The Google Company has a program called Google Ad-Words, which allows web-site owners to make bids on certain search terms. Whenever someone searches for that specific term, the web-site that has bids on the term is shown high on Google.com search results. However this is not an equal opportunity program. Just ask a man named Dan Savage, he runs the web-site Sourcetool.com. He started the web-site in 2005, and placed bids (usually around five or six cents) on terms like ball-bearings, which would ensure that if someone searched Google for a place to buy ball-bearings they would be led to Sourcetool.com. However his web-site was a free one, so he needed a way to actually make money from it. So he used Google's other program, Google Ad-Sense, which placed specific advertising on the Sourcetool.com homepage whenever someone clicked through to the site from Google.com searching for a place to buy ball bearings. Mr. Savage says that he was paid around ten cents every time someone clicked on an ad in his site.

At first Google gave him nothing but support, even going so far as to name Sourcetool.com its Ad-Sense site of the week. By 2006 Sourcetool.com was making Dan Savage around $115,000 a month on $655,000 revenue. Mr. Savage said that his biggest expense was paying Google for bids on search terms, which was costing him $500,000 a month. However in the summer of 2006 Google turned the tables on Mr. Savage. Suddenly and without warning Source tool’s traffic dwindled. When Mr. Savage started to look into the reasons for this drop in traffic, he found that Google had raised his minimum bid requirement from five or six cents to one dollar, sometimes as much as five or ten dollars; because the new minimum bid for search terms was so much higher than what Mr. Savage would allow for, he traffic had dwindled.

Mr. Savage was concerned as to why Google had suddenly done this to him. After asking the Google executives what went wrong, he was told that Google thought that his landing page was low quality. All though he was never told what exactly was wrong with his landing page they gave him some suggestions; at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars Mr. Savage followed Google’s suggestions. Still his ads were not ranking high on the search results. When he pressed Google to explain why the suggestions hadn’t worked they brushed him off.

After much digging and involvement with his lawyer, Mr. Savage figured out that the reason Google had betrayed him was that his site acted as a directory, and Google felt that its capabilities to search over 600,000 business sites was too much like competition, so they excluded Sourcetool.com from Google’s search results. The other major reason for Google to get rid of Sourcetool.com was that it competed directly with business.com one of Google’s “content network partners”. “Mr. Savage realizes that he is in no position to sue Google for anti-trust violations”, however one thing that he can do is relate his story to he justice department in an attempt to stop or at least hinder the Google-Yahoo deal that was announced in June. (All information in this piece is derived from information gathered from NYT.com news articles)