More on why Google's auctions are a sham

Kudos to Cade Metz of the Register who has some dead-on and pertinent insights to the pending Google-Yahoo decision by DOJ  in his July piece: "Eye of newt: Inside Google's Adwords auction." Don't miss the whole article. Below are some wonderful snippets.  

• "If AdWords is an auction, it's an auction where your $10 bid may lose out to a bid of 5 cents, where you may be banned from bidding unless you outbid the rest of the field, where some bids are ignored from time to time and others are ignored all the time, where you don't know the rules - and the rules are always changing."...

• "But, again, this isn't eBay. It's not the bids - or, at least, not the bids alone - that determine where you finish. Each bid is multiplied by a mysterious something known as a "quality score," and its this black-box calculation that decides where your ad ends up. The trick is that quality score varies from advertiser to advertiser, from keyword to keyword, and sometimes from day to day. And no one knows how it all works except the Oompah Loompahs inside Googleplex."

• "But Google isn't just playing favorites. It's driving prices higher by limiting the number of clicks available at low prices."

   

Bottom line:

Google's 'auctions' are certainly not how a competitive market works.

• Isn't it supremely ironic that the company that is so paranoid that other companies may treat Google non-neutrally, is the biggest offender of not treating customers neutrally?
• Is Google really telling us that they are worried that everyone else on the Internet is just like them?