This video is about how I pissed off Google and how Google search contributed. The book referenced has been re-branded as Dominate Advertising Online. It is available at the link below: http://www.halfpasthuman.com/bitch.html
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| Hello. | |
| My name's Cliff High. | |
| I run halfpasthuman.com. | |
| I need to tell you real quickly about how I pissed off Google and apologize for it. | |
| Basically, the situation is that I had been contacted by some um readers of my material. | |
| They had some issues with their advertising online, they were wasting a lot of money, they wanted some linguistic help. | |
| I set about to do that. | |
| There were enough of them contacting me that I knew there was a uh at least a niche market for this material, so I set about making a book. | |
| I made a book and I called it Make AdWords Your Bitch. | |
| My problem was that there's a trademark symbol in there, which is the word ad words. | |
| A D W O R D S. Now I've been using that word, ad words here for about five years because about uh 2010 I started uh running across these words in the general giant conversation that is the internet when I swept it for my predictive linguistics stuff, and I had to filter out all the ad words because they show up um in my work very glaringly mostly uh because they're uh linguistically emotively linguistically inappropriate. | |
| So you're having a conversation that's flowing one way and then all of a sudden it skews over there with the introduction of this ad word um thing in there, this advertising keyword. | |
| Now, I did not know at the time that I wrote this book because I've never done any advertising online up until recently, never bothered to even look at it. | |
| It was never even entered my consciousness. | |
| I just did my work and figured universe would find it. | |
| I didn't have to go out and advertise it. | |
| Advertising is fun, I've gotten into it since I've been asked to by these um uh few readers. | |
| I wrote this little book, uh, make ad words your bitch, which has now been retitled, it rebranded to dominate uh advertising online. | |
| And here's here's the situation. | |
| I pissed Google off because I wrote a book, used a trademark uh word in that title, and then set about advertising and selling that book. | |
| Now I did this 100% in ignorance that that word was uh was trademarked. | |
| And I had done it without being an ignorant pig because I'd done my due diligence. | |
| I searched AdWords for a trademark symbol on Google's own site before I've made it into my title. | |
| And this is what the point of this video is about. | |
| I'm going to show you a Google search on Google's site that shows AdWords is not uh trademarked. | |
| And I'm going to show you that you can make that same search using Google AdWords repeatedly, and you won't see a trademark symbol, except occasionally you will. | |
| Last night I was seeing the trademark symbol uh once out of every 20 plus searches. | |
| Uh it would show up sometimes uh three or four times in a search of six uh six iterations, and then not again for 14 or 20 times. | |
| So it was really inconsistent. | |
| It's not so um, it's not every other one, it's not every third one. | |
| There's a weird kind of a pattern there, it's very variable. | |
| Uh I've got some thinking I've done about it, but I don't know for sure. | |
| Nonetheless, though, when I uh wrote my book a couple of weeks ago and got it ready to title it, uh I titled it at the end of the process, and I went and I searched on Google to see if AdWords was trademarked. | |
| Now I'm gonna swing around here and let you see the screen, and you'll see that there's no trademark symbol there. | |
| And we'll do a couple more searches for ad words and see if it can show up. | |
| I'd like to show it to somebody and then show that that we don't normally see it. | |
| Because my thing is that that um what happened, I'll show you in a second, but what happened here was I had an advertising campaign going, it's really phenomenally successful, it's on Twitter. | |
| I love Twitter, Twitter is real time. | |
| Uh people give Twitter all kinds of grief and they shouldn't, they just don't understand Twitter. | |
| I mean, in terms of advertisers, they don't like Twitter because they don't understand it, they don't know how to make it perform. | |
| But my approach really did make it perform. | |
| I was putting in $15 and 26 cents worth of ad cost on Twitter to get $693 in sales. | |
| And that was consistently holding. | |
| In fact, I could do better than that on some other um advertising keywords. | |
| That's what I have to start using now instead of the word ad words. | |
| Apologies to Google, I did not know it was trademarked. | |
| Uh so in using advertising keywords and developing an advertising campaign on Twitter, I was doing very good. | |
| Uh I had a response that had 5,160 uh percent return on investment at one point. | |
| And then last night I go to check my ads, uh, as is my habit after doing my work um uh on my reports and stuff, I go to do the housekeeping work. | |
| Uh And so I went to check my ads, and there's this big giant red banner saying basically you screwed up. | |
| And it was on Twitter, and they were saying you can't advertise anymore because you've been a bad boy. | |
