The fact that it has to be a covered by news really sucks.

I ran a website that got our AdSense account shut down for what Google claimed was invalid clicks. I never clicked on our ads and we made little money from AdSense (we had other ad networks). Since my personal Gmail account was used as a backup email my personal account's AdSense account was also banned. They won't reinstate either account or give any more details.

I don't use any Google Cloud services because I'm afraid that all of my accounts would get shut down for any reason and I would lose all of that data.

AdSense is a giant hypocrisy, they tell you you can't have ads in the first part of the screen on mobile, but you look at Google search results and they so exactly that.

Then, there is a set of guidelines you have to comply, which is great, except it says this "Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site" and also says you can't copy content from other sites, they are basically describing Google search page.

who watches the watchmen?

They obviously provide a good service with Google search, that's out of discussion.

Search is the one you should really stop using when possible. I've found DuckDuckGo's general search to be only okay, but bang patterns are very helpful since I usually want to search stack overflow or another site directly anyhow.

Google search quality has dropped drastically. Any attempt to look up a technical issue results in StackOverflow inconsistently in the top 5, with maybe 20 different shitty mirror sites.

Google has lost their magic. I'm actively migrating away from their services at this point.

> Google search quality has dropped drastically. Any attempt to look up a technical issue results in StackOverflow inconsistently in the top 5, with maybe 20 different shitty mirror sites.

Are you logged in? Maybe their learnt wrong things about you? (For me swiftkey has that problem, had to switch away from it as the more it learnt, the worse the suggestions would become)

Search is the one thing I still need from google. Technical things result in 50% stackoverflow and 50% blog posts or forum posts of people discussing the same problem. For things with multiple meanings google usually gets the right one. I'd love to use DDG, but whenever I try it, I end up having to use bangs to get what I want.

Yep, same has happened to me. Right before I was going to get my first payout of $100 or so, I got my AdSense account killed for invalid click activity. I never intentionally clicked, and the one time I accidentally did I reported it to them (which is what they said to do in the event of an accidental click). I turned over information, offered them server logs, etc., but never got anything more than stock replies that my request for reconsideration was denied and they wouldn't tell me anything more detailed.

That happened a number of years ago and I haven't had them kill any of my other accounts for any reason, but it remains a concern and I certainly don't trust them.

The hard math with ads is that Google keeps perhaps 30%, and from that they pay themselves and their costs. So there's not very much customer service you can offer on accounts that earn them $100 to $300/year. And there really is an enormous amount of real fraud.

That's not how it works, though. In business, you always factor in the cost of everyone, across the board. Ten minutes on the phone with technical support with any small software company is certainly worth more than the paltry $20 license you paid for.

Just like hotels factor in the price and rate of stolen towels when pricing their rooms for everyone, Google, like any other business, makes money from some of te customers and loses money on others. We don't get to pick only the winning horses. Your grocery store doesn't ban you because you dropped a dozen eggs and then left with a 10¢ stick of gum - they price it in.

Being good at business is, in large part, only serving profitable customers. There is no legal right to purchase services from SAAS companies that said company doesn't care to provide.

>Being good at business is, in large part, only serving profitable customers.

I strongly disagree with that notion. Even if you know in advance who will be profitable, you often gain more customers by servicing all customers (or at least the vast majority).

Two examples:

1. A lot of internet companies are built on servicing everyone, and extracting money from a tiny subset (github is one example).

2. If one in every thousand customers costs me more in support than they pay, that's one thing. But becoming known for good support will be more profitable than becoming known for kicking customers who ask too many questions.

We find it to be very good business to provide amazing customer service to all users, free or paid. It results in better word of mouth advertising. It's so appreciated by users that they will evangelize for your service, assuming it's something they use regularly.

The cost for support is low too, relatively speaking. Obviously not all businesses have enough margin to consider this, some support is more expensive than others etc.

Oh it's perfectly fine to only have certain customers.

The problem is when you accept customers and then don't provide proper service.

They could require $1k or $10k per month minimum volume. But they don't. They accept everyone and then stonewall at random, sometimes even when people are high-volume.

Yep, I'm going to be migrating my email off of gmail soon as well.

#1 rule when you get as large as Google is not to burn your users trust. This was about a big of a screw-up as you could do there. You should keep your different services separate and isolated and only ban in the areas of business where it impacts things negatively.

To what? Gmail is so effortless to use. I've been considering running my own email servers because of things like this (and privacy) but I have never found anything as good.

I tried Office 365, but not that great. I tried fastmail and I like it a lot.

It was the other way around for me. But regardless, the best part of owning your own domain - if you don't like your mail provider, just change the MX records to a new one.

Heck, I could run my own mail server if I wanted (been there, don't want to go there again, but could if I really HAD to).

You like Office 365? I felt like it was a pain to configure and the migration thing did not work well either.

I didn't use the migration, so can't speak to that. I just had to set up the DNS entries on my domain. Granted, there are a fair few (MX, TXT, SPF, SRV, A, CNAME..), but there's good documentation and it only took me about 30 minutes to set everything up.

