Comment by macNchz
1 day ago
They were arbing keywords through this: they'd place ads directly on Google for low-cost keywords, which would link to an ask.com search results page that itself would display Google ads through that partnership, but with a UI designed (more than Google itself) to trick people into clicking them. Seemingly they were able to find combinations that made this profitable.
The "Search Partner network" in general is one of the ways that Google Ads milks (scams?) unsophisticated buyers: unless you turn it off, you're paying for ads that are shown to confused users on sketchy results pages that you have no real insight into, not just the Google results page itself. The traffic from them is garbage.
>one of the ways that Google Ads milks (scams?) unsophisticated buyers
The average advertiser has no clue about this. Google's role in the advertising ecosystem has been as a scammer and monopolist for many years now. Unfortunately, every major ad network learned from them, and they all have a similar trick default setting.
The latest scam from Google is PMAX, where you YOLO your placements/ad creative/landing page combos to Google and they optimize it automatically. This serves as an optimal mechanism to funnel your ads to the most fraudulent publishers, who's army of employees fills out your forms and bypasses bot protections most effectively. Google's team will then helpfully recommend to "ummm... maybe block their IPs?". Absolute racket.
> you're paying for ads that are shown to confused users
Knowing some scammy advertisers, I think that many are happy to pay to show their ads only to confused users