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Google Bans Ads For Essay-Writing Services
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed May 23, 2007 01:48 AM
from the write-it-yourself dept.
from the write-it-yourself dept.
llamapalooza writes "Google announced that it will ban essay writing firms from advertising on their site. (The prevalence of cheating on campuses has been discussed here before.) While universities have welcomed the move, the affected firms are claiming it will 'punish legitimate businesses.' Google has specifically banned 'academic paper-writing services and the sale of pre-written essays, theses, and dissertations,' which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution."
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Cheating Via the Internet at College 467 comments
Electron Barrage writes, "An anonymous professor writes that last year about half of the seniors at his US university were suspected of cheating, mostly due to the Internet and community sites such as Wikipedia. He guesses that perhaps 25%-30% were actually guilty, a huge increase from earlier levels. According to this professor, it's nearly impossible for the universities to keep up with the new forms of cheating enabled by the Net. Will academic institutions learn to deal with this new reality? It sounds a little dubious from this professor's viewpoint." The article mentions the anti-cheating services Turn It In and iThenticate (while decrying their expense), but expresses worry over the new countermeasure represented by Student of Fortune.
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Banned list? (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on the drug [google.com]
Anyway, who really cares who Google accepts for advertising - its what they index that really matters.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Banned list? (Score:4, Informative)
You can still search, and find whatever you want. What they're doing is not seving ads for these products when you search for a related term.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not comparable. One still allows you to find something, the other does not.
Google should never have gone into China, it makes do-no-evil-initiative
Re:Banned list? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Banned list? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Googles intermingle top placement ads with the top search results. While they are subtly different, top placement ads often times
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I think a lot of people wish those robbotically-created pages that pollute the results pages weren't indexed. Crap like all the dozens of clones
Don't Be Evil (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, it's "Don't be evil" from their CoC. [google.com] And I imagine their decision to refuse this type of advertising is, in their opinion
The Difference (Score:2)
Offensive Speech (Score:3, Funny)
I am soooooo offended by your suggestion. I DEMAND AN APOLOGY!!!
...And happen to be illegal "too"... (Score:3, Interesting)
Depends on the juridiction.
And here in Switzerland, it is illegal to advertise for it.
A drug
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That's probably the last thing I'd expect a hippie to say.
Medical point of view (Score:3, Informative)
Fluoxetin the ative stuff in Prozac, as well as other "selective seretonie-reuptake inhibitors", has a complex (and slow) dynamics.
Depression, in an oversimplified way, can be said to have
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Distinction (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not illegal, though (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, legitimate is even trickier. Where do you draw the line? Technically speaking, anything legal _is_ a legitimate business. If you don't want it done, just pass a law to outlaw it.
And the business side pops up all the time (e.g, "but it creates employment!") when debating whether or not to make something illegal. It sure popped up in the spam and telemarketting debates, for example, all the way to the highest level. So basically when deciding whether it's legal or not, some MPs/congressmen/whatever-you-have, already considered the business side of it, and whether or not they want businesses doing that. E.g., whether the (lack of) ethics of it outweigh the employment created, tax income, and/or bribes from that lobby. In a way they already decided if that kind of business is legitimate or not.
Employment vs inflation is a constant concern since the Great Depression, when basically suddenly supply outstripped aggregate demand. (Yes, Say's Law does still apply, but "supply creates its own demand" only by lowering prices, and in the Great Depression suddenly the only point where you could actually sell all that stuff was below the production costs.) This became even worse when most industry moved offshore. Now we need even less people producing stuff. What do you do with the rest? Leave them unemployed, like in the 19'th century? Well, that also lowers the money they can spend to buy stuff, and that-a-way lies the downwards spiral that led to the Great Depression in the first place.
So nowadays governments actually get to see that employment stays roughly where they want it, and create some extra aggregate demand. (Deficit spending, pork barrel, social security, etc.) It works too, since we no longer have the economic crisis cycles that plagued most of the 19'th century and the first part of the 20'th century. Back then it was considered _normal_ that the industry goes through bankruptcy cycles and rises from the ashes based on demanding even longer work hours and lower salaries.
In a nutshell, a government's job is to see to it that you encourage (or at least don't discourage too much) people to create more jobs that don't actually produce something. Pretend to manage each other, create whole castes of marketters just trying to steal customers from each other, or do all sorts of convenience services to each other. And chip in a little to make it all keep working. Deserved or undeserved, ethical or unethical, as long as the negative impact is small enough, it doesn't matter. It matters that unemployment doesn't get out of hand. Because noone wants another Great Depression.
That's why even when debating something as annoying as telemarketting, the question just _has_ to pop up, basically, "how many jobs _are_ we nuking in the process? and can the rest of the economy absorb those?" You don't want to be the paladin in shiny armour that saved people from all evils... at the expense of causing the economy to collapse.
At any rate, that's why a lot of unproductive and even mildly unethical stuff is allowed to exist. In fact, encouraged to exist.
If you think that such companies are crossing the line into outright harmful, well, just lobby your lawmakers to outlaw it.
But, yeah, I'll aggree that Google is free to choose the companies it does business with.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But you're right: where do you draw the line? "Legitimate" just means a business that you approve of. Are payday l
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd even question wether it's unethical. Embarrasing, yes, and telling, sure.
