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Got Term Papers for Sale? Google Won't Help You Advertise It
About time.
By Josh Fischman
Term-paper and essay-writing services join prostitutes, firearms dealers, and hacking sites in Google's forbidden-advertising zone, the company announced on Tuesday.
Academic paper-writing services, or "paper mills," will no longer be able to buy search terms in the Google AdWords program, and thus their ads will no longer pop up in the "sponsored links" sections of a Google search-results page. (Links to those sites could still be found among the results on the main part of the page, however.)
"It's a new Google policy, just announced," said a saleswoman from Google's AdWords who did not want to give her name because she was not authorized to speak to reporters. "We're not going to be taking ads from essay services anymore."
Diana Adair, a Google spokeswoman, confirmed in an e-mail message that the ban would go into effect "in the coming weeks," though she did not give a precise date.
The paper mills, which offer buyers papers written to order for a fee, have been the subject of sharp complaints from universities, which view them as sources of plagiarism.
The companies themselves have a different view. "We're not doing anything wrong here," said Sandra Brown, a spokeswoman for Term Paper Relief, a site that shows up as a sponsored link on Google after a search using the phrase "term paper."
For $9.95 per page, the company offers "A-grade term papers" that, it says, are custom-written and completely nonplagiarized. "We've been working as a company for eight years, and we've never had a complaint from a customer," Ms. Brown said. She added that she had not heard about the new Google policy.
Term Paper Relief's site notes that its papers are "for assistance purposes only" and "should be used with proper reference."
That kind of disclaimer probably won't get a company past the new Google ban, though the AdWords saleswoman said she did not have the exact wording of the policy or know how it would be enforced.
"We'll look at individual sites," she said. "It's going to be a work in progress."
— Josh Fischman
Chronicle of Higher Education
2007-05-23
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