jtara - 4:31 am on Sep 12, 2006 (gmt 0)

wow - all you have to do is add this parameter: &adtest=on

That's why I asked "how long until we see the exploits...". Not quite sure how this might be exploited by somebody for profit, but betcha somebody thinks something up pronto.

(Edit: clicking on the ad links does NOT click-through to the destination. So, probably not much incentive for abuse.)

what we really need is a tool to be able to choose our location to test local ads outside of our region.

Read the blog. There's a way to do that. You can add parameters to the URL by hand. You could also build a local HTML page with a drop-down list in a form. Would have been nice if Google had done this, though.