But unethical? If essays and theses are so easily manufactured, replicated and/or
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually in Massachusetts, it is illegal to sell papers like this:
Re:It's not illegal, though (Score:4, Interesting)
Heck, I even know of people who forged or lied about their diploma, and still didn't land in jail. E.g., there was this story on Slashdot about the, IIRC, admission officer at MIT, who not only claimed diplomas from universities she never went to or which didn't even offer that qualification, but went on to actively undermine the whole idea of academic achievement and integrity. They fired her, but that's pretty much all they can possibly do. You can't throw someone in jail for merely being a pathological liar, or we'd have to build jails for all the politicians and marketters and PR hacks, plus about half the journalists.
College rules are one thing, laws are another. Something may be forbidden by the college rules, yet perfectly legal as far as a court of law is concerned.
Cheating is just inherently unethical and for most of us abhorrent, but, as I was saying, a lot of stuff that I find unethical and abhorrent is legal anyway. And unless someone actually manages to make it illegal, like it or not, it _is_ a legitimate business.
Now noone says you or Google should do business with them. But they are legitimate, no matter how much some of us think they shouldn't be.
Not keen on this (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm aware that this is only on the paid-for part of the business. I still don't like it. If it's legal, they should allow it. It calls into question whether they're putting their morality into the rest of their business.
Re:Not keen on this (Score:4, Insightful)
In what jurisdiction?
Prosititution is illegal in many parts of the land of the (hah!) free. Alchohol is illegal in some Middle Eastern countries. Drugs have different laws almost everywhere. Codeine is illegal in Greece (IIRC), Marijuana semi-legal in some countries, etc etc.
Re: (Score:2)
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
That'd be their corporate HQ. Next question?
Re:Not keen on this (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a company whose motto is "Don't be evil." If you are just now questioning whether or not they're putting their morality into their business, you have not been paying any attention at all.
Whether you agree with their morality or not, or agree that the particular decisions they've made are consistent with their openly stated (hell, vigorously publicized) moral code, are other questions entirely. But they have been very clear from day one that morality plays a central role in their business decisions.
Personally I think "Don't promote businesses which serve no purpose other than helping students cheat on their schoolwork" is entirely consistent with "Don't be evil."
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, now that you mention it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, now that you mention it, I'd rather have more prostitution ads than some of the other scams I'm
This comment would be funnier... (Score:4, Funny)
Bender Says. . . (Score:5, Funny)
dickens was paid by the word (Score:5, Funny)
Essay writing is just a simpler form of prostitution. You know the old saying "Prose before Hos".
Legitimate Businesses (Score:2, Insightful)
Google can choose to display or not to display any ads they want. The supreme court has found many times that the right to not speak is equally as important as fre
Thank God! (Score:2, Interesting)
'Bout Time (Score:4, Insightful)
It's about damn time.
I hate to see that these services even exist.
I understand the cheating will always go on, at all levels of academics. The practice isn't against any laws, but it is nice to see Google not condoning something legal but flat out wrong.
Re:'Bout Time (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who is less than 48 hours away from a completed thesis Ph.D. thesis and a little over a week away from my defense, there is only one thing I have to say about this.
First thing that struck my mind when reading this -- you did make sure to backup recently?
Look at it from a different POV (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Just advertise the degree outright! (Score:2, Insightful)
Has anyone tried to get ad sense to offer them a degree?
Re:Just advertise the degree outright! (Score:5, Funny)
Phd, pffft - I have the Nigerian finance minister transfering $34M dollars into my account as we speak!
that explains it (Score:5, Funny)
Good, this will save them some money (Score:3, Insightful)
Not censorship, service to AdSense cleints (Score:5, Insightful)
Now homework cheating services are on that list.
So this is a case where maximizing profit also happens to be "do no evil" (depending on your definition of evil).
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
What are you saying? In this very slashdot article's advert section, we find:
Original Essays, Book Reports, Papers and other Academic Writing.
customessay.com
Essays
High Quality - Instant Download Find one on your topic today!
DueNow.com/Essays/
But diploma mills are still adverticed (Score:3, Interesting)
For example a reporter was able to buy a degree in aerospace engineering, a field he knew nothing about, from Ashwood University [wikipedia.org]. Ashwood University is deceptively named to be similar to Ashford University.
But if you search for "Ashwood University" in Google [slashdot.org] you get plenty of ads. As well as the Wikipedia article which document the fact that the operation is fraudulent. The Wikipedia article is vandalized regularly by people trying to edit out the well-documented criticism. The vandals are probably the university owners or degree holders.
I have sent an email to Google some time ago, saying that they were advertising for fraud. But my email had no lasting effect, obviously.
Not a good idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Banning the advertisements isn't going to solve the issue of plagiarism. In fact, it could compound the problem by pushing it underground. If someone is motivated to cheat, they're probably going to cheat regardless of whether they see an advertisement on Google, or whether they have to hunt underground for a service. Afterall, is Google banning search results?
Re: (Score:2)
What annoys me is they dont give a damn about *where* they advertise. If I f
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Where I live it is perfectly legal to advertise prostitution [yellowpages.com.au]. I can see that google will take the attitude that it is illegal most places so it is safer for them to ban it. But there is a line to be drawn here. Essay writing service
Re:Prostitution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, being a friend of someone who writes viruses for a living, I think there are three negatives to making virus writing illegal:
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
We've had a similar problem on some technical Usenet groups where I help out, teaching beginners various programming-related subjects. Some posts are obviously asking us to do their homework. Most are obviously genuine questions. A few are harder to classi