We are committed to an ongoing process to improve our privacy practices, and have recently taken a closer look at the question of cookie privacy. How long should a web site "remember" cookie information in its logs after a user's visit? And when should a cookie expire on your computer? Cookie privacy is both a server and a client issue.

On the server side, we recently announced that we will anonymize our search server logs — including IP addresses and cookie ID numbers — after 18 months.

Now, we're asking the question about cookie lifetime: when should a cookie expire on your computer? For background: a cookie is a very small file which gets stored on your computer All search engines and most websites use cookies. Why? Cookies remind us of your preferences from the last time you visited our site. For example, Google uses our so-called "PREF cookie" to remember our users’ basic preferences, such as the fact that a user wants search results in English, no more than 10 results on a given page, or a SafeSearch setting to filter out explicit sexual content. When we originally designed the PREF cookie, we set the expiration far into the future — in 2038, to be exact — because the primary purpose of the cookie was to preserve preferences, not to let them be forgotten. We were mindful of the fact that users can always go to their browsers to change their cookie management settings, e.g. to delete all cookies, delete specific cookies, or accept certain types of cookies (like first-party cookies) but reject others (like third-party cookies).

After listening to feedback from our users and from privacy advocates, we've concluded that it would be a good thing for privacy to significantly shorten the lifetime of our cookies — as long as we could find a way to do so without artificially forcing users to re-enter their basic preferences at arbitrary points in time. And this is why we’re announcing a new cookie policy.

In the coming months, Google will start issuing our users cookies that will be set to auto-expire after 2 years, while auto-renewing the cookies of active users during this time period. In other words, users who do not return to Google will have their cookies auto-expire after 2 years. Regular Google users will have their cookies auto-renew, so that their preferences are not lost. And, as always, all users will still be able to control their cookies at any time via their browsers.

Together, these steps — logs anonymization and cookie lifetime reduction — are part of our ongoing plan to continue innovating in the area of privacy to protect our users.

by Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel - Source: The Official Google Blog

An appeals court in Pennsylvania has affirmed a lower court's dismissal of a lawsuit against Google. The lawsuit was filed by Gordon Roy Parker, a writer who claimed the search giant infringed on his copyright by archiving a Usenet posting of his and providing excerpts from his Web site in search results. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled over a year ago that under case law, Google's activities were akin to those of an Internet Service Provider and thus did not constitute copyright infringement by automatically archiving a copy of the Usenet posting. In a decision handed down this week, the appellate court for that same district affirmed that ruling.

Source: news.com.com

"Yahoo will hire its first employee in New Zealand to help promote the Internet giant's fresh push into the paid-search market."

Arch-rival Google has become synonymous with searching the Internet, especially in New Zealand, and its AdWords service is believed to have about 85 per cent of the global market for paid search advertisements, which researcher Frost & Sullivan estimates will be worth US$1 billion (NZ$1.28 billion) by 2010. Businesses pay to have advertisements and links to their websites displayed on screen when Internet users search the web by typing keywords into search engines that are relevant to what they sell.

Yahoo last week stepped its efforts to grab its share of the spoils, launching a long-awaited system – Panama – that underpins its paid search service. Businesses can now pay Yahoo to have their advertisements displayed in one or more of 16 different regions in New Zealand, whereas they previously had to pay for advertisements whenever their chosen keywords were used by any computer user in New Zealand or Australia.

Breaking down paid adverts by region should reduce the cost and wastage involved in paid search advertising, especially if businesses do not offer a nationwide service. Craig Wax, YahooSearch Marketing's regional managing director for Australia, New Zealand and India, says Panama also lets Yahoo activate keywords for customers in minutes rather than days, making it possible for businesses to use paid searches to support short-term, time-sensitive sales campaigns.

Paid search results were previously ranked in an order that was entirely dependent on how much advertisers had paid for their advertisement. Placement will now also take into account how popular an advert has proved. Mr Wax would not say how much revenue Yahoo was earning from New Zealand advertisers prior to Panama, but it is believed to be negligible. "We expect it to grow quite a bit because we have not put a lot of focus on it up to now, because without 'geo-targeting' we did not have as strong a value proposition as we have today," Mr Wax says. "We now have a much stronger value proposition for New Zealand."

Panama can display up to 20 different advertisements for each customer and detect how popular each is, based on how many people click on each advert. It can then learn from this, displaying the more successful advertisements with greater frequency to reflect their higher "click-through" rates. "There is no question that search marketing is becoming increasingly complex and that requires a higher level of sophistication," Mr Wax says. "But at the same time, what we have done with this new system is we have built in some functionality that takes a lot of that analysis off the shoulders of the advertiser and lets the system do it.

"Larger advertisers are able to go in and set specific parameters or business goals they want to achieve around click-through rates, cost per acquisition and return on their ad spend, and then they can prioritise each of those and put in targets. "Then our system will optimise against those parameters in an automated fashion, based on the instructions they provide."

Google spokesman Rob Shilkin says Google also lets New Zealand advertisers target paid-search adverts by 16 different regions, and offers all the other features provided by Panama.

Source: stuff.co.nz

I spent some time over the weekend evaluating a Google PPA campaign I've been running for a few weeks. I knew the potential for fraud, especially with high payouts available, would be an issue with Google PPA but honestly never expected to see results this poor.

I have a lead generation form I've used with various affiliate networks and other programs over the past 24 months. It's always worked well - i.e., generated a profit. I set this form up for a Google PPA campaign and am honestly shocked with how poor the results are. According to my AdWords account I've received 124 conversions. The reality is only 4 of those conversions are actually valid - the other 120 have fake information.

I'm seeing this same trend across a number of PPA campaigns. Pretty disappointing to say the least. At this point It look like I have two choices - drastically cut back what I'm willing to pay per conversion, or, add a lot of extra validation to the form. Alternately I may just pull the plug on PPA for awhile until some of these issues get worked out.

Is anyone seeing decent results with Google PPA yet?

by: Jeremy Mayes - Source: ppcdiscussions.com