Molly Diesing noticed that some of the ads that Google has been serving to this site have been ads for companies that will sell plagiarized term papers to cheaters. I have added the URLs of the relevant sites to Google’s Ad Filter. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t offer a way of filtering ads by keywords. So, continued vigilance will be required. Let me know if you see an ad that is out of place on an academic site.
By the way, the reason that there are Google ads at all on this site is to defray the computing costs (especially the hosting service) — MIT has no facilities that could host the site, so I am using a commercial vendor.
Update: Ironically, this very post seems to serve as a magnet for ads from these companies (on the individual entry page). So, I can use that as a mousetrap by just checking on what shows up here and add it to the filter.
Another Update: Here is Google’s response to an email I sent them about this issue:
Hello, Thank you for your email. Currently, we don’t offer the option to individually filter out specific ads or types of ads. The only way to filter ads from your site is by blocking all ads from that advertiser’s site. Should we offer the option to filter by type of ad in the future, we’ll be sure to let you know.
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This entry was posted by fintel on Thursday, September 29th, 2005, at 9:09 am.
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