Archive for July, 2008

• Exploring Paid Search Auctions

  The generalised second price auction, described in a somewhat mathematical paper by University of Stanford economists, is the dominant auction mechanism for paid search. It is often misunderstood. I’m pretty certain that there’s features of it that I don’t properly understand, too. However, understanding the auction is important for effective bidding and also explains a [...]

  July 29th, 2008

• Rails 2.1.0 Fails With Sqlite3 on Debian

  I’ve tried this on OS X (Leopard) having done the update dance recommended by Apple. I’ve done the Debian 4.0 update dance and installed various packages for compilation – including libsqlite3-ruby. After the updates, the rev levels are different and that’s pretty suspicious. Both OS X and Debian have rails 2.1.0, ruby 1.8.5 (Debian) and [...]

  July 28th, 2008

• GAP Test Defects – Part Two

  In the first part of this article series about Google AdWords Professional certification, I looked at some questions and answers that I considered to be of doubtful value. Here’s some more questions and answers from the exam that I think reflect badly on the value of a GAP certificate to an advertising professional and degrades [...]

  July 9th, 2008

• AdWords Phishing – Another Type Of Click Fraud?

  I now know what at least one of the scammers are doing. Screenshots of the fraudulent activity signature of this scammer are shown below. If you’ve clicked on a URL in an email apparently from Google, recently, then you might want to check your AdWords History – as shown below. If these international fraudsters have [...]

  July 2nd, 2008