Is Google heading for troubled waters?

It's easy to see that they're doing good now, with all their new apps and services (iGoogle, Google Earth etc), but how much of that even matters when 90% of their income comes from adwords.

Sometimes I wonder if the FTC is building a major case against them based on the way adwords makes some people have a minimum $10 bid for a keyword, and yet others pay .10 cents.

I've started fresh campaigns many times, that are getting 10% CTR's converting like mad and making me money, hand over fist, but then all of the sudden they say my ad sucks and I need to bid $10 to make the best kws active?

Very very fishy business practice there.

It has crossed my mind that at some point in the future, Google could face an anti-trust suit. However, I'm more confident that their legal team works around the clock to keep that from happening.

they do that for a fact.

when i was doing arbatarge in through google, my keywords started out at 30 cents highest bid, a month later they were asking for 4 bucks for that same keyword that cost me only 30 cents a month before.

also the price raise was not due more people advertising using my keywords or anything. they just saw that i was getting loads of traffic and it was costing me nearly nothing, so they raised it...

i believe we can see this example repeated a number of different times with other keywords of importance.

I have one teory.
Much is about how your ad perform. If your ad fits perfectly to the search so you get much clicks then you can get cheaper keywords.
In other words google is trying to optimize the income.
10x click for 1$ each is same as 1x click for 10$ each.

I think it's the same if you make advertisement on google content.

At least I don't think it's the ad with highest bid that get first position.

Google doesn't get the bulk of my PPC money anymore-I've still got some issues with their adwords search query reports not providing me the search queries for half of my clicks-anyone else had this problem?

While we're discussing PPC stuff, has anyone been messing with MSN adcenter-man, I'm loving some of their reports, at least they're trying to improve, although they still get the baby share of my cash my CTRs are pretty decent there.