Report: Google Sold Ads to Piracy Promoters
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Google Inc. sold advertising to two men who allegedly marketed an application designed to find and download pirated movies online, a business relationship that has angered big movie and TV studios, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
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Advertisers get peek under the hood Google is offering advertisers more information on where their adverts are appearing and how they are performing.â¦
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InfoWorld - A security company has identified a Trojan horse program that replaces Google text advertisements on Web pages with ads from another source, depriving Google of revenue and potentially causing problems for end users.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- An ethics group is urging Congress to scrutinize Google Inc.'s copyright controls after finding hundreds of apparently pirated movies available on the Internet search leader's Web site.
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A security company has identified a Trojan horse program that replaces Google text advertisements on Web pages with ads from another source, depriving Google of revenue and potentially causing problems for end users.Google may be powerless to stop the trick since it involves the modification of an internal PC file, called the hosts file, that is used to match domain names of Web sites with IP (Internet protocol) addresses, said Romanian security company BitDefender.When a person visits a Web site, the browser checks the hosts file to see if it has an IP address for a particular domain name. If the hosts file is corrupted or hijacked, the browser can be directed to fetch a different Web page than the one the user intended to.Modifying the hosts file can be done for legitimate reasons. For example, PC users can change the hosts to block banner ads served from known ad networks. When a Web page tries to contact an ad server, the request is diverted by the hosts file and no ad appears.BitDefender said in an advisory this particular malware directs a browser to download advertisements from a different server than Google&#39;s ad server.BitDefender named the malware Trojan.Qhost.WU and said it is not spreading fast and poses a &quot;medium&quot; risk of damage. It did not say how the Trojan is being circulated, and company representatives did not return a call for comment.Besides costing Google ad revenue, there is a danger that those replacement advertisements could contain links to sites with malicious software, BitDefender said. Web site owners who buy ads through Google, as well as Google itself, can lose out on both Web traffic and revenue if people are diverted from its ads.There is not much that Google can do for those who download the malware. However, security products such as BitDefender&#39;s can detect and remove it.Without commenting on the Trojan specifically, Google said it removes Web sites from its search index that contain malware.&quot;We have canceled customer accounts that display ads re-directing users to malicious sites or that advertise a product violating our software principles,&quot; the company said in a statement.
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Information in sworn depositions indicates that Google took a remarkably active role in selling advertising space to two men who sold software allegedly designed to facilitate peer-to-peer downloading.
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A trademark infringement suit against Google may alter how the search industry makes a profit.
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A small company delivering ads to net-based games is being snapped up by Google for $23 million. Plus: Darwinia developer eyes consoles. In Game|Life.
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Blog: Random search strings in Google can yield sites hosting drive-by downloads of malicious content.
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Google undeservedly has gotten all the credit for many clicks on the&#160;online ads&#160;it delivers via its search engine, but Microsoft wants to put a stop to that.So said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of Microsoft&#39;s Advertiser Publisher Solutions Group during a panel discussion at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco Thursday.Currently, systems for tracking ad conversions and analyzing online marketing campaigns focus on the last ad a user viewed or clicked on, he said. This gives all credit to that last publisher and not to others the user may have been at before and influenced the user to seek more information about the advertiser, McAndrews said.In particular, this situation has unfairly benefitted Google because many times someone will see a display ad on a site and go to Google, search for the vendor&#39;s name, and then click on the vendor&#39;s text ad served by Google, he said.But Microsoft is developing a technology called &quot;conversion attribution&quot; that will track the trail of ads seen by a user, so that advertisers get a more complete understanding of how effective their marketing campaigns are, he said.Along the way, advertisers will get a more balanced view of the value of their ads across a wider trail of Web sites and via a variety of ad formats, not just the last ad displayed by the last publisher, which is often Google, he said.&quot;We&#39;ll introduce conversion attribution to give [more publishers] credit and it will devalue search [advertising],&quot; McAndrews said.Search advertising is the largest online ad format, accounting for about 40 percent of total ad spend. Google has built its empire on these pay-per-click ads, which the company matches to the content of queries on its search engine and to the content of third-party Web sites on its ad network.While search has been the main driver of the blistering growth of online advertising in the past five years, that won&#39;t be the case in the coming five years, McAndrews said.In addition to the &quot;conversion attribution&quot; technology, the shift away from search ads will be fueled by the increased spending in online ads from large companies which prefer display and rich media advertising designed to boost their brands, and for which pay-per-click text ads are less effective, he said.Google didn&#39;t have any representatives participating in the panel. The company didn&#39;t immediately respond to a request for comment.Microsoft didn&#39;t immediately respond to a request for clarification on the availability of the &quot;conversion attribution&quot; technology.McAndrews, who&#160;came to Microsoft recently via its $6 billion purchase of aQuantive, of which he was the CEO, shared the stage with other ad executives in a panel titled &quot;Edge: The Advertising Model&quot; moderated by conference chair John Battelle.
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The joy of web app advertising...sob Google is rolling out yet another way of pumping advertising onto the web with Gadget Ads, and this time it reckons it can trick you into thinking it's real "content", whatever that is.â¦
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It is commonly believed that Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion because the wildly popular video-sharing site represented a great way for the search giant to expand into video advertising.
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Google Founders Selling Off Stock  Is this a sign that Google stack is overpriced? Or does it just mean that since there is so much interest in Google and its shares right now that the founders decided to sell off a big part of their holdings with the search engine. Dow ...
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Google Inc. is working with Dow Jones & Co. Inc., Conde Nast, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and other large content companies to syndicate their video content on other Web sites, the New York Times reported on Monday.
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Google &#038; eBay Partner for &#8216;Click to Call&#8217; The WSJ (sub req&#8217;d) and NY Times (reg. req&#8217;d) are reporting this morning on a deal in which Google will distribute ads on eBay&#8217;s pages outside the US. eBay has a similar deal with Yahoo! domestically. This is something of a surprise given that eBay aggressively courted Google [...]
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Policy group cries foul Google continues to fight allegations that it's promoting video piracy. In March, entertainment giant Viacom slapped Google with a $1bn lawsuit over copyrighted videos posted to YouTube, the site Google purchased last fall, and now, the National Legal and Policy Center is asking whether the search engine cum world power is facilitating copyright infringement on its home-grown video-sharing site, Google Video.â¦
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YouTube investors, executives and its founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, have filed to sell as much as $1.53 Billion in Google stocks which were received when Google bought YouTube last year. Sequoia Capital is making out quite well on the deal also, with $504.4 million coming their way. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are expected [...]