• by Shankar Gupta , May 9, 2005

Google found itself on the defensive last week as the conservative organization RightMarch.org and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee both took out search ads attacking specific politicians.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee took out an ad slamming House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. The text read, "The Truth about Tom DeLay, Learn about DeLay's many scandals and help us clean up the House!" and linked to the Web site of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

RightMarch.org responded by purchasing an identical ad, except with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's name appearing in place of Tom DeLay.

Both ads, which ran on April 28, were ultimately taken down by Google for violations of the editorial policy, but RightMarch's ad was removed earlier than the anti-Delay ad, leading to accusations of left-wing bias.

A Google spokesman denied the company was biased, and said the ads were taken down for violating Google's editorial policy, which prohibits portraying an individual or group in a bad light. He added that an ad calling for the ouster of a politician is acceptable, but an ad portraying one as corrupt would not be.

But the controversy highlights the myriad of ways in which creative marketers can use Google to press a point, notwithstanding the search giant's editorial policies.

The main reason that political groups--and others--can take out search ads that technically violate Google's standards appears to be that Google doesn't fully enforce its rules until after ads appear. A Google spokesman said that AdWords first are automatically screened using an algorithm, and after passing the initial screening, the ads go live.

While Google also has an editorial team scour the ads, this human review doesn't take place until after the ad has appeared. Google's main search competitor, Yahoo!, also uses an editorial team to scrutinize search ads--but unlike Google, ads don't go live on Yahoo! until after this review, which usually takes between 24 and 48 hours from the time the ad is submitted.

Google declined to state how long ads are online before being reviewed, or how many ads are rejected a day.

But others in the industry say that it can take a few days before Google catches on that there's a problem with an ad. Peter Hershberg, a managing partner at search engine marketing company Reprise Media, said it typically takes Google's editorial team 72 hours to remove ads that violate Google's policies.

And that's a time delay large enough to allow ads to sneak through, and in some cases, attract quite a bit of attention.

Early last month, an individual working for the 2006 gubernatorial campaign of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer placed an ad on the keywords AIG, a company that Spitzer was investigating.

It didn't take long before an anti-Spitzer ad appeared, criticizing both the Spitzer campaign for placing the ad and Google for allowing the ad to be placed. The Spitzer campaign took the ad down on its own, while the anti-Spitzer ads were apparently removed by Google, but not before they caught the eye of the media.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, a campaigner bought AdWords keywords for the word "waffles," and linked it to the John Kerry presidential campaign Web site, playing on the claim that the presidential candidate couldn't make up his mind on certain issues.

Democratic political consultant Michael Bassik said that while these search ads only stay up for a short time, they can still be used as a clever way to generate buzz. "It's a technique that we've seen a few people use," he said. "It's not that that ad will reach millions of people or even hundreds of people, it's that the appearance of the ad hopefully triggers some media attention."

"I could see it being an effective tool. But in terms of influencing the electorate, by the time Google figures it out, only a handful of people have probably been exposed to it," said Bassik. "The cost barrier is so low that this is just a natural thing for campaigns and individuals to latch on to. It's a question of 'How long can your ads stay up before the editorial team sees them?'"