The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) has decided to take Google head on, believing that they have contravened the Australian trade practices act, and are also engaging in misleading and deceptive conduct.

The ACCC is alleging that Trading Post contravened sections 52 and 53(d) of the Trade Practices Act 1974 in 2005 when the business names “Kloster Ford” and “Charlestown Toyota” appeared in the title of Google sponsored links to Trading Post’s website. Kloster Ford and Charlestown Toyota are Newcastle car dealerships who compete against Trading Post in automotive sales.

Without seeing the ads in question I would assume that the Trading Post were using keyword insertion within the ad copy, a practice which lets you to bid on a wide range of phrases and still have unique advertising copy related to the phrases people are using to search with.

The ACCC is also alleging that Google are not adequately distinguishing between their sponsored listings and organic results.  They are seeking an injunction that would prevent people from displaying advertising that is not expressively distinguished from organic results.

Google Australia spokesman Rob Shilkin said in a statement: “Google Australia believes that these claims are without merit and we will defend against them vigorously. They represent an attack on all search engines and the Australian businesses, large and small, who use them to connect with customers throughout the world.”

The matter is set to appear before Federal Court in Sydney on August 21, 2007.

Rumour has it that Microsoft plans to launch its paid search platform “adCenter” in Australia before the years end.  The ads will be distributed on the already popular nineMSN search network, replacing Yahoo Search Marketing.

Business Strategy Manager Harvey Sanchez has stated that they see Australia as a top five international priority market for Microsoft search.  He said that he hopes that adCenter will be launched by the end of 2007 and that they have already commenced a lot of localisation work to increase the relevancy for Australian searches.

Source: Search Engine Room

I was surprised to see this evening while catching up on some reading that Google have officially launched Google Maps Australia.

The first thing I did was search for Web design Ballina and was happy to see eMedia Worx showing nicely in the results.

Time to have a bit more of a play around and I will start posting some tips to get your business noticed over the next week.  In the meantime you can read the official announcement at the Google Blog.

According to online message management company Postini, the amount of unsolicited e-mail spam has risen by 73% in the past three months.  These figures really don’t surprise me at all!

As many of you are well aware we also own a small Web hosting business, upon which many of our customers entrust their e-mail services.  All accounts come equipped with the ever reliable MailScanner software, which up until recent times has done a remarkably good job at filtering out most of the unsolicited e-mail.  This has changed over the past few months, where we have seen a steady increase in the amount of complaints from customers about the amount of spam that they are receiving into their inbox.

So what has changed these past few months?

There are many online experts who believe that the level of spam has not increased so much as the sophistication.  In a recent article, Brian Livingston states research from London-based analyst Richie Jennings that mentions that “naive commentators wrongly issued him that a doubling of spam in the inbox equals a doubling of spam on the Internet.”

His research indicates that spam has increased up to 20% in the past three months.  However the real interesting aspect is that they have seen a 100% increase in the amount of spam that is being delivered to people’s inboxes.

He also mentions that this increase in delivery is due in part to the spam messages ability to use images to convey content rather than traditional text e-mail based messages.  These image-based e-mails are proving to be very successful in their ability to bypass traditional spam filters such as MailScanner.

Just who is sending this spam?

A lot of the problem has also been attributed to a group of Russian hackers that are using a Trojan named “SpamThru” which is reported to have hijacked over 70,000 computers. This particular botnet is showing a new level of sophistication and is theoretically capable of sending a billion spam e-mails per day.

Security analyst for SecureWorks John Stewart found that SpamThru was a complex operation with a data base hacking component that signalled the ability of the spammers to target their “pump and dump” scams with victims associated with financial institutions.  According to Stewart, about 20 small investment and financial news sites have been breached with the express purpose of obtaining user information to target with their “penny stock scams”.

“They’re breaking into sites that are somewhat related to the stock market and stealing e-mail addresses from those databases. The thinking is, if they get an e-mail address for someone reading stock market and investment news, that’s a perfect target for these penny stock scams,” Stewart said in an interview with eWeek.

Can anything be done to stop this?

From a technical point of view, I’m sure that there are many companies working on solutions to these type of issues, but the real problem lies in that the antispam/antivirus/antispyware/antimalware vendors are always one step behind the spammers and hackers and are forever playing catch up.

There are those that also believe that the ISPs also shoulder part of the blame in that they should be blocking all unauthorised traffic on port 25 which is used by computers to send e-mail.  David Hart believes that any port 25 traffic not destined for an ISPs own mail server and accompanied with an authorised username and password should be rejected.

A lot of blame should also be dumped upon most Gulf overnments around the world that have very weak spam laws and should be looking to shut down and deter spammers with extremely harsh penalties.

From an Internet user perspective the best thing that anyone can do is not purchase any of the crap that these guys are trying to sell.  If we don’t buy anything surely they won’t have any money to fund their projects and pony for the bandwidth they use.

It looks like Apple has confirmed the Web’s worst kept secret and launched the much anticipated Apple iPhone.  This is a damn sexy looking piece of gear and I definitely may be tempted to get myself my first ever mobile phone when it is released in Australia.There’s plenty information floating around about the launch and you can read more about it over at MacWorld.

I was just installing some Windows Updates on my computer, when up popped a notice that Internet Explorer 7 was ready to be installed.

Microsoft has had the new browser ready for download for a while, but has only “forced” it upon users within the last couple of days as a security update. I have resisted the temptation to download it and play with it, mainly because we thought it would be a good idea to see what our clients are seeing. Now that most people will be upgraded without even knowing it, I will be keen to check out what exactly has changed.

The new browser has a few new features that will be useful to users, including tabbed browsing, rss feed aggregator and increased CSS support.

The aggregator will be most useful, especially for users with blog and newsletter systems available through their site. One of us will be writing an article soon on the value of RSS feeds in reaching your audience, so stay tuned.

As for the increased CSS support, we will be going through our clients sites furiously within the next few weeks, making sure all designs are still sitting together nicely. If you are an eMedia Worx client, make sure that if you see anything we miss, you contact us and report the bugs and we will endeavour to fix them as quickly as possible.