Anti-abortion rights group buying Google ad space to misdirect women who search ‘abortion’

Anti-abortion rights group buying Google ad space to misdirect women who search ‘abortion’
By Ashley Lopez | 05.13.11 | 2:12 pm | More from The Florida Independent

A Texas-based pro-life group has a serious problem with the way search engines work. Their problem, it seems, is that when a woman searches for “abortion” in Google, she is generally directed to ways in which she can obtain an abortion.


Online For Life, a self-described “non-profit outreach group,” has found a way to change that. The group is buying Google ad space in the hopes of misdirecting women looking for information on abortions.


According to Life News, the group wants to go after the over six million results that abortion-related searches bring up in Google by buying ad space “at the top of some of these searches,” and directing women to “clinics that offer a free ultrasound and pro-life counseling.”


Featured content in Google usually appears on the right hand side of the results page. Some search engines place them before actual search results, which are sorted by relevancy, page views, etc.

THE REST:
http://washingtonindependent.com/109539/anti-abortion-rights-group-buying-google-ad-space-to-misdirect-women-who-search-abortion
http://floridaindependent.com/30128/anti-choice-group-targets-women-googling-abortion

They've been doing this crap with the Yellow Pages since Roe v. Wade came down.

That's just what a young woman who is already grappling with a difficult decision needs to be forced to see: dead fetus porn.

If you have to acknowledge you NEED to manipulate others to advance your perspective, your perspective is fucked up.

Google isn't that hard to use.

But it appears that if it is affiliated with an anti-abortion program, fetal torture porn is legal?

I guess there's nothing so twisted that SOMEONE won't get into it.

Speaking as someone who has looked into doing some advertising on Google (I quickly reconsidered once I learned the details of how it works), I can tell you that this could end up boomeranging on them in a big way if enough people know about it.

Most of Google's ads are charged/paid for on a "pay per click" basis. That means if somebody clicks on the link, the person/entity who placed the ad has to pay anywhere from a couple of cents to a few dollars for that one click. And that's whether or not the person who clicked the link stays to look around the website or do anything else. So if there were a group of people who were so inclined, that group could just start clicking this group's link willy-nilly. Not only would it eat up all their bandwidth, but you could very quickly bankrupt their advertising funds.

Another added bonus: Google will allow you to set a "daily budget" for your ad (meaning, once the clicks add up to a certain dollar amount, it will take your ad down for the day so you don't go over your daily allotted amount). So if that group clicks up the bill to the point that they hit their daily budget limit, that ad will disappear for the rest of the day.

Once you realize the ins and outs of advertising on Google, the more you see how ripe for abuse it is (and how generally ineffective the advertising is for the money you spend on it). It seems to me that this strategy is just BEGGING for a counterstrike.

it never ends...