San Francisco Chronicle: Advertisers confused by Google's policy

Google's ad policy - the secret rules by which it accepts or rejects paid search ads - have been mysterious, and after the San Francisco Chronicle obtained some documents detailing some of the rules, they seem even more mysterious. Advertisers won't be terribly surprised to find that guns, hard liquor and prostitution are forbidden products on Google, but they may be surprised to find that ads from Scientologists have special disclosure requirements and ads against President George W. Bush or Senator John Kerry run afoul of the policy.

Scientologists may come in for special scrutiny - no other religion has apparently been assigned such treatment - because of long and extremely expensive litigation that has flared up from time to time, especially in Germany. In fact, Google's policy prohibits Scientology-related ads from Germany.

Ads for abortion services can be accepted, but not tied to the keyword "abortion," and they cannot make reference to religion.

In practice, many instances of these rules being broken can still be found. A Google representative said that it is likely due to the fact that the company runs 350,000 ads - the count as of the end of 2003 - and the backlog of manual checking means that inappropriate ads can appear for days or months before they are noticed.