Google sued over Adwords

SEARCH OUTFIT Google has been sued for charging punters for adverts that they don't want. The suit accuses the "don't do evil" outfit of fraud, connected to its Adwords practices.

Plaintiff David Almeida, who wants to make his case a class action, said that Adwords customers who left the cost-per-click content bid box blank when they filled in the CPC form were being erroneously charged.

Adwords advertisers can set the maximum cost-per-click they will pay. According to the law suit, however, the search outfit doesn't make it clear that, if you do not stick a zero in the box, you could have to pay for running ads. Those who leave the box blank still have to pay up.

Almeida claims that Googlevil does this secretly despite the fact that ads placed on the content network are inferior to ads appearing on search result pages.

He claims that most people will think that leaving the input box blank will mean they will not buy content network ads.

Googlevil said it had not yet seen the paperwork for the case. µ

L'Inq
Information Week