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OT: have you tried google to find a doctor lately?


Daddy Dee

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OK, I'm to old to go around being mad and am generally successful with that. I did want to share a couple observations about the way the net is changing. I am probably even late to the party in realizing this.

The last couple of months I have been getting my family transitioned to new doctors in the community in which we've lived for three years. Obviously, haven't been a hurry about that, but it's been time to catch up on physicals and such. Needless to say, we've been setting up a number of appointments.

What I've noticed in google search for a particular doctor, the particular doctor's, or clinic web site is lost among dozens of for profit doctor rating services on google. Does google make money for having web sites turn up at the top of their searches? Interesting enough, most of these sites won't even reveal the doc's telephone number unless one registers for the site. Not happening.

The same thing has been true for me in trying to locate sites for recycling. Our community is small and I expect to have to go out of town to recycle cardboard boxes and such.

Fairly often I will click on a link of some blog or another to find content which I find interesting. Bloggers have understandably transitioned their sites so they can make some money with advertising. I'd like to get on that gravy train myself. Problem is trying to find the blog content on the page with all the advertising.

One more complaint is the near idiotic hypertext links in all manner of material from newspapers to blogs to anything. OK. say I'm reading an article that includes a highlighted word "photo". This is linked to advertisements for all manner of photography services. How random is that?

Anybody else notice this?

Even my own web email client for sbcglobal.net is covered with advertising. They offer a paid ad free version, but since i'm already paying for internet service, I'm not agreeable to pay more. Just tolerate the crap. It's not worth grinding the gears. However, as a matter of principle, I wouldn't click on one of these ads if they were trying to give me the Hope diamond.

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Your exactly right, the next thing is they will probably have a advertisement free Internet that you pay extra for. If I start out looking for one thing I usually get side tracked or led into a whole different area. and some of these places that pop up on there own you would never go on intentionally. It's not safe to let kids read on there own without some type of protection on your computer because you can type in almost anything and end up where you would not want a kid looking.

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You are correct sir!!! there are countless agency's, services, web hosts, server sites, etc. that sell packages to get your web page higher on the google count. They know exactly how what when and where to cross reference, tag, flag, and manipulate a web address, to get traffic to it.

in theory, if you have the tech savvy , you could do it your self for free, but I suppose in theory I could rebuild a car engine!

as far as doctors go, a lot of my clients are P. I. attny's, so I always check with them about malpractice and pending suites.....you'd be amazed at how many cases some doc's have brought before them!!!

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Daddy Dee yes you can put your internet site on the top of google or the right of it. Actually other competitors used methods to drown out the person who paid for the services, they would go on that site millions of time and not buy anything. Everytime they get redirected I think its like a nickel for every thousand uses google redirects. Also there was a funny case with Waffles and John Kerry and someone finding the algorithm of how google does its search engine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffles_%28John_Kerry%29#First_political_Google_bomb_of_John_Kerry

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From wikipedia

Advertising


99% of Google's revenue is derived from its advertising programs.[60]
For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total
advertising revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other
revenues.[61] Google is able to precisely track users' interests across affiliated sites using DoubleClick technology[62] and Google Analytics.[63]
Google's advertisements carry a lower price tag when their human
ad-rating team working around the world believes the ads improve the
company's user experience.[64] Google AdWords
allows Web advertisers to display advertisements in Google's search
results and the Google Content Network, through either a cost-per-click
or cost-per-view scheme.[citation needed] Google AdSense website owners can also display adverts on their own site, and earn money every time ads are clicked.[citation needed] Google began in March 2009 to use behavioral targeting based on users' interests.[65]


Google has also been criticized by advertisers regarding its inability to combat click fraud,
when a person or automated script is used to generate a charge on an
advertisement without really having an interest in the product.
Industry reports in 2006 claim that approximately 14 to 20 percent of
clicks were in fact fraudulent or invalid.[66]


In June 2008, Google reached an advertising agreement with Yahoo!,
which would have allowed Yahoo! to feature Google advertisements on
their web pages. The alliance between the two companies was never
completely realized due to antitrust concerns by the U.S. Department of Justice. As a result, Google pulled out of the deal in November, 2008.[67][68]

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Jay,

Thanks. Sort of suspected such as this was at work behind the scenes for such a result.

I guess it's just something to get used to. I mean, the internet is not really free and this is the price for using it as inexpensively as we do.

I do pay for a subscription to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. I'd probably pay for it anyway, even if it wasn't needed for business.

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