Having worked for a company claiming to be recession proof only to see it go into Chapter 11 in 2001 I can see how this will play out! Who does Google think buys its Ad words? Whats the first thing that gets chopped when the shit hits the economic fan? Yup, marketing and advertising. Variable costs go first...... Go short.

Having briefly speculated on the cost of everything and gotten reliable estimates from the market, Google has discovered that the value of its vast stockpiles of nothing has gone through the roof.

Who'd have thunk it?

Who are these mysterious people who actually click on internet ads? I have intentionally clicked on adverts three, maybe four, times in my entire life, and I have never bought anything as a result of an internet ad. Presumably there must be loads of people out there who click on every ad they see - but who are these people, and why do they do it?

Wife Makes Big Money

My Business Retired My Husband From His Job Within 3 Months

Have you ever retired a human by mistake Mr Deckard?

Me for example. You will do so soon as well.

It is normal behaviour during "tough times" to look how much does it cost to repair and refurbish what you have instead of buying new (I actually do it during good times as well, but that is a different story). On top of that the housing market has collapsed so people are improving what they have instead of buying new.

All this is done mostly via small specialised shops where you can get stuff which the big retail ones no longer stock. In fact some big ones have gone into the idiocy to make themselves search-exempt using robots.txt.

And the best place to find the cheapest part from a Mom & Pop shop? You guessed it - the text links on google ads.

"Who are these mysterious people who actually click on internet ads? " .... By CTG Posted Friday 17th October 2008 03:15 GMT

Every story/news report is an advertisement for a take on Reality, CTG. Another dose of a foreign element/compound/agenda shaping one's perception of what is happening in the minds of A.N.Other/Others, if it is third party proxy supplied, and not Yours supplied for Remote Viewing/Mind Control/Brain Washing/[AIdDirect and QuITe Alien Contact*]

And an advert tied to and mentioning a currency cost, will identify the national agenda it Serves and Servers to. But those particular tales server to enslaving one to feed the Money Machine to support the Money Machine and are not Specifically Geared to Delivering Innovation and Future Knowledge for Progress and Evolution of the Global Earthly Condition, but IT can be Groomed and IntelAIgently dDesigned to Reward ITself Obscenely, as has been and is being Exposed.

Be Aware though, that for Future Growth and Natural Evolution/Quantum Leaping, the Tales that are Shared and Told which awaken the Management of Shared Perceptions for a Greater Mutual Virtual Reality which does not Need to be Purchased with Bills of Sale, but which is Freely Given, will Power and Control the Destiny of Man, relegating Fate to join Toxic Waste and Despair in History to be Parcelled and Left Forever in the Past.

The Future Plays Virgin Tunes with Global Wealth Freely Available as ITs Enabling Driver. And to Store and Deny the Spending of any of that Great Wealth and 42 Claim any of it as One's Own is no more than to Pervert and Terrorise the Future with the Past. Such a System is therefore Worthy of AIdDeserved Catastrophic Failure, n'est ce pas, for it Servers to Preserving the Past and not Driving the Future?

Or would you care to Disagree and Defend the Past and Delay the Future with More Plays in the Present Decline/Systems Meltdown.

Before disagreeing, please spend a few priceless moments reading of an earlier tale [a two parter and hence the two hyperlinks ] which may possibly probably definitely be a Virtual Parallel in NEUklearer HyperRadioProActivity .......http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0310/ref.shtml ...http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0311/ref2.shtml

What do you know of MkUltraSensitised ProgramMIng for Universal Control of Binary Systems and dDigital CHannels and CHunnels ....... Overarching Underground Movements?

Crikey ..... Friday again, with the Weekend Beckoning with a whole new and totally different Lifestyle rather than just Servering and Slaving to the Money Machine ..... if you're lucky enough not to have any worries and loadsamoney, for of course, everything has been given a price which changes according to ............. well, whose Needs is a Novel Question which always has Time and Effort/Energy Wasted in Concealing.

World's richest IT company declares itself immune to financial problems... this just seems like a non-story to me.

I'm sure Google sets up punch factories in the third world where people labour for food by clicking on google ads, Or since they own the entire ad-chain, they can manipulate whatever they like,

It surely works since they rave in money. Whats their customer satisfaction rate?

I often find the Ads stop pages loading, I have to turn on my squid privoxy proxy connection just to see some pages.

