AdWords

Google has won a landmark advertising case in Australia with a ruling that the Web giant was not responsible for misleading advertising that ran on its site.

The five judges of Australia's High Court unanimously ruled Wednesday that Google did not violate trade laws by allowing companies to purchase AdWords related to competitors' names. The decision overturned a Federal Court's ruling last April that found four advertisements purchased on the site between March 2006 and July 2007 were misleading and in violation of Australia's Trade Practices Act 1974.

Google appealed the decision, arguing that it was merely … Read more

Google is driving serious economic activity in the U.S. -- at least, that is, according to Google.

The search giant today unveiled its 2011 Economic Impact report, and said that its search and advertising tools, including AdWords and AdSense, drove $80 billion in economic activity across the U.S. last year. The company said it reached that figure with help from "1.8 million businesses, Web site publishers, and non-profits across the U.S."

In order to arrive at that figure, Google used some fancy math. The company estimates that businesses that use AdWords make $2 in … Read more

Google AdWords can be a powerful form of advertising, placing ads for your business right next to related Google search results--if you do it right. Google AdWords Editor is a simple tool that lets AdWords users manage their campaigns on their desktop. There's no guarantee that it will improve the success of your ad campaign, but it can at least make the whole thing a little easier to deal with.

The program's interface is plain and utilitarian, with its major features arranged in tabs. We easily signed in to our AdWords account and loaded our data into the … Read more

Google received 14,201 requests from 25 countries for private user information in the second half of 2010, according to data released today in the company's Transparency Report.

Among the countries listed in the report, the U.S. accounted for 4,601 requests, of which Google complied with 94 percent. The U.S. had the most requests of any single country.

Other countries high on the list included Brazil with 1,804 user data requests, India with 1,699, and the U.K. with 1,162.

The search giant's Transparency Report is designed to shed light on the … Read more

Google is promising a few improvements to its online ad system to help stop the spate of advertisers hawking counterfeit items.

In a blog posted yesterday, the search giant tallied the number of advertisers using AdWords at more than 1 million spread across at least 190 different countries. As a result, finding specific accounts that advertise phony products can be a challenge. Google was able to shut down around 50,000 such accounts just in the second half of 2010, but the company admits that more needs to be done.

To help stop the proliferation of fake items sold through … Read more

Dodge's Challenger is a modern muscle car. The Challenger explosion 25 years ago was a tragic moment. Other than the name they don't have much in common, but for several hours Friday morning, Google's AdWords system considered them linked.

That's just one example of a weak spot in Google's famous AdWords system, which turned an interesting Stanford science project into the world's most powerful Internet company. Simply put, it takes some time for the AdWords system to determine whether an ad triggered by a search query is truly relevant to that query, meaning that … Read more

Google may be using its leading position in the search market to weaken the competition, according to the findings of a French regulator.

Asserting that Google holds a dominant position in search advertising, the French Competition Authority said yesterday that it has found certain possible conduct on the part of Google intended to "discourage, delay, or eliminate" competitors.

Among its findings, the French regulator, or the Autorite, cited exclusivity clauses, technical obstacles, and other methods that Google imposes on its partners or customers and said that the company treats them "in a discriminatory manner or refuses to … Read more

After initially rejecting three AdWords ads submitted by a major critic of its policies, Google has now approved the ads following a complaint by the advertiser.

Last week Consumer Watchdog--an intense and sometimes disingenuous Google critic--submitted three text ads to Google designed to promote the over-the-top video it created of Google CEO Eric Schmidt in order to criticize Google on privacy issues. The ads targeting keywords such as "Google CEO Eric Schmidt" were purchased on September 2, the same day Consumer Watchdog released the video, but Google rejected them the next day citing its policy on trademarks in … Read more

Auctioneers generally aren't allowed to bid in their own auctions; why should Google be any different?

That's what Santa Clara University professor of law Eric Goldman is wondering, publishing an essay Wednesday on his personal blog and Search Engine Land calling on Google to stop bidding in AdWords auctions to run "house ads" that promote Google products. Google's involvement in the process distorts the value of search ads for other advertisers trying to bid on the same keywords and makes it impossible to know whether Google is playing fair, Goldman wrote.

"Thus, when Google … Read more