Archive for category Internet

Microsoft Sues a Canadian Family for $750,000

This company wants $750,000 dollars from a mother and two sons

This company wants $750,000 dollars from a mother and two sons

Two Canadians along with their mother have been sued by Microsoft for “click fraud”. Canadians, with their mothers – who thought they could be “damaging to Microsoft’s reputation?”

Microsoft claimed that the family was running two websites, one about auto insurance and the other about a massively multiplayer online game (World of Warcraft).

In the Internet Marketing industry, PPC stands for the “Pay Per Click” ad scheme, in which you as the advertiser make companies like Google and MSN display your ads in relevant sites; and pay them each time your ads are clicked. The amount you pay depends on the competition for your keywords.

Microsoft maintains that this Canadian family has created a scheme in which they wrote a script that imitates a person browsing the Internet and clicking the ads of their competitors. So their competitors have to pay for those clicks, and they gain nothing in return because the “visitor” is not actually interested in them.

Sure it’s their right to sue for as much as they want, the eventual amount will be decided by the court anyway, and that’s if Microsoft wins the case. But fuck it, man, $750,000? What damage could this little Canadian family have done to you that demands a $750,000?

Microsoft says “their revenues went down and their reputation was damaged”. Oh fuck. A Canadian mother and two sons damaged the otherwise completely stellar reputation of Microsoft.


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Microsoft’s Bing gets new PORN-ONLY DOMAIN

Well, Bill Gates is not as horny as it sounds, but it is true. In an effort to better filter search results, Microsoft has

Bing's logo, obviously

Bing's logo, obviously

activated its porn-results-only domain, explicit.bing.net. From now on, all search results that have explicit content in them will be redirected to explicit.bing.net, and the results will be served from there. To the end user, this will make no difference.

But for places like libraries and internet cafés (well, some of them), it’s undesirable for GET LAID IN LOS ANGELES TONIGHT to appear in their computers. So, all they have to do is to block the explicit results domain, so they won’t see those kind of results.

After its hard hyped launch, Bing is now by seen by many as an alternative to Google. At the core, Bing is the same as Live Search – I personally haven’t seen an improvement or a change on their crawling and ranking algorithm. What Microsoft did was to add some “features” instead of core search engine performance.

Obviously, Microsoft needed this to remind people that it had a search engine – most people didn’t even know that MSN had its own search engine. So, by adding some nice features such as video previews and categorizing information, Microsoft was able to tout Bing as its “new search engine” whereas in the core, nothing changed much. This enabled Microsoft to advertise like mad and remind people that it had a search engine.

None of the new features on Bing seem to be major game changers, but as I said, it wasn’t Microsoft’s point that they should change the game by adding features or improving their results; the point was to make it known that they had an alternative to Google.

Bing’s (and formerly MSN Search’s) different ranking results from Google mostly occured due to the fact what some people are calling “an outdated algorithm”; that is, not caring much about the site’s quality but putting emphasis on the site’s keywords as defined by META tags etc.

To make it clearer; Bing puts a lot more emphasis on the actual keywords you are searching for, and is pushing the website quality in second place; while what Google does is, taking your keywords, matching them to the context of sites for those keywords and then displaying the best quality websites for that keyword.

So, it’s easier for a smaller site to rank higher for a certain keyword it has puts its emphasis on; which can lead to positive and negative results. The positive results are that you are able to get exactly what you are looking for in the first few sites on Bing’s results page; but the negativity comes from the fact that some low-quality websites are able to attain high positions for important keyword phrases by methods such as keyword-stuffing.

So Google search is usually more reliable, but if you can’t find something you are looking for in Google, I think Bing is a much better alternative than Yahoo.


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