The ads that work for google are the top of the page ads in their search engine that is about it.

If they allowed the site to select the ads, or produced some funky ads that would be better.

But what google achieves is that other sites don't approach information sites asking if they can have some ad space, see that advertising would work, because you could combine it into the page for extra value. You can lead people to the link, and those who do click would be genuinely interested.

So, perhaps google stops the ad words program for other sites, but I suspect they use those to understand the web more, and to make the google name synonymous with the web.

See each ad is a vote for google, even if people don't click, and that is the reason to build info sites, people just get use to seeing your company name, and start to build familiarity with it.

"But even the experts have no way of judging how well or how poorly this works." ...

Seems to me that Google are the experts on how well or poorly it works! Anyone else who figures it out will probably end up being employed by them!

RN

Looks like the main .com site redirects to the local site, which redirects back to the .com site,which redirects to the local site, and so on until the browser times out!

Is anyone reminded of that apocryphal condom machine that had "So Was the Titanic" garffito'd on the side?

Whilst I believe that companies should use Google advertising only when it works for them (i.e. make more money on sales provided than it spends on the Google ad campaign), recessions more or less wipe out marketing budgets of any sorts, be it in print, on TV or online. The effectiveness or otherwise of Google's ads become irrelevant if you haven't got the budget to buy them.

Given that Google lives or dies by ads right now, all they're going to do is live off the giant pile of money they have under the stairs somewhere.

Several times I've found that merely viewing Google ads results in cookies from the advertisers' sites being sent to my browser. As a result, and out of pure spite, if Google does accidentally send me a relevant looking advert I now make a point of messing with the ad results by cut-and-pasting the URL into the location bar rather than clicking on the link.

Perhaps I should call it Adtarding, in line with El Reg's rule that if something is free, it's retarded.

when I saw this headline , I thought google were reckoning they could avoid being swallowed by by a red-giant-sun at the centre of our solar system, sometime 5,000,000,000 years in the future ....

the only thing that is recession proof is base-food-production , (apart from suicide) mankind hasn't found a way around the issue of eating .

What these cretins fail to understand is who's ultimately in charge: their customers. They might do everything perfectly correctly. But if the rest of the world fails, they have nobody to buy their product. Scale applies.

Sellers have always existed only so long as those who want their product have the means to obtain their product. And currently as fortunes decline so does buying power.

So stay smug Google, but you might want to research the cost of a loaf of bread in Europe [Germany?] circa early 20th century. A wheelbarrow of currency was required to buy a loaf. Oh there was money ... lots of it. It just happened to be worthless. It's nice you have lots of money.

So keep bragging Google, you're time's coming. Here in the good ol' U.S. of A. not too long ago General Motors had a saying, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country". Somehow I just don't think many there are saying that these days.

Bad tactic. Simply clicking ads to see what is being charged for various goods or services is worthless. All you'll get is continuous corporate hype and rhetoric designed to maximize their profits, increase their market share, grow their company and increase their stockholder worth. If you need to obtain true competitive pricing, ads are the last place you should go. By design their sole purpose is to convince you to buy their product in deference to others.

If you seek competitive pricing, feature evaluations, and etc, you can do actual product research as provided by a number of legitimate product testing labs that do have a web presence. Some do charge a small membership fee but the cost is well worth the value received. At the very least, read user reviews and evaluate on that basis. But deciding to spend your money by heeding commercial ads is analogous to just marrying the woman (or man) who screams "I love you" the loudest. Not the best basis for a happy relationship unless all you want is a big mouth mate. Not me, I'll do the research and get other big assets too.

but usually the content pages are better than the ads, although the ads for comparison shopping are also useful. Once in a while the ad is spot on and is the one I use.

The best shopping currently is on the Google Shopping format page, though, and the ads there are for all my favourite resources such as New Egg and comparison sites, while the main page allows you to see a particular drive at all different places, such as ZipZoomFly, one of my favourites for buying. I don't know if those are content or ad-based, but they are pretty good.

There used to be a different Google buying page that was really not any good, so I always used the main Google, ads, and comparison sites. This was when I did small-time commercial purchasing for my company. I saved us a lot of money!

I have always preferred Google as a search engine -- fast, no Flash, no pictures, no My-Your-Recommended-Latest bull. No Portal! Just speed-readable text.

When folks call tech support, the diagnostic for network connection is: try a Google! Nuff said.

Hubris.