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Sharoogle vs Google

Many people integrate Google' Search into their homepages. Google's search engine is (more) powerful and easy to integrate. Because of that, I decided to give that service a try and installed it last week on this blog. Top of it, one can earn some cents, if an visitor finds an sponsored link more temptating than the regular search results.

Basically, the business model of "Sharogle" is (as I already reported in an earlier article): Install "Adsense for Search", make the service public, install an affiliate system and share the revenue with the affilitates. This, of course, attracted lots of people, so the service got quite popular within some weeks. (Alexa Rank was topped to 40,000 within weeks, now dropping in free fall).

But now the dreams are over. At least for now, as it is written on sharoogle's homepage:

Sharogle has been experiencing some technical problems with Google. We will soon be back with a new method of operating, but we will always share our revenue with the clients.

The problem is, that google is probably not very happy about this business model. Sharogle is built on an affiliate system, their customers are mainly also AdSense subscribers, and therefore they have a strong interest, that they click the displayed ads. As Sharogle made sure, that only the user ids of others are used, so it was safe to click the ads. Probably, more people thought like this, and some over-the-limit click rates occured.

The result: Google's anti-click-fraud team became aware of this, and they declared the business model as "incentive". As this is an violatiom of the Terms of Service,  Incentive presentation is a sure way to get the adsende account disabled. 

On the other side, Sharogle tried to contact google about their service, to get an ok for it. However, the managment of sharogle told me in a mail, that they never reacted to any inquiries, something that is not really new, if listening to other publishers.

So the leason learned: Never try to fool google. Or: Be careful, as goolge decides what "inncentive" is, and what not.