The crucial question is what Google *claims* to be doing. If Google's search pages are presented as, in essence, Google's *opinion* of what you would most like to see, then I think they are in the clear. If they are presented as some kind of objective survey results, *and* if Google is manipulating them so that they aren't really what's claimed, then there's a problem.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: It really is too bad when internet folk (and that includes me) come to rely _so much_ on the revenue they receive from Google AdSense that they really begin to suffer when it is gone and they think in terms of lawsuits to force things back 'as they were'. Like many other people, I was (am) depending on Google AdSense for a few dollars each month. And like Kinderstart, my own internal records (based in large part on Google's calculations) and money began to dry up several months ago. Google's readership count (_always_ too conservative, IMO) and their formulas for making payouts got even more conservative than in the past. Unlike Kinder- start I do not claim that Google owes me anything, but something, somewhere is going wrong with their system, that much is fact. I think I am looking realistically at their 'click-through' ratio. I see about a one percent ratio each day, and other sources have told me two or three percent ratio is doing quite well, and I know that every page with a Google ad on it is going to get crawled and indexed. But, I still maintain that 'things' are not as they were with Google AdSense even a year or so ago. PAT]- posted
17 years ago