Comments on: Google Vs. Yahoo Search Ads

By: Martel Firing

Martel Firing — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:23:00 +0000

My two cents — I just received one of those class action suit envelopes offering me crumbs for being ripped off by Yahoo. I threw it away as I always do with those things. Oddly, I don’t remember booking ads on Yahoo.

But I did spend a small fortune on pay-per-click ads on Google. My impression is that at least a third of the clicks I paid for were the result of fraud. I traced back a lot of these clicks and found that they originated on web pages that had been composed by Google, itself — essentially parking and mistaken-entry traps. There were literally dozens of these useless, fake pages, and that’s where an abundance of clicks were coming from. It is inconceivable to me that legitimate web browsers would be sending me traffic from these dummy pages.

I experienced even worse results from another pay-per-click service. This service gave me a lot of traffic, but then actually continued to debit my account for clicks after it was turned off!

The lesson is to be skeptical about results from any of the pay-per-click services.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:20:50 +0000

Google’s search engine still leave much room for improvement. I wanted to compare government orders of vaccine for bird flu to swine flu. I searched “Bird flu vaccine orders” and the results dropped bird and returned results with swine. Same thing with names. You look for John Smith and you get John Adams and Adam Smith.

Google seems to bring back a lot of noise in its search results.

By: Eddie

Eddie — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:11:55 +0000

I think Yahoo’s long-standing and consistent attempts to expand their business into a homepage/internet portal conglomerate has accomplished one major thing: people no longer think of Yahoo first when they want to search for something.