| And uh and then they gave me some hints in a general set uh sense as to what my um offense might have been. | |
| Now, at first I thought it was the innuendo, the the sexual innuendo I was using as a um uh as a theme, as a thread, a linguistic thread for my uh advertising campaign. | |
| And I am sense of the opinion, probably not. | |
| No one's actually told me what my offense was. | |
| I've sent in a help ticket asking to have it explicitly explained to me. | |
| I'm pretty sure it was using AdWords, and I'm pretty sure Google um uh complained to Twitter. | |
| And had I been Google, I would have bitched too. | |
| Now, I'm just a different kind of a guy, they're a corporation, they can't do things that way. | |
| If it had been me, I would have called me, and I would have corrected it, because I'm a nice guy, right? | |
| I'm not trying to scam them or anything. | |
| I did this in ignorance. | |
| I did not know. | |
| And in fact, they contributed, they helped me not know. | |
| Uh, but so in my own defense, as soon as I discovered that there was a potential that AdWords was indeed trademarked, I went and removed it all the way from all of my material. | |
| Redid the website, redid the web page, redid the book. | |
| Uh, you know, with universal search and replace, it's not that big of a deal. | |
| Um so uh the the books being translated now by some friends of mine in German and Spanish. | |
| I've I've uh addressed that. | |
| I took down all of my videos off of YouTube that used that term. | |
| I I need to remake these videos on how to use the product, uh, but I won't be using AdWords. | |
| Sorry about that. | |
| Dust all over and I've been cleaning up. | |
| So anyway, uh we're at a situation where uh or at a point here where my ads have been stopped by Twitter. | |
| I'm I want to continue them, I've redone everything. | |
| I don't uh I'm actually very apologetic to Twitter too, because I didn't want them in this position of being the in the middle of this between Google and myself. | |
| I'm assuming I'm that they're in the middle, and I'm assuming as well uh that Google's on the other side. | |
| And I didn't want to piss off Google, I've got no problems with them, I like them, they're good guys. | |
| Uh you know, I feel for them. | |
| They're drowning in in data and and and um you know they're running as hard as they can, and the data mountain keeps growing faster than they can search the thing. | |
| So um, you know, so they've got some real challenges over these next you know hundred years or whatever as they move into the uh this new millennium with the rest of us. | |
| Anyway, so like I say, I apologize to Google. | |
| Uh I did this uh inadvertently, and I did do my due diligence though, and your own site does not show the uh trademark claim. | |
| Therefore, I assumed it was you guys used it the same way I do as a generic term, you know, like facial tissue, right? | |
| As opposed to a brand name, Scots or Kleenex or something. | |
| Uh but um I didn't know it was a brand name. | |
| Again, I apologize, I've corrected the offense. | |
| Uh I would not have done it had I known, and I would not have done it had Google not contributed to the situation by not having it on their site consistently. | |
| so now let's zoom in and have a quick look and then everybody can get back to their day this is just kind of a weird situation let me see if i can get at that So now I'm gonna search for AdWords on Google's own site, and we'll see if we can actually get them to show us a trademark symbol. | |
| And it'll the data is going to appear over here, so I'm gonna focus the camera. | |
| Let's get our search there. | |
| Okay, so now I'm gonna oops. | |
| I'm sorry guys. | |
| I'm just not very good at all this video crap yet Thank you. | |
| Okay. | |
| So you see, right off on the on top, there's no trademark symbol near AdWords. | |
| I've actually found it in one of their ads uh where it does show up. | |
| Let me reinitiate. | |
| Redid the ads. | |
| There's no trademark symbol anywhere the word ad words appears. | |
| And I'm gonna uh back it out a little bit here so you see a bit more of the whole screen. | |
| And you'll see, I mean, I'm touching each and every one of these. | |
| There's simply no trademark symbol in there. | |
| I'll run the um uh thing again again it's not there's no trademark. | |
| So uh uh at this stage I I mean I can repeat that um query pretty much indefinitely. | |
| I was able to run a um Perl script and had it uh pop off a bunch and out of um something slightly shy of 1200 um uh queries on AdWords uh we had um 95 95 times out of 1200 it would show a trademark symbol. | |
| This was running it last night. | |
| So uh like I say there you go. | |
| That's the story of how I pissed off Google. | |
| Didn't mean to. | |
| Uh it was my fault. | |
| I shouldn't have done it, and they should they should not have let me do it. | |
| No, I'm not copying that. | |
| I'm not uh I'm not saying it wasn't my fault, and I have indeed corrected it all. | |
| Uh but interesting. | |
| Uh you can't trust search. | |
| So if you're gonna do this, you gotta do a really serious search and not trust what the uh search engines present. | |
| I guess that's the lesson. | |
| Thank you much for watching. |