Not Good Enough to Sell Out

Y'know, I've been leery of search engine giant Gooble for some time (I'm purposely misspelling their name, they don't need me helping to spread it around the 'net).

First, I started noticing a lot of "Sponsored Links" in web pages. Now, I've been dedicated to killing advertisements in pages that I visit for a long time, mostly because I got tired of waiting for pages to load over dialup connections because of the damned adverts. This got me started using proxy software on my computer that could "ignore" banner ads. As the code insertions for adverts got more sophisticated, I learned to write custom scripts for the proxy software to take the ads out of the pages.

Then I started seeing a lot of requests and data returning from "analytics" script embedded in pages. More proxy scripts to defeat these invasive requests.

I stopped using common browser versions and instead switched to Opera, which besides being very configurable, was one of the first browsers to allow content blocking.

My web server started getting requests from advert-checking bots, then image collecting bots came and (presumably) cataloged my images for presentation in response to searches. These got blocked via robots.txt.

Not long ago, I noticed that search result links returned by Gooble ~weren't~ going directly to the pages that contained the content I wanted, but instead went to Gooble, which acted like a proxy server, redirecting the request to the site that originated the page, likely with cookies, analytics, and scripts attached and embedded. More custom scripts for the local proxy software to remove these munged links and send my page request directly to the domain that the link only appeared to direct to. Try this yourself, search for something in Gooble, then hover your mouse pointer over the links, or right click and copy-to-clipboard so you can paste the link address into a text editor. The link leads to:

httb://www.gooble.com/url?q=http://www.the_domain_you_want.com/search term.htm&sa=U&ei=fbgxUOWxN6_AiwLqioCgAw&ved=0CCEQFjAB&usg=AFQjCNEXKHCRgAXAgRRJIHldZLC

(this example is somewhat scrambled, so it's not a real link)

Compare the link that you hover over on the results to that which is displayed in text on the screen with your search results. See a difference?

When you click the search results link, your request gets sent to Gooble, along with the domain address and page request of the "real" page (the one you want to view) as a (?q=) query string, with a long string of alpha-numeric garbage attached to the end, the purpose of which is, at the very least, to tie in with a cookie that Gooble put on your computer, and possibly a lot more, such as the ability to establish a persistent connection so that they can track where you go after clicking through from the search results.

Slimy. Evil. Underhanded.

But, I expected that.

Some time back, I put a "donation" link that shows on every page of the site. The purpose was to perhaps get a few people to begin sending in a token amount of spare change to help me pay for the ongoing expenses to keeping this site afloat. It hasn't been a big success. I get a small donation once every couple of months, not enough, really, to even pay for the DNS account, much less the domain renewal when it comes due in December.

All along, I've resisted the obvious temptation to put advertisements on the site. I've always considered it to be an intrusion to the viewer and to myself.

Well, this afternoon, I decided to get into bed with the Devil, and signed up for a Gooble AdNonSense account. Just a few pages on the site consume the majority of the bandwidth, pages that impart valuable information. I decided that people seeking this information would not mind having to scroll past a couple of "Sponsored Links" to get to the information that they desire.

After signing up and answering a couple of intrusive questions that made me uncomfortable, I received a message saying that I'd be notified after the Gooblebots had inspected my site. That happened quickly enough, but the result was that I was rejected. "Inadequate content" was the excuse given. "Resubmit your request after site construction is completed" was suggested.

Thinking that perhaps the happy bots had gotten snared by one or more of my spam protections on the site, I checked the logs and overwrote some lines in the robots.txt file to make it easier for them to get in. No dice, I was rejected a second time, same automated message: "inadequate content".

Gooble is, after all, first and foremost, an advertising company. That's what they do. The search engine is simply a way to drive advertising. The Chrome browser, Android operating system, F.A.T. online data backup, and anything else that they are developing is, to be sure, yet another method of delivering advertising. That's how they make their money. Oh, that and collecting and selling your personal information, browsing habits, purchase history, and anything else that they can get their money-grubbing, greenback grabbing hands on.

The good news in this is: No Gooble AdNonSense adverts on the site, Mr. Sharkey's is still ad and banner-free.

The bad news is, when the domain renewal comes around in December, I might just decide to pull the plug and let the site die. If its not good enough to sell one-tenth-of-a-cent sponsored link ads, what good is it?