He says that user mental associations have become so strong that…