Same thing happened to us. We were large enough to have an admob rep who reached out to the IVT team for help. After our first appeal was rejected, our rep negotiated a second appeal attempt but he said “This time make sure you take full responsibility for the IVT getting through.
Funny part to me was Google was the only network bidding on these bots while others must have detected something and stayed out.
We submitted a second appeal taking full responsibility plus providing a long list of corrective action we took in house plus a full triage of what happened.
They again rejected our second appeal with no feedback.
I keep hearing it too. The bit I don't yet understand is, wouldn't it be in Google's interest to not do this? They ban on both sides of the market for seemingly no reason. Wouldn't maximizing all legitimate participation be much better? Also seems a lot more possible to do now with AI to check all campaigns, landing pages, etc.
Google is an overwhelming market leader vertically and horizontally. Not only do they not have to compete with their competition. They don't have to compete for their competition's business partners. They don't have to compete at all.
What's more, they're a publicly traded company. That means their primary product is no longer what they sell. Their primary product is stock dividends. That is their primary business now. Whether you're buying a service or a product from Google, you're no longer their true customer.
They treat such customers like they don't matter because they don't. And until they stop being in such a position of dominance, or someone magically transforms the whole of American business culture it won't change.
> What's more, they're a publicly traded company. That means their primary product is no longer what they sell. Their primary product is stock dividends. That is their primary business now. Whether you're buying a service or a product from Google, you're no longer their true customer.
It's not hero worship to think he knew what a customer was. It's pretty basic, and given he won the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, he probably knew more than the basics.
I imagine it's a side-effect of another fraud prevention effort. In my experience ad fraud on a google search ad is at least 17% of traffic, and potentially a lot more.
Whilst I don't doubt that Google invest heavily in fraud prevention, they're not actually succeeding.
Spam website owners pay for these bots, they get compensated for the conversions. In an ideal world, google’s ad prices and fraud detection would render this ineffective.
When you want to keep your house warm, you ordinarily should not burn the rafters. However, when the house is about to collapse anyway, it is cheaper to dismantle the roof and to burn the rafters than to buy firewood.
Hypothetically you would have already paid for the ads before your account gets suspended/banned then hypothetically Google just keep sending you automated replies denying your requests for support until you give up or lawyer up. And when you consider the shear scale Google's adtech networks run at, this would add up fast and generate revenue over costs. Hypothetically
I really don't get it. Ads are supposed to be Google's biggest revenue thing but the entire process is just so infuriating at times. Their ads dashboard/tool for running ads is one of the worst pieces of software i have used period. My theory is they just dont care about individual experience as long as businesses see value in it. Nobody is going to not run ads because the platform is from hell. They still need to run ads and thus suffering is okay.
I think Google's business model in large part is having a super complicated ad console that very few, if anyone, actually knows how to most efficiently operate.
So what happens is that the savvy media teams figure out what works through meticulous trial and error, and constantly monitor Googles weird changes to the levers you are given to operate the "console."
For a good chunk of businesses, ROI tracking is really not that hard. It gets harder as your business becomes larger, or oriented more towards B2B, or in specialized niches, or online only businesses. I know first hand small/medium businesses (whom I've helped myself in the past) that basically survive on traffic coming from ads.
Obviously it all depends*. But I just wanted to chime in that it's not all totally useless, and "nobody clicks on ads". Us (tech-adjacent people), are less likely to be prone to it, but still get swindled through other sort of ads as well. It works more effectively for people not in our group. And keep in mind, we're in extreme tiny minority.
Yes and no. ROI tracking is not hard if you want to run 1 campaign on Google and nothing else.
ROI tracking is a whole subspecialty of adtech if you want to parse out one medium or campaign's spend from all the other spend have running -- imagine you spend $10m / month on media, you have ROI and you have spend across platforms and nobody except you is incentivized to figure out what ad spend should be credited for which response. That's real ROI tracking and it is quite hard
Google makes a ton of money. It has to come from somewhere… so yes definitely agree that even though it’s hard to imagine for some people in the HN bubble, ads seem to be working for most people.
$220 is irrelevant to Google. The bot farms spend more. Hence, the small honest customer is not worth supporting when the large malicious customer will generate orders of magnitude more revenue. Viewed through the profit incentive, the end result makes perfect sense.
Perverse incentives will only change when regulators are made to care.
Ads seem to be working for most people or are people in protection racket where they have to pay to fend off the mobster from plastering the front of their store with roadblocks and directions to a competitor?
Would the casinos benefit from a careful presentation of the mathematical odds of all the games and how to best position your wagers ?
Or would they benefit by seeming like a fantastic place to wine, dine, splurge on things you can spend money on, and also make a few wagers on fun betting games while you are at it ?
