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Comment by kvs | Hacker News Reader

Agreed.

After reading the comments at cdixson.org by the author and reading openness article at Google, it seems like author is simply saying: "I agree they won't open it. But then they should stop talking sactimoniously about openness." which I agree with as well.

Here is an interesting perspective: "And millions of websites will have to continue blindly relying on a small group of anonymous engineers in charge of the secret algorithm that determines their fate." Have you ever been delisted by Google? Is there a transparent process to get back on the list? Perhaps transparency is what Google needs the most at the moment.

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> Perhaps transparency is what Google needs the most at the moment.

Absolutely, and not only on the search engine part of it, Adwords/Adsense are extremely opaque and as a publisher continuously give you the feeling you're being screwed without any chance to prove that for lack of information.

You say that now but if they provided that transparency then the amount of fraudulent activity would skyrocket. Knowing the details of the algorithms involved does nothing to help you as an advertiser or searcher. Googles extreme impartiality in search and ads is their greatest strength and open sourcing the algorithms involved would do nothing to increase that strength and contribute to a great deal less useful ads and search results on average.

> Googles extreme impartiality in search and ads is their greatest strength

Without proof that is nothing but handwaving, if they are as impartial as you suggest they are they've got nothing to lose by letting you know what their take is and how big a portion of their clicks are confirmed fraud.

As a publisher, couldn't you do some sort of A/B testing with another ad provider? Something like 10% of page views using another set of ads? Or, maybe setup some kind of onclick tracking to verify ad clicks?

I don't know what could be done as verification for the advertiser, but the publisher should be able to do something, right?

No one else gets enough volume :/

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