I was waiting since last year for Google to introduce their payment system, as I was hoping that they will also handle payments for Romanian companies.

Google checkout was released yesterday, but it seems that it's US only for now. The concept is simple, I wasn't able to login nor to create my GCheckout account as I'm not American :), but from the Flash tour I've seen it seems that the service will make AdWords clients' life easier by allowing faster purchasing.

It's clearly competing against PayPal, at least from my non-US perspective (PayPal refused to create an account for us, too :). The fees are 2%+30c, a very good price compared to the 5.5%+45c that we pay now to 2Checkout.

Alexandru

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I love the personalized Google. It remembers my searches, it provides me slighly better results, and so I have a "personal" search engine.

However - I use google often as a "link" searcher. When I blog about something, I usually search for the company and copy the link directly from the google search.

With personal Google - I can't do it anymore. For example, when searching for "Java Studio Creator 2", the link to the product homepage is.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=........&ei=a1zbQ_.......

As you can see, it points to the Google server, and this means that Google will know for sure that I click this link, and will use this information to give me better results.

But I need the "original link back". I hope I'll see it there in the future

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It's on...

Yahoo has definately started the war with Google - betting on "social".

Del.icio.us was purchased today by Yahoo. Along with the whole Web 2.0 - tagging movement - personal blogging (yahoo 360) - we can see a more powerful Yahoo ready to face its rivals - and ready to use the community as a source for it's "used-to-be-proprietary" content.

Slashdot coverage here.

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Google has just released another product - Google Analytics - a product that is supposed to improve the way people understand their websites and optimize them for better results.
It's kind of interesting how Google is able to make all these ex-commercial products free - I mean, it should cost a lot to understand how people browse each site on the Internet ...

However,  I see multiple advantages Google could get from this service:

• first, what people do on a website should be extremely relevant for the search engine results... Bounces (hits of a single click made on a site) after a search could mean that the specific search result is irelevant, etc.
  
• second, the AdWords optimization thing ... I'm kind of skeptical on this one, as used wisely, a traffic analyzer will definately make Google loose money in the short term - by telling the advertiser which ads are not performing right.
  

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Yes another tactics used by scammers to fool Google. I wonder why Google don't react or know about this ...

The approach is very simple - Copy/Paste Google generated code in your pages, and then you'll have successful "hits" that might bring you lots of money. I haven't tested it yet, but I'll try to describe how "I think" they are doing...

Let's see how this works. Normally, to activate Google Adsense, you have to include a JavaScript code section in your page. As you can see, this code just do a call to the Google web services, which will determine the current site, and that will deliver the right and uptodate ads for the curreent site content.

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "pub-9654545106692959";
google_ad_width = 120;google_ad_height = 600;
google_ad_format = "120x600_as";google_ad_channel ="";
//--></script>
<script type="text/javascript"  src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</script>

However, it seems that the inventive minds of the evil scammers has discovered a way to trick this technique, and the approach is simple - they just copy/paste the HTML code generated by Google AdWords in any of their pages. This way, I can do with ease a site with empty content, and start pasting ads from anybody I want, making good money out of it.

Step 1 - get a good domain name - something that people often mistake when writing

www.mosforge.net is a "fake" copy of http://www.osforge.com/ (I think :). It seems that they are doing fake advertising, and they can paste legit AdWords content in their fake pages and then benefit of this :(

Step 2 - get an AdSense account

This can be easy done here - https://www.google.com/adsense/?sourceid=ASO&subid=US-HA-Jan0605

Step 3 - checkout some expensive Ads around here

You can do this in several ways.

1. Get an google Adwords account, and start looking for some popular keywords (you can use their keywords suggest tool to get keywords, and use their price estimates/day to see which of them are expensive - hint - you have to try different prices per click, the see your rank in the page to see if others are bidding on the same term
2. Check out this site - it's pretty cool - www.googspy.com (check out how PHAkt advertising goes :) - http://www.googspy.com/SearchTerm.aspx?id=5318)
3. in my case, I will test with HTMLarea

Step 4 - search for those terms on the Internet

You have to be creative doing this - I don't have a solution yet ... Anyway - probably you can put your ads online for a while and see the sites that hit you as referres. Then crawl these sites to search for other's ads.

Step 5 - retrieve the Google Generated code

Firefox + DomInspector - it's very easy to retrieve the Google generated code in a specific site, just by peeking inside the page HTML content. Two screenshots to proove you this.

For example, our ad on www.htmlarea.com brings in the following GoogleAdsense URLs

• /pagead/iclk?adurl=http://www.interaktonline.com/Products/KTML/Overview/%3Ffrom%3Dgg_ktml&sa=l&ai=BM6<snip>Y29tLw&num=2&client=ca-pub-5454961553038759

• /pagead/iclk?adurl=http://www.interaktonline.com/Products/KTML/Overview/%3Ffrom%3Dgg_ktml&sa=l&ai=B0dWe<snip>&num=2&client=ca-pub-5454961553038759

As we can see, Google IS using some kind of unique number per each display - the "ai" parameter. It looks like a hash function.

An (working) example of a Google Scam...

Let's take this link for example http://events.mosforge.net/search/webarchiv.php4?task=search&adtype=2&query=Htmlarea&userofferid=5412647&language=e&searchsession=7f19253255e2e02cf423

Inside the page, there is NO CONTENT whatsoever that might point to our KTML product (expect for a fake search for "htmlarea" - which is a keyword we monitor), but in the main content area there is one of our AdWords ads. Looks Googlish, behaves Googlish (the JS code looks older, though).

Even the links sends the same AdSense parameters to a redirect.php page

/search/redirect.php?sid=7f19253255e2e02cf423&id=5412647&t=017320&forward=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fpagead%2Ficlk%3Fadurl%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.interaktonline.com%2FProducts%2FKTML%2FOverview%2F%253Ffrom%253Dgg_ktml%26sa%3Dl%26ai%3DBS<snip>yAEB%26num%3D1&pos=1&r=0.03&surl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.interaktonline.com&kid=1027031

We see several parameters included in this page:

• sid - probably a session id
• id - another id
• t - some other id
• forward - our google Ads URL
• ai - some huge hash very similar to Google
• pos - the ad position in the page
• r - some "relevance", maybe?
• surl - the url to show when onMouseOver
• kid - probably another id

The page will target "/search/redirect.php", and this php page will probably be in charge with processing and sending the parameters to Google. A.k.a "faking the process".

Subsequest requests to this page will return different "ai" parameters. So the ad is valid and will probably work on GoogleAds, "stealing" my money.

What's happening? I suppose that one of the following answers is correct:

a) Google has a non-JavaScript, server side AdSense version, that can be positioned by anybody on any site - regardless the site content - this is really EVIL of Google

b) these guys know how to "fake" AdSense view - this would be really EVIL of them

Who has some free time to experiment? I really want this to stop.

Alexandru

PS - in AdWords, you have the possibility to disable your ads to show on various domains. I've just disabled mosforge.net. Surprise! my ad is still there :)

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