Of course, I only have one account ([email protected]) and therefore didn't have to deal with setting up multiple users, migrating data etc. I also set up 2FA for my account.

I did all this over one weekend (from looking at different providers, to signing up for O365, configuring etc), and haven't had to touch anything since. The only question I had was related to billing (I went from a month-to-month to a yearly account) and that was answered quickly by a real human being.

Outlook+Exchange is a very, very nice product.

Have you tried Fastmail? I've found them to be very good for many years now, although if you don't like their UI and are sort of old school, try their classic.fastmail.fm older interface.

Another choice is Office365. I use my own domain, with O365 providing the email services. I pay $60 a year for the cheapest plan (with Exchange). I migrated from Google over a year ago, and have slowly moved all my accounts to my new email. It's not something you can do overnight, but if you stick to it, it's not hard to do.

One time I had a question, I was able to use the web interface to request support, and a real human called me back in 10 minutes. It wasn't a very complex question, so I can't say if he was super knowledgeable, but he certainly seemed like he knew the platform, and was able to answer my question in just a few minutes.

Oh, and I know this is a throwaway account, but I'm not a shill for MS. This is just my personal experience with O365, and YMMV - it's worked well enough for me.

Microsoft will happily send you up a creek if you are a large paying enterprise. Don't think you'll get useful support if you pay $60 a year. Their cloud stuff breaks all the time and the typical support offer is to wait and see if it's better tomorrow.

$5 a month plus the unknown cost of switching vs $0 a month and not having to switch.

Why does Google care about the trust of scammers? Some customers are not worth the effort. This time it was a mass phone scalping scheme, next time it might be a fraudulent click scheme. Google is better off if people like that never use one of their products again.

It's as if some person kicked out of a store for shoplifting swore they'd never shop there ever again. Good!

Because they falsely accuse people of things, often—especially with AdSense—and that's it, you have zero recourse, your account is permanently dead. There are a ton of people who have been accused of invalid click fraud on AdSense and got banned, but who never clicked their own ads. The common Google and Google fanboy reply is to dismiss those claims and say people are lying, but I can tell you from personal experience that while maybe some are, not all are.

Google's Adsense is a fraud outright. I run a small news website where few people contribute. Almost all content is original. Adsense never approved by website claiming the site has no original content.

The answer is to work on the accuracy of the process, not to throw up their hands and stop trying to ban scammers.

For this story in particular did anyone come forward to say that they had been banned that didn't participate in the scalping scam?

There's a culture of impunity out there on the internet were people think they can cheat the system and nothing will ever come it (think manufactured spending for example). Well, sometimes something does come of it. Don't do the crime, if you can't do the time.

They will never be accurate enough, because it costs too much. The easier and more just solution is to just ban people off of the ad platform, and leave the gmail & other services alone.

If there is email abuse, then you ban from gmail, youtube abuse, from youtube, etc.

Buying a piece of hardware and reselling something you paid full sticker price for is now cheating the system? That's quite an expansive definition you have.

Sure, but if you steal a piece of candy from a store, they don't burn down your house and remove your mailbox. And delete every record of your existence.

> Because they falsely accuse people of things, often—especially with AdSense—and that's it, you have zero recourse, your account is permanently dead.

In the case of AdSense that may be true but there's no evidence here that anyone was falsely accused.

People scalped. People got busted. That's it. The only "problem" is that some of the scalpers were stupid enough to use their real accounts.

Prevent them from ordering another phone from the Google store? Totally, but this went beyond that.

It'd be like losing your voting rights due to getting a speeding ticket.

Google is technically right here but the reason you're seeing such a visceral reaction is that people care about their data a lot and having a relatively unrelated event wipe that out is a big overreach.

Even to scammers, answer must be proportionate.

Google should put in place a better solution to deal with frauds. They have the resources, not the will apparently.

Their customer service sucks big.

No, it doesn't need to be proportionate. They aren't the government. If you try to cheat me and I catch you, it is totally my right, totally reasonable, rational even, for me to decide I never want to do business of any sort with you again.

Sure, and it's totally reasonable, rational even, for other customers to see what Google is doing and react by choosing not to use their services. Nobody is saying Google overstepped their bounds legally; yes, they are totally allowed to choose who their customers are.

That said, if you as a company are going to completely destroy someone's online life over a single incident, then it's totally fair for others to be weary of using your services.

To use you shoplifting analogy think of a teen who tried to steal a can of Soda and the Owner shot him in head (tis is 'Murica) there and there.

I think I will be concerned to enter that shop again.

Google Search is one of Google's easiest products to switch away from. DuckDuckGo, Bing, whatever. They all do the job.

Having been using ddg for the past year, I can say that its results are, unfortunately, noticeably worse than google's. For a lot of technical searches I end up resorting to google.

Same, but it's 85% of the way there for most, everyday searches. For everything else, there's '!g'.

