Bidding on competitors' brands in Google Adwords

Anyone who uses Adwords might be interested in this:

I was researching igougo.com and noticed that Web sites are bidding on their competitors' brands:

Above the actual igougo.com site in the organic search results, there are three PPC ads and two of them are igougo.com competitors. Google makes money whenever a user clicks on one of those sponsored ads...

Related article here.

There is also a related forum post about Google's shady ad practices here:

• Google's Teleporting Feature and Google Adwords

Another related article about how Google has just started allowing bidding on trademarked brand names.

Excerpt:

Google last week announced changes to its pay-per-click rules which for the first time will allow any company to buy keywords associated with a rival’s brand name.

The move has angered a number of the leading online travel brands in the UK and prompted a wave of speculation as to why Google had reversed a popular policy.

Big travel companies could be forced to hike their digital marketing spend by up to seven figures within a month, according to managing director Lyndsay Menzies of the BigMouthMedia search agency...