Google Q & A: What questions do you want to ask Google?
“The One Bit of Info Google Withholds: How It Works, Advertisers, competitors and Wall Street analysts are frustrated by the company's secrecy,” said Chris Gaither in the latimes.com earlier this week.
Google will have the opportunity provide more information on how it works next week when it holds a Q & A with financial analysts and investors to “offer more opportunities for the investment community to interact with our senior management.”
What questions should Google be asked?
CLICK FRAUD
Click fraud in AdSense reduces your profits and harms your advertisers; click fraud in AdWords increases your profits and harms your advertisers. Do you do more to prevent click fraud in your AdSense operations than in your AdWords operations?
Google Inc. is taking the fight against click fraud to court, suing a Houston-based company for allegedly clicking on sponsored links to fraudulently boost advertising revenues…Google filed a lawsuit last week in Santa Clara County Superior Court in California against Auctions Expert International LLC. The search giant is accusing Auctions Expert of abusing the Google AdSense program, in which Web publishers display Google's pay-per-click ads and receive a share of the revenue, according to a eweek.com report.
Your proposed settlement in the Lane’s Gifts v. Google click fraud suit does not provide for cash refunds to your advertisers as reimbursement for charges from fraudulent clicks: Will you agree to reimburse your advertisers in cash, rather than in Google AdWords credits, for payments they made to you for fraudulent clicks?
For all eligible invalid clicks, we will offer credits which can be used to purchase new advertising with Google. We do not know how many will apply and receive credits, but under the agreement, the total amount of credits, plus attorneys fees, will not exceed $90 million, according to Google.
SEARCH DATA TRANSPARENCY
Many of your competitors in search make absolute data available to the public on the exact words and phrases the public is searching on at their sites, as well the number of times the words and phrases are searched on, such as the Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool. Your Google Trends and your AdWords Keyword Tool, however, provide no quantifiable data and your disclaimers regarding your use of approximations and selected inclusion in determining the “information” the tools present seem to suggest the tools are not producing meaningful data. Will you make absolute data available to the public on the exact words and phrases the public is searching on at your properties, as well the number of times the words and phrases are searched on?
There are many more areas to question Google on—user privacy, transparency in AdWords pricing, content caching and repurposing…—stay tuned to this Digital Micro-Markets Blog for more questions for Google.
UPDATE: HERE ARE THE TEN QUESTIONS FOR GOOGLE
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