Geico v. Dave Pell

Too Much Free Time

from the whooops dept

Earlier this week, when the Geico v. Google case started, Dave Pell tried to take advantage of the situation by buying up a Google ad on the keyword “Geico” (the central point of the case). After the case was very quickly decided in Google’s favor (despite claims to the contrary from Geico), a search on the phrase Geico was flooded with search ads — mostly from insurance sellers who wanted to take advantage of the situation in a bit more of a commercial manner than Dave. There was even one that I saw on Wednesday that said “Dave Pell doesn’t sell insurance…” which appears to be gone now. However, Dave’s ad apparently attracted plenty of attention from the Slashdot crowd who decided to go for broke and click on his ad a lot. This thorough clickfest drove the ad to the top of the Google results — a spot reserved for ads with very high clickthrough rates. This was the point at which Dave noticed that he was getting a lot of clicks from Geico’s lawfirm. Now he’s hoping Geico’s lawyers have a sense of humor. As he points out though, expect plenty of others to do similar things in the future, as people try to scare up a little extra publicity simply by buying up breaking news keywords — though it’s less likely that lawyers will be so interested in those ads.