I’ve recently been reading a lot of articles mentioning that the sponsored results from many search engines are high-risk candidates for spyware and other scams. This study was mentioned by SearchEngineWatch, reported on by the BBC, and by Wall Street Journal.
With the higher risk of scams coming from sponsored results, it’s very unfortunate that Scandoo does not also detect the presence of risks in search advertising.
Obviously, this is a completely separate results set than the normal search engine results - and we certainly don’t want to inflate the advertising costs of honest advertisers through automated testing! However, it would certainly be great if a way could be found for a tool such as Scandoo to follow the links contained in sponsored links without being registered as a visit.
It seems that such a thing would be relatively simple - the automated requests coming from Scandoo could be routed through a specific server, IP address, or use a specific referer string which could be eliminated automatically from AdWords accounting. Manual clicks in the search results pages, however, would need to be managed separately.
It would be a nice addition to the service!
I was recently made aware of a very interesting search application called Scandoo. Scandoo is a sort of variation on the metasearch idea with a very valuable twist. Rather than searching a collection of websites and collating their results, it searches one particular engine of your choice (currently offering MSN, Yahoo, and Google) and pre-scans all search results looking for malicious "badware" (adware, spyware, etc.) and examining for potential illegal activity.
Unlike adblockers, spyware shields, or antivirus software, which can only help you out AFTER you’ve visited the problem site, Scandoo warns you in advance if there are risks in visiting sites in your search results.
We scan each and every one of your search results to see if there is anything malicious behind the links and then feed the security results back into your search page. Unfortunately, using a database lookup alone can’t protect you with better or safer searches, and because database technology relies on updates you can’t rely on its accuracy. That’s why Scandoo is designed to give you advanced warning – before you click – by scanning content in real-time.
There’s always a risk in any search that a site may try and deliver malicious software to your computer. In addition, there’s the risk that a site may be using language you don’t want to see, advocating hate crimes or discrimination, or providing less-than modest photographs. Scandoo can be configured to warn about a wide variety of categories.
The default setting warns you about Sex or Nudity, Hate and Discrimination, Illegal activities, and Weapons. You can also get warnings for Arts and Culture, Nature, or Technology.
I think that’s a little strange, honestly - I turned on the Art and Culture warning and ran a test and, indeed, I was warned against visiting my favorite museum…
However, in addition to these warnings about specific topics, the tool provides warnings about security risks - try this search to see an example of the various results.
Not something I see as an everyday tool, but I can certainly see some times when I would want to use it - researching an article on illegal software, looking into web security techniques, etc.
Moving a step beyond the text or image split, Google is now providing the option to use video in their contextual advertising programs. This new video ads will be Click-to-play, allowing the user to have control over whether they actually want to see the video. (None of those invasive semi-transparent Flash advertisements!)
The complete announcement at the Adwords Blog provides detailed information.
This could open up a whole new marketing campaign style with Google Adwords - viral video marketing has, on a number of occasions, created circumstances where a particular video circulates exceptionally heavily due to the network buzz. What happens if a video only available through the Adwords network becomes virally popular? Does this mean that sites which may potentially be carrying that video gain massive traffic, just to visit an ad? Will the key search terms which spawn the ad suddenly spike in Google? What does this mean for keyword analysis?
I’m assuming also, that only a click through the advertisement to the destination site will be billed - but I’d be concerned that the number of accidental clicks could skyrocket, if viewers are accidentally clicking on the destination URL instead of the video. Although, given the small area which is specified for the destination URL this shouldn’t be a huge issue.
This new product raises some interesting marketing possibilities - and a few intriguing questions!