Google, I Want to Tell Your Story

Over the weekend I decided to put together a quick campaign to sell a few digital copies of the book, The Google Story.

I received the standard "possible trademark violation" warning when I tried using the word Google in the ad title or copy, so I decided to leave it out and just bid on the book name using all available matching options.

3 days later and no impressions...time to check into a few things. I did a search for "The Google Story" and guess what, the only two AdWords ads were for books.google.com and an eBay ad. Cool, I'm not the only one being blocked.

Next I just decided to search for "Google" and see what came back. I got three ads for make money at home type services and one website hosting ad.

None of the ads in either search used the word Google in the ad title or text.

My question is how did the work at home and website hosting ads show up for a search for the word Google? Are they flying under the radar or did they actually get an exception to bid on the word Google?

Google, I'm just trying to tell your story. Could you cut me a little slack;-)