Said search website was probably google. If that's the case they don't have to sell it, they just use it to target ads from their own network. If you search something on Google it will follow you like the plague.
I'm sorry but how do you know it was the search website that sold information? It could as well be the first web site that she opened that happened to be on the same ad network as other related web sites she visited. Just guessing.
Even Google is supporting these shady practices by powering some of the search toolbars and probably paying the toolbar owners for ad clicks. See MyWebSearch (http://home.mywebsearch.com/) mentioned in the article.
They advertise their own search result pages on Google, then sell a bunch of ads at higher CPC on their page, with the idea being that they'll make enough on the commission from the second ad to pay for the Google ad with a profit.
One thing they tend to do is when one tries to go to a site that does not exist, they instead serve up a 'search' page with their ad links and other unrelated junk. Perhaps they don't want to lose the ad revenue from hijacking their user searches?
Google had search and used that to prop the rest. Simple.
And Google is making money by removing more and more "free" listings and replacing them ads and their content. Morality aside, eventually they'll lose their effectiveness.
Google wants to be a content host and an ad broker and a search engine. Each of these is reasonable in isolation. Yet you can search on google, and Google will serve you an ad linking to a google.com site, and that site scams you out of money. This isn't theoretical, I know because my family was hit.
This entire thread kinda ignore that they are also selling ad space on many sites and their objective function in ordering search is not just the best possible result. Case in point the many sites stealing stack overflow content and filling it with adverts ranking higher than the source, that committed the cardinal sin of running their own and network.
Probably trying to build a case that they're just trying to compete, not steal traffic from existing sources via their position as the search provider.
Was it a Search or a Display Campaign for Google? I could understand that adsense webmasters used clickfarms. However finding out that google is using clickfarms for Search campaigns would be uncovering the greatest scam of the Internet.
I have a suspicion a significant amount of their income comes from exactly that kind of extortion, and (very much relatedly) from tricking people who aren't Good at Computers into clicking ads that they think are search results, not from any machine-learning magic. At least as far as search ads are concerned.
This article is bullshit. Top result for a search for Google is an Adword for his site, followed by a natural search result for his site, followed predictably by Wikipedia and some affiliate sites dedicated to promoting his site.
It's called re-marketing - the site you look at allows the ad network to track your visit to your site, then they show you ads for that site as you navigate the web. It's horrible but incredibly effective.
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