incrediBILL - 4:17 am on Apr 4, 2012 (gmt 0)

The court said Google should be responsible for search results and that by publishing the paid advertisements had "engaged in conduct that was misleading or deceptive"

The courts obviously aren't aware of the complexity of the problem.

If the judge had someone 'splain to her/him/it how this stuff works, he'd have run screaming into the night and ended up face down in a gutter after a drunken bender.

Seriously, short of 100% human checking of every single ad and SERP combo possible, where the ad could potentially be displayed, computers aren't quite capable of currently negotiating the nuances of the human language required to detect such garbage. Maybe someday soon, but not today.

However, if Google allowed end users to report these problems and automatically stop running ads for certain combinations when the reported problems reached a certain threshold, in theory the masses being mislead could stop the misleading ads. Then the competition could hire people, or rent a botnet, to game the system and shut down competitors ads and all sorts of fun garbage.

Like I said, if the judge only had a clue what's involved.