The advertising market is a place that used to be dominated by the big advertisers meeting with the big networks (upfronts), but now is dominated by large platforms that only marginally care about the biggest users because the tail is so long
I know a company that spends >15M per year on Google ads, and Google blocked one campaign on a Friday night claiming it was fraud, in the middle of a hot sales season.
Took the rep two weeks to actually find out what happened.
It's just how the whole company operates at this point.
If you spend that much money on ads you should be a Google Ad partner, and you usually get to have a dedicated, on-call support agent directly from Google.
We had a similar situation arise once (big marketing agency in EU), up to that day I've never had heard anyone screaming so loud at someone than my boss to whatever poor soul was assigned to us by Google.
Why would you ever ever ever on record "take full responsibility" for something you did not actually do?
If a person does that, then that's dumb. But a company? Don't you have like a legal department or similar telling you to not ever confess to something you did in fact not do?
Seems about right, in the sense that these advertising companies are just fine dealing with scammers / taking their money … but there are corners of the same company that also have reasons to not allow that behavior and it becomes a circle where Google users and etc are banned for Google encouraged activity.
Last week on YouTube I was logged out of YouTube and on my work computer got an ad that appeared to offer access to underage girls, the pic was creepy as hell. Google took their money but if I posted that image in a video I bet I would be banned….
I was getting an advert that was obviously some scam software on YouTube mobile. The image looked like a system alert that storage was low. It was an obvious attempt to trick users.
There is too many ads to report all of them. But a don't show me this, that also affected on report as a negative signal to reduce the possibility of that specific ad to you.
Unlikely. The effectiveness an ad has on you is related to the amount you think about that ad - and nothing else. It doesn't matter whether they are positive or negative thoughts.
Yikes, that is especially egregious. As the comment to that post mentions, you see it on adult sites (so I've heard) but that's also the kind of ad you'd see on an old forum where the moderators have lost all respect for their users and are trying to cash out.
I’ve seen and reported that exact ad, and variations thereof, multiple times. Each time my report has been rejected on the basis the ad didn’t violate ToS for advertisers. Google absolutely sucks nowadays.
That's double ironic because Google feeds off of ad-money
addiction, but here it also uses that traffic to ban
people from the evil Google empire (which is actually
pretty good, if everyone would be banned then Google
would collapse quickly. Without adMoney this adCompany
would be useless. It has nothing to do with the old
Google company before the adMoney inflow addiction).
This is what class actions are literally for. Yes, I know it sucks that the only people who make money are the lawyers, but it can result in some behavioral change.
Google is fine attracting bots when it makes money for itself, but it can clearly detect that bot traffic when it has to pay out. There is likely huge amounts of money in total that Google has collected money from in ad buys but that they could also detect as bots. I would think class action lawyers would be all over this given the total amount of money involved.
- Help you find weaknesses in your case and what you can do to fix those.
- Rewrite your text in proper legalese (I do recommend to prepare the your arguments yourself to avoid over generalization from an LLM).
Of course you need to verify because of hallucinations but showing up is half the battle here. Big (tech) corps + internal bureaucracy makes it quite expensive for fight these cases. Especially if there are many different countries.
You might get your 100 dollars but google will ban you / stop doing any business with you the minute you start that so you better be sure you don't need your account or google services going forward.
Then you sue them again in small claims court for the damages of not having access to your accounts (to which other online services require/are tied to which are not Google-owned properties) and have the judge force your reinstatement with a warning to Google that such punitive actions taken maliciously against the user will result in a prior fine*exponential multiplicative levied for each occurrence, with the base fine amount being the prior multiplicative fine issued.
That leaves Google with very few chances to fuck up before they're financially wiped out, and this is a ruling you can have issued in a small claims court.
How would you force the judge to do that? Has this strategy ever worked for anyone you can cite? Have you tried it yourself?
Otherwise, I'm not sure why just being able to imagine a knock out David vs. Goliath win against Google has any value whatsoever as a viable legal strategy.
It's certainly valid and it has been done in other situations, but the details are different. I don't know that of any case where it's been tried against Google. It's certainly reasonable to think it could work against Google, but the details of would it actually work in the real world? I have no idea. Even if there was precedent that someone could cite, that doesn't mean that your case would win.
If you really want to know, you need to consult a lawyer, not ask here.
Was there a follow up if he ever managed to collect on the $721 judgment?
EDIT: Ah, missed the follow up link at the end. No, he did not get any money.
Google appealed to a superior court (sending their lawyers this time) and the award was modified to $0.
So he didn't actually win, the online meme that "small claims are the one weird trick to beat the mega corps" doesn't usually hold up to scrutiny. I doubt throwing ChatGPT into the mix would have helped against their in-house counsel.
How much compensation do you get from a class action? $5? That is only a win for a lawyers. The problem is lack of regulatory action and law enforcement. We all pay taxes for these bodies to protect us and more often than not they collude with corporations and do nothing.
