Mountain View, California — The humongous growth of the internet means that it is now easier than ever before to start a business and reach a huge audience. But counterfeit goods tend to make anyone unhappy in the long run. Buyers are frustrated when they discover the quality of the product is shoddy. Google on Tuesday announced three initiatives that it hopes will help weed out advertisers who try to use its AdWords accounts to sell counterfeit goods online.
On the Google blog, Kent Walker, Senior Vice President and General Counsel, acknowledged that there is a big problem with sellers advertising counterfeit goods online. “As the Web has grown, so does the efforts to sell counterfeits online”.
Walker said that “With over a million advertisers using its Adwords service, in the last six months of 2010 alone, we shut down approximately 50,000 AdWords accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods”.
He conceded, however, that “there is no silver bullet here. Instead, he described it as a ‘cat-and-mouse game’, where we are constantly working to improve our practices and tune our systems to keep out ‘the bad guys'”.
Google has also promised to “closely coordinate with brand owners to identify infringers and, when appropriate, expel them from the AdSense program”.
The company announced three recommendations to try and cut down on ads for counterfeit goods and services. “While our systems improve over time, counterfeiting remains a complex challenge, and we keep investing in anti-counterfeiting measures,” said Walker.
“After all, a Google user duped by a fake is far less likely to click on another Google ad in the future.”
The three new initiatives announce are:
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We will act on reliable AdWords counterfeit complaints within 24 hours: A speeding up of the time it takes to resolve matters reported using the existing Counterfeit Good Complaints Form, first introduced in 2009, to 24 hours.
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We will improve our AdSense anti-counterfeit reviews: We have always prohibited our AdSense partners from placing Google ads on sites that include or link to sales of counterfeit goods.
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We have introduced a new help center page for reporting counterfeits: New Help Page with information to make it easier for users and brand owners to identify counterfeit users along with forms to enable easier reporting of abuse.
Walker said, “We use their feedback to help us tune a set of sophisticated automated tools, which analyze thousands of signals along every step of the advertising process and help prevent bad ads from ever seeing the light of day.”
“We devote significant engineering and machine resources in order to prevent violations of ads policies, including counterfeiting.”
“Ads for counterfeits are not just bad for the real brand holder — they are bad for users who can end up unknowingly buying sub-standard products, and they are bad for Google too,” said Walker.