Google's Top Spot For Sale, Court Told

[Nomad559]

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22393389-29277,00.html

GOOGLE has been selling off the top rankings on its search engine results to commercial partners, rather than sorting them by relevance as it claims to, a Sydney court has heard.

The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) is taking world-first legal action in the Federal Court against Google Inc over allegedly deceptive conduct related to sponsored links on its websites.

The ACCC has brought a two-pronged case against Trading Post and Google - including subsidiaries Google Australia and Google Ireland - for potentially misleading consumers.

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.

[melody]

1. They're just finding this out?????????

Anyone who works in web marketing has known that for years.

They're at war with webmasters (a war which has caused most of the top results to be spam)
and -- fancy that -- without relevant top listings, people are more prone to click paid
ads. How oddly fortuitous. :tinfoilhat: