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April 23, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Search giant Google was sued on Tuesday by one of the users of its AdSense program, who claims he was deceived and unfairly charged for ads displayed on third-party sites through the program.
The Plaintiff, private investigator David Almeida, says he signed up to promote his business through Google's AdWords program, which displays paid listings alongside search results.
His lawsuit accuses Google of fraudulently charging Almeida, and other advertisers, by "redefining the universally understood meaning of an input form left blank."
Almeida says he set up his Google advertising account, leaving blank the maximum per-click bid box for AdSense, which runs ads alongside targeted content on third-party sites, because he understood "optional" to mean he could opt out of the program by not filling it in.
The system, it turns out, requires the user to input a bid of $0, or the maximum bid for AdWords is applied to the AdSense program as well.
According to reports published Wednesday, Google says it has yet to receive the complaint.
The lawsuit was filed in US District Court in San Jose by the law firm Kabateck, Brown and Kellner, which has filed numerous consumer-protection lawsuits seeking multimillion-dollar damages. The current suit against Google seeks unspecified damages and is pursuing class-action status.
Brian Kabateck, Almeida's lawyer estimates that Google earns hundreds of millions of dollars through unwanted advertising.
Kabateck has reportedly been involved in action against Google in the past, and joined in a $90 million "click fraud" settlement against the company in 2006. He has also reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with Yahoo! over search related complaints.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
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Comment by Anonymous on Thursday, April 24, 2008
This suit was brought by a California class action mill that has sued Google several times before. You can see the orginal filed Complaint here:
http://www.TechnologyBuyersAdvocate.com/almeida_versus_google.pdf
What a crock!