I am fuming over the adsense letter I received recently. I run a very small time search engine, an experiment really that includes file/torrent searches if/when the the alg. believes the user is searching for something that might be downloadable. obviously the search engine indexes torrent sharing sites because of this reason. I received a notice from Google that they had stopped delivering ads to my Adsense channel for this website due to a terms violation because the search engine was indexing files. The file it mentioned in the warning letter was "Hidalgo DVDrip" The problem is that Google themselves indexes not just one version of this torrent file, but thousands of them as you can see in the search results here: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=Hidalgo+torrent&aq=f&aqi=g2&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&fp=7a0f3b167a3fb4f3 and http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=hida...&oq=hidalgo+dvdr&gs_rfai=&fp=7a0f3b167a3fb4f3 Now Google does not show ads on that particular page, most likely their alg. has decieded that a media title coupled with "torrent" or "download" would not have ads sold against it, possibly to avoid copyright complaints. However, the Adsense team states plainly "AdSense publishers are not permitted to place Google ads on sites involved in the distribution of copyrighted materials. This includes hosting copyrighted files on your site, as well as providing links for or driving traffic to sites that contain copyrighted material. As a result, we have disabled ad serving to the site.... Please note that we may disable your account if further violations are found in the future. " notice it says "sites" not "pages" so Google is a gigantic hypocrite and indexes and displays these pages, but yet threatens to ban another search engine from their adsense program for doing the exact same thing?
I don't think it is necessarily that you are a search engine but rather just an Adsense Publisher. TOS and Policies are quite clear...right or wrong (in your mind) you DID agree to them when you signed up....