From the beginning: the two doltish MNC's Citibank India and Google India refuse to respond back in a human fashion.
After Citibank upgraded my 'gold' credit card to 'platinum' without ofcourse increasing any credit limits I re-entered the card information into Google Adwords interface ( the old interface lets call it ) and lo and behold it failed. Wrote to Citibank India and they responded that Google India tried to process a .01 INR payment which is not possible. Possibly some cut-n-paste from US codebase to make it work in India duh!. Now extremely dumb of Google India but aren't they big enough for Citibank India to make an exception. Requests to Google India were responded to by their bot a couple of weeks later which promptly redirected the dumb user ( yours truly ) to their help section. How could I a dumb user dare to doubt the goodness of Google, I should read and re-read their help section ofcourse and find that I should get another credit card, they wouldn't bother to charge a reasonable amount like INR 1 instead .01 INR to test the validity of the card. Anyone familiar with India's draconian ( for regular folks ) KYC norms knows that it is a pain to share your personal information with yet another leaky sieve ( read another bank ) so I decided to apply for another card which promptly arrived in another couple of weeks. And lo and behold the Google Adwords changed its interface which no longer allows me to add either a backup or primary card, I guess its just a special case for me since I didn't see any other rants about it on the interwebs.

It takes several weeks for Google India's bot to respond and then you can write an e-mail back thinking oh yes maybe some human may respond now, you get yet another bot to respond to you few weeks later and then total silence. I decided to drop it and move over to Yahoo! search marketing. Yahoo!'s moral equivalent of Google Adwords is more advanced but its interface is not very intuitive and their help sucks but a helpful human responds to you everytime you need to speak to one. In the end that is what matters.

I haven't been able to figure out where do I find the site analytics on Y! similar to Google Analytics. But Y! ads go all the way to Y! search and Bing and its definitely worth a full shot. Infact my experience till now with Y! search marketing has been reasonable the prices are more reasonable and traffic quality is comparable to what was sent by Google Adwords.

Results:-
Move from Citibank India to yet another Credit Card Company transition in progress.
Move from Google Adwords to Y! search marketing, learning and transition in progress.
If only Google India could try testing a new credit card with a more reasonable transaction amount like INR 1 or more or fix their interface to allow me to add a new card I might have never tried Y! search marketing.

For long has the SEO(Search Engine Optimization) industry with their black hat and then borderline techniques held the mindshare of webmasters and PHBs. A client recently asked me what it would it cost him to get to the top of search results, I told him not to bother about SEO get the SEM working for him instead. Well for a large price SEO experts still claim to subvert the Big G's algorithms( without bothering the explicit guidelines laid by Big G) for a while but not for long. I believe the continuous cost of subverting search results versus buying sponsored results to acquire traffic are now evenly matched.
The tipping point where SEO's well deserved death is upon us, with some help from searchwiki.

Perhaps the black hat techniques have now moved to another domain of social media marketing and they are being celebrated. How evil is it to make an un-suspecting youngster to part with his orkut/e-mail password and spam all his friends with a so-called 'viral video'.