I started using Bing. My main problem isn't privacy or bad news, its one company dominating search - hopefully this will help out the competition. + you get gift cards :)

Use DuckDuckGo(og)

Yes! DuckDuckGo is great.

You can always use !g interobang if you want to search google

I've set DDG as my default a couple of times, and I find that I end up `!g`ing every search eventually. Maybe it's time to try again though.

Me too! I use !g so much that I end up inadvertently typing it when searching on google.com. The day of reckoning is near - use DDG as intended or just switch back to using Google as the default search.

But you're using it as intended. I'd much rather type "!gi blah" or "!gn blah" than move my hands to the mouse/trackpad to click on the Google Images or News link.

See Firefox keyword bookmarks.

I use bookmark keywords to get access to a cluster or folder of bookmarks instead of mousing. Also not interested in making 9000 bookmarks to reproduce bang functionality: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Plus you still have to type "bookmark" <wait> "search"

I'm not sure what you mean by wait. It really Works For Me (TM) here. I just type im foo in the address bar and it goes straight to Google images search for foo. Same for maps, Wikipedia and some obscure websites which will never be available at DDG :)

> I find that I end up `!g`ing every search eventually.

Often it is good, sometimes better than Google but in some settings I too use !g frequently. I still try to use it without !g first to give some search traffic to ddg.

I hope they can use the data to improve future searches.

or use !s to query startpage, which is an anonymising proxy for google results (if i am not mistaken)

Does duckduckgo act as a proxy of sorts when using !g?

It redirects your search to https://encrypted.google.com

You can use !sp for that since startpage.com proxies Google results

I migrated away from Google years ago after a similar incident. I use Fastmail for email. It's decent enough. I am happy to pay for services. I still use Google's search, calendar, browser and location services and Google Play for my android devices. I use YouTube frequently as well. I think the big problem are gmail and drive. By not using Gmail and Google Drive you will prevent something as bad as this from hurting you. My calendar isn't that important to me. If I lost my Google account I'd lose my apps and movies. It's not good, but it's not as big a deal as losing access to my email and personal files.

My cloud storage has always been Dropbox, it's always been great.

I backup my cloud storage (and disk storage) with Arq.

Fastmail has calendar support now. Although I haven't yet migrated away from google for Cal.

So you stop using everything but the thing they care about?

Yes, because if they close my account I can still use google search. My goal is not so much about harming them by avoiding them, but rather to not be dependent on them.

Presumably it's more moving away from everything that stores data they care about. I don't care if I lose my search history, that'd be annoying because Google would get dumber, but ultimately whatever. Losing emails or photo backups or Drive though, is stuff I care about.

They certainly care about having gigabytes of mail that they can scan for patterns and use to target ads.

Sadly, yes. It's like calling a congressional representative and not having donated enough money to their campaign for your words to be worth their time, yet it's somehow even less fair and accountable.

Also, DuckDuckGo?

I haven't used DuckDuckGo in years. Has it improved?

It happens to me 5% of the time : if the results are not what you expect, you can still ask DuckDuckGo to use google, just add !g to your search (or !gm for Google Maps, or !yc for Hacker News etc.) So userful! More here : https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Yes. This makes ddg useful as a default search engine even if you decide that you always want to use Google Search, because that you can use all the other bangs. Being able to search "on the fly" wikipedia, youtube, google maps etc. is very valuable

That's awesome, there's even ones for documentation (!cpp)

I find that it still falls down with a lot of programming questions, but in those cases I can always punt out to google. Aside from that, I think it works plenty well.

It's not good with loosely formulated queries. But if you have a good selection of words to use, it's better than Google.

Yeah surprisingly a lot in the last year.

I use it as a primary search engine on all devices. Every now and then I'd fallback to !g or !gi if a particular search is particularly bad, typically to learn that Google isn't much better. But the fact those commands are there makes it super low friction :)

Is anyone still using StartPage? Haven't seen it mentioned but it's been a great alternative for me. I use DDG on my iphone since safari won't let you set StartPage as the default.

So you're upset because they had a system that automatically banned people intentionally trying to break their system by running a massive illegal reselling scheme? These people were far from being innocent little bystanders who were hit collaterally. Yet, Google still pardoned them and restored their account EVEN when what they did was clearly not only against the ToS but actually probably against the law too.

Yes, I agree it's a scary thought, I will automatically takeout my data and keep personal backups, but let's be honest here, those people in my opinion very well deserved what they got. You can't shit on someone's lawn and expect them to welcome you in their house.

> illegal reselling scheme

Citation needed. In the past decade, tech companies have managed to perpetuate the toxic notion that they can attach strings to your physical purchases. Despite their aspirations, legally you are free to do as you like with a physical product once you legally purchase it.

But they have the right to refuse the sell in the first place, which I would not have blamed them if they did, but swinging the ban hammer AFTER the fact is a bit harsh in this case.

What ever happened to the first sale doctrine?

> You can't shit on someone's lawn and expect them to welcome you in their house.

Pets do exactly this, so if any company treats people like property, they shouldn't be surprised by those people's behavior in response.