Google accused of fraud with AdWords program

Last week, Google was sued for fraud based upon a claim of selling low-quality advertising through its AdWords program. Attorney Hal K. Levitte says he paid for AdWords advertising in 2007 that was bogus. Part of the money they paid was for 202,528 impressions from pages that were parked domains.

Parked domains are essentially websites that haven't been established yet, but have a generic page as a placeholder. Google AdWords appear on many of these parked pages, and advertisers are charged when people visit these pages or click on the linked ads.

The problem is that when I see a parked page, I immediately leave it. Yet the advertisers who are paying per view of the page are being charged because I went to the page. They have almost no chance of me even considering their ad because I leave so quickly, yet they pay for my page view nonetheless.