Google has been sued (again). This time it’s ACCC, Australia’s largest watchdog group. At issue is Google Adwords “Sponsored Listings”, which may appear to consumers to be organic SERPs.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said it wanted Google to stop publishing search results that fail to distinguish between paid advertisements and “organic” search results.

The ACCC said the case arose in 2005 when Google’s search engine listed two car dealerships from the New South Wales city of Newcastle as sponsored links, which are paid for by companies to attract Internet users.

Of course the links went straight through to competitor’s websites. The ACCC is saying that Google hasn’t gone far enough to distinguish the organic SERPs from the paid ads, despite the fact that Sponsored Listings are labeled as such. They further claim that this is mis-leading and continues to happen to this day.

Google Australia plans on fighting the case. Do you think this case has any merit?

Resource: SMH