It would be hard to imagine that the Organic SERPs are influenced by Advertisers.

But what should be litigated is the ethics of placing the Sponsor Links on top of the organic SERPs.

Google has the entire area as one large hyperlinked map, so even if a surfer is not on the link itself, just being in the proximity will make it clickable.

Surely there have been unintentional clicks in the past.

“Christine Adamson stated Google was misleading people who thought the ranking of its search results was not influenced by payments from advertiser.”

There are so many ACTUAL scams and misleading criminal organizations out there that it seems a little… petty to go after google for this. Afterall, you don’t have to use Google, no one is forced to use it or tricked into downloading malicious code.

Busted

I’m sure there’s a lot of overlap between the companies that pay for adsense _and_ attempt to game their page ranking through various less-than-honest page modification techniques that google hasn’t accounted for in their ranking algos yet. I used to work for a guy who did both.

Comment 1 (WEB):

Here is further detail of the case, from NEws Ltd’s News.com.au:

The consumer watchdog alleges Google does not do enough to differentiate “organic” search results - those ranked by relevance - from sponsored links which appear at the top of the results page.

In particular, the ACCC claims Trading Post breached the Trade Practices Act in 2005 when it used the names of NSW car dealerships Kloster Ford and Charlestown Toyota as hyperlinks to its own site.

These hyperlinks appeared in a shaded area titled “Sponsored Links” at the top of the results page, but appeared to be the dealerships’ official sites, or at least affiliated with the dealerships, the watchdog said.

Christine Adamson SC, acting for the ACCC, said Trading Post had no such affiliation or link to either dealership.

The ACCC has previously said these dealerships compete with Trading Post for local car sales.

Trading Post chose the dealership names through AdWords, a Google commercial program that sets up hyperlinks.

Trading Post then paid Google “per click”, Ms Adamson said. “That’s how we found out about it,” she told Justice Jim Allsop.

“Kloster Ford was so outraged by the conduct that they contacted the (consumer) advocate.”

The second thrust of the case concerned Google Inc’s encouragement of this deceptive conduct by allowing sponsored sites to appear at the top of the list of search results, and in the same format as the organic search results, Ms Adamson said.

“Google represents to the world that its search engine is so good that it can rank, out of the multitudinous entries of the world wide web, these entries in order of relevance of the user’s query,” she said.

“Part of that (reputation is) that it’s not influenced by money, it’s influenced by relevance.”

Justice Allsop asked: “And that’s misleading because there would be results put at the top which are placed there not by reference to relevance but because people have paid to have that?”

“Yes,” Ms Adamson answered.

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Gaggle is an OCE (ongoing criminal enterprise).
MSN search is far better and honest.

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

I think they have a good case against google, especially when google is cracking down on paid links at the same time.