Even a failed lawsuit has the potential to cost the company a lot more money than it costs you.
If it's small claims court the company has to pay a lawyer hourly to attend as their representative, while you just have to show up and pay the small court fee.
If it's big claims court, well, you always have the option to represent yourself, and then you'll probably lose, but at least you won't have spent much money.
Governing Law; Venue.
All claims arising out of or relating to the AdSense
Terms or the Services will be governed by California
law, excluding California's conflict of laws rules,
and will be litigated exclusively in the federal or
state courts of Santa Clara County, California, USA,
and you and Google consent to personal jurisdiction
in those courts.
Okay, I do indeed live in Santa Clara County, California, so if I ever get in a situation where I might want to sue Google Ads, I might as well try and see how local courts work, especially if the claim is small enough for the small claims court. For those who do not live here, it might be a prohibitive requirement.
Considering the government routinely both decides Google is violating the law but is unwilling to do things to change it, like split apart their ad monopoly, suing them is most likely futile.
Better ways to spend your money, like funding competitors.
The big manual task we haven't automated is going through documents and determining "is this sensitive enough to warrant information controls?" We may just be stuck with that in the way of things.
Just out of curiosity, why would the LLM need network access for this? I.e. feeding the doc to an LLM and asking "is this sensitive information according to these criteria: [...]" should get you there most of the way, no? Probably need a handful of (carefully designed) tool calls and a human in the loop somewhere, but it seems achievable.
"Do these documents contain models or descriptions of (list of devices redacted for HN), or personally identifying information?" would be a great question to be able to automate since it sucks up a lot of time that could be more profitably spent doing other things. There's costs to both Type I and Type II errors so deterministic filters only get us so far (which isn't very).
Humans of course will screw at least 1% of the time, at least judged retroactively.
The fun part is, if you have non-trivial inputs, even if you don’t change anything, you’ll likely get a different 1% set of errors each time no matter how perfect your judges.
10% seems pretty high, but it really all depends on what you’re evaluating. If it’s all weird edge cases….
That's nice, I've had the issue where LLMs would return non-existent uids. But does this package actually help with that? Token savings are nice, but not really my main concern. If this can measurably reduce hallucinations, it would be really useful.
> Where UUIDs cost ~23 tokens and get hallucinated by LLMs, id-agent produces memorable word-based IDs at ~14 tokens with equivalent collision resistance.
My gut feeling is that the hallucinations are caused by the entropy. A UUID has unlikely character sequences. But the entropy is a core feature. Turning the UUID into words keeps the same entropy, you just have surprising words instead of surprising hex sequences.
I would be surprised if this actually helped with hallucinations. Happy to be proven wrong though, and this seems like an easy experiment to run: just take a tiny model (below 1B) and have it transcribe a couple thousand ids in both formats, then check where it made more mistakes
I had similar thoughts. The readme intro explicitly mentions hallucinations, that's why I thought I'd ask.
If you're dealing with uid in -> uid out, where you're hoping to get the same uid out, intuitively the entropy would be greatly reduced anyways. Then the question becomes, are words conducive to keeping input->output consistent, given the way LLMs work (e.g. attention mechanism)? I could see it go either way, that's why I'm supporting the idea of running your experiment.
But within the surprising words, the adjacent tokens are common. I can see an argument for having fewer transcription errors on badger-yellow-alternate than 0B9A26F3C74D.
Your test with small models makes tons of sense. Would be interesting to graph to two approaches against model size and recency.
We wrote a simple internal tool that looks at the that transcript and replaces all UUID and BSON IDs with lower cardinality placeholders (e.g., id-1), including replacing them in the output, and it instantly brought down common error and hallucination rates. I figure this tool lets you apply semantic tokens to the IDs too, e.g. user-1 instead of id-1. Stuff like this is useful for my team because we only use small, fast, highly available models for bulk classification, so we measure error and hallucinations where we can.
Okay, but you can also validate uids. What I'm asking is whether the human readable uids cause fewer hallucinations, as that would be the real win imo.
Didn't expect it to get hammered like that, just added caching for the sheets request. Thanks, my guy ;)
Backfilling it further is definitely in the cards, I just want to stabilize the methodology first.
If a comment just mentions Opus without being more specific and in the absence of relevant context clues, it gets mapped to Opus Latest. So it's saying more about the model family than a specific version. Tbh I'll probably remove all "-latest" data points going forward, as I mentioned in another comment.
Yes! Going forward I'm definitely doing that, once there is enough data. Might even backfill the data more into the past. I just want to stabilize the methodology before burning more tokens.
And it's probably a good idea to create a list of model release dates, so older comments can't accidentally map to models that weren't released yet.
From the comments that I've checked manually it's pretty good. You can go to the "User Ratings" tab in the Google Sheet and check some comments to get an idea.
https://openrouter.ai/typesafe/jev-1.13
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