Comments on: A quick idea for Google

By: admin

admin — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 20:31:17 +0000

I’ve obviously explained myself poorly – it’s SIMPLE to remove ads. AdBlock does it quite well. I don’t WANT to take them away, for the simple fact that they pay for the internet. I just want them to be more interesting to me.

This first attempt does it in a very primitive way – it simply makes every google adwords ad I see, look like it’s about a single site – one that *I* pick. I’ll have to get more sophisticated later on.

By: Doug Ransom

Doug Ransom — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 17:26:05 +0000

You may find advertising repugnant. I think an important question to consider is how does your target market feel about ads? You may find your target user base simply considers advertising boring.

No doubt viewing ads is undesirable for almost everyone, but free service like web search or facebook provides more than enough value to make up for it. The cost to me ignoring an ad on a google search is $0.0005. On facebook, is probably closer to 0.005 because the ad may actually distract me from achieving whatever it is I am trying to do on facebook.

I wonder how much Google could make selling memberships, which include ad-free web searching?

By: Joshua McKenty

Joshua McKenty — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:35:00 +0000

I’ve added the script to userscripts.org, at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/16424 – it’s primitive and incomplete, but I think it shows what’s possible. Anyone want to help?

By: Joshua McKenty

Joshua McKenty — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 08:17:00 +0000

Gone a bit farther again – added a “delete” button next to each ad, which I’ll use to save the URL in GM. Not sure what to do with it, though – either I build a client/server solution where I push those URLs back into the keyword page (in some microformat for exclusion), and wait for the Google refresh, or I delete the ads as they come in.

I have a feeling that I’ll end up pulling adsense with XHR, decomposing the ads and displaying them manually. Which feels… bad.

The alternative is to push the limits of the adsense URL parameters. Anyone know good tricks there?

By: Joshua McKenty

Joshua McKenty — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 07:08:00 +0000

Quick note - I whipped together a simple version of this. It simply uses my blog as the source for keywords of interest to me, and rewrites all the google adsense iframes on the page to match.

Future improvements:

Make it an extension, so it can capture the outgoing google iframe call (no double loading).

Mix the content of the page into the keywords somehow.

Note that I'm specifically NOT rewriting the client ID - that would be stealing from the page owners, and therefore bad, m'kay?