Competition commission digs into adwords

Competition commission has ordered a probe into google's business practices in relation to its advertising service adwords. according to sources, the probe was ordered after the Competition Commission of India (CCI) found “prima facie evidence” that Google has abused its dominant market position by being discriminatory in allotting keywords to matrimonial site Bharatmatrimony.com.

Consim India which runs properties likes bharatmatrimony.com and host of other regional matrimonial websites filed a case against google alleging that it has used its dominance in the search market to indulge in discriminatory and retaliatory practices.

Its was the same story that has been played in the western markets several times, it revolves around using trade marks or product names of competitors to promote one's own service. For example when you type maruti alto you will be shown ads for hyundai eon, because the hyundai has chosen to target the keyword 'maruti alto' but the case of consim could be a bit different as its domain name almost 250 of them are all generic keywords like if you search for tamil matrimony you will see ads of shaadi.com or simplymarry.com in google's sponsored result. What consim claims is that the keyword "tamil matrimony" is its trademark since its owns tamilmatrimony.com. Likewise it owns several other domains like brahminmatrimony.com or agarwalmatrimony.com.

What i personally think is that there is no strength to this case as the keywords are generic, there is no other way for a tamil guy to search for tamil matrimonial site without using the keyword tamil matrimony. Its fine if the case is for targeting keyword bharatmatrimony which is not essentially a generic keywords and there are alternative keywords available.

The current probe may or may not be related to the above case, it seems to be about discriminatory pricing of keywords. But as far as i know, google uses a totally automated keyword pricing mechanism that uses factors like demand for a keyword, the quantity of traffic required and ctr of the ad in question to come up with a price.

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Google's new advertising metrics

Google has proposed new advertising metrics to help marketers know the impact of their campaigns or to be sure of the effectiveness of their campaigns. This metrics is specifically for the display ad business. Because in search and text ad the billing is mostly on per click basis, but in display advertising (image banners) the campaigns are mostly run on cpm (that is cost per 1000 ad views).

The problem with current model in CPM advertising is that an advertiser pays for every impression that is served, that is every time the banner loads on a website the advertiser is charged for that. But there is no guarantee for the advertiser that the advertisement has actually been seen by the website visitor. Thats where google's new metric Active view comes in. Active view makes sure that the advertiser is billed only when  50% of the ad is visible for at least a second.

Which means that the advertiser who is displaying the ad the bottom of this blog, which you might not see otherwise wont be billed for it. I personally believe that its a fair metric to be used. It will help advertisers spend more on digital advertising because they can be sure that their ads are being seen.

Since google is world's largest advertising company, every other network will have to follow them. Which will require significant changes in all the ad-serving platforms globally.

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BSNL starts hosting and cloud services

BSNL has launched 6 data centers across various locations in the country along with dimension data to offer hosting and cloud services. Its data centers are located at Mumbai, Faridabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Ludhiana and Ghaziabad. Interestingly all of them are located in western and central India.

Dimension data has invested around 200 crores in the operations, BSNL will basically be the bandwidth provider in this arrangement. What dimension data gets from this is access to psu and government clients. Already IOC and some other government departments are running a pilot.

Enterprise clients in the private sector will initially be skeptical about using BSNl's service, but if the service is proved effective then they wont have much problem in getting clients.

As we all know the cost of bandwidth in India is incredibly high, its not viable for small website operators to host their websites in India at affordable prices, thats why bulk of the Indian website operators choose US or Europe based hosting. When more data centers are setup in India, the price of bandwidth will slowly decrease. Which will be beneficial to everyone. It will also save foreign exchange.

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Paid links? buildmyrank.com shuts down

Buildmyrank.com used to be one of the popular link building services. The company has announced that it has shut down services because of a google de-indexing. This has happened to other service providers in the past. With this google sends a clear warning to all those people who are into paid link business, the message is clear you have to earn your links and not buy them. If you want to buy traffic then there is adwords.

This also means that website owners should take care of their link building efforts in-house, because its not safe to outsource the link building work to some other agency who might end up doing something that google doesnt like, esp these agencies are into paid links and google has specifically mentioned that its against paid links.
And websites who are selling paid links? I dont need to say anything more, you are on a path to be de-indexed.

On a daily basis, we monitor our domain network to check metrics like page rank, indexed pages, etc. As with any link-building network, some de-indexing activity is expected and ours has been within a permissible range for the past two years. Unfortunately, this morning, our scripts and manual checks have determined that the overwhelming majority of our network has been de-indexed (by Google), as of March 19, 2012. In our wildest dreams, there’s no way we could have imagined this happening. 

Read the post by the company here

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Tips for protection against trojans

Trojans are viruses in disguise. They spread so unknowingly and accidentally that one does not get enough time to take any corrective actions like using Trojan Removers immediately. They can hide in anything people search often while on the net. These can include free games, movie, songs, and some others. The attack of a Trojan often takes place while downloading any of these or while carelessly opening an email attachment. The best strategy against Trojans is to be alert against any such dubious looking files, attachments or emails.  

One can take the following precautionary measures to avoid mishaps on their computer system caused by these viruses.

One must ascertain both the source and content of every file before downloading it. You must be sure that you know the sender of the file or are familiar with the file server and also the contents of the file should be trustable. One should especially be very careful if one performs a lot of downloading tasks.

Sometimes even if the sender of the file is a known and dependable person opening a file may be risky. There are many Trojans that automatically try

Even if the file comes from a friend, you still must be sure what the file is before opening it, because many Trojans will automatically try to spread and multiply themselves to friends in an email address book or on an Internet Relay Chat channel. If a friend is sending a file you never wanted or asked for then there is definitely something fishy. Taking precaution at this point saves you from a lot of trouble. So if you are doubtful about a file sent to you just ask the concerned person first or else you can also scan the attachment with the help of a fully updated anti-virus program.

One should also be very tactful against hidden file extensions. Trojans are executable programs, which mean that on opening the file it performs some actions. In Windows, executable programs have file extensions like "exe", "vbs", "com", "bat", etc. One should be very watchful against hidden file extensions. Windows by default conceals the last extension of a file, so that harmless looking "susie.jpg" might actually be "susie.jpg.exe" – a hidden executable Trojan. To avoid getting tricked in this manner it better to cover these troublesome extensions.

One should not use features in programs that automatically take you to preview files. This seemingly convenient feature may prove to be bane for your computer system. Never blindly type commands that others tell you to type, or go to web addresses mentioned by strangers, or run preplanned programs or scripts. This may end up in a Trojan infection or other alarming problem.

It is the general tendency of computer users to have a laid back attitude as they have run anti-virus programs. Unfortunately these antivirus programs do not provide complete protection against many viruses and Trojans even when they fully updated.  Anti-virus programs only serve as a backup and it does not provide all round security to your computer. Specifically designed Trojan Remover is greatly helpful in tackling situations like these.

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