• Google Busts Out The Ultimate Spam Fighting Tool: The Lawsuit

    Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

    MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple. Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in... → Learn More

    As an Internet behemoth with properties that get visited a zillion times a day, life battling spammers must be pretty tough for Google. Sure, they invent new technologies to try and stop these jokers. But like parasites, they quickly adapt and come up with new methods to manipulate the system. And when it gets bad enough, it’s now clear that Google is willing to throw technology out the window and simply sue the bastards.

    As they’ve announced on the Google Blog today, the search giant is taking a group of rogue pharmacies to court in order to stop them from continually bombarding Google’s ad ecosystem with their spam. As Google notes, in this case, it’s not just that the spammers are annoying users, they’re potentially tricking people and offering products that “can be dangerous without the right prescription.” So Google felt as if they had to act.

    Google also notes that late last year they were forced to take other spammers to court — the so-called “Google Money” scammers. On June 1 of this year, a court granted Google a permanent injunction barring those scammers from using the Google logo or name. So while time-consuming, the court-route can work.

    Says Google: “Litigation of this kind should act as a serious deterrent to anyone thinking about circumventing our policies to advertise illegally on Google. As we identify additional bad actors, we will add them to the lawsuit.

    Company: Google
    Website: google.com
    Launch Date: September 7, 1998
    IPO: NASDAQ:GOOG

    Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...

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