"The reason is because I didn't catch the other users. Or their infraction isn't as bad."

That's your reason, not Google's. Google knows full well who is bidding on what keyword. Are you suggesting they are under-staffed, under budgeted or overwhelmed in their task of keeping AdWords clean? I'm not buying it. Google has the resources to evenly apply guidelines, they're not a one-man show who's too busy to squash out violators.

The famous last words.

Of course they are overwhelmed by the taks of keeping AdWords clean, just like Apple is overwhelmed by the task of timely approving apps for App Store, despite having more money than god and the number of AdWord ads submitted to Google is several orders of magnitude greater than number of Apps submitted to Apple.

Processes that involve humans are inherently non-scalable and determining whether an ad crosses the line of acceptable usage is a human task.

And humans have different opinions so there will never be "evenly applying guidelines", not for google ads, not for App Store apps. The only time 3 people have exactly the same opinion is when 2 of them are dead.

Reminds me of the time an Apple staffer called me to discuss an app I had submitted.

"We'd rather discuss this on the phone," he said.

"What's up?"

"We can approve your app, but can you please remove all references to midgets touching themselves, first?"

Would've paid to have seen that in writing.

I need to download that app NOW

> While I feel bad for the knife company, I also know dealing with user-generated content (like these ads) is hard.

Uh, what? Where does it state that the ads are user generated?

OP means user generated from google's perspective--Knife Depot is the user doing the generating.

The reason Amazon and Walmart get to do stuff is not because Google didn't notice them.

If there was some small company that got away with it, you might be right. But the issue here isn't Walmart's actions going unnoticed.

> dealing with user-generated content (like these ads) is hard.

That's not really an excuse because no one forces Google to be in the user generated ad business. They want money from advertisers so they should do all they can to offer the best service possible.

If the advertiser is not happy with Google's service, they are free to use another service.

"no one forces you to do X" argument cuts both ways?

Unfortunately that other service doesn't exist. Sure there are other places to advertise but for a lot of businesses it won't come close to replacing Adwords.

Google has such a large percentage of search traffic that your competitors who are not flagged will have a huge advantage over you.

I think so much of these types of actions stem from growing pains. It all stars with defining a policy (no assisted open knife ads!). You then have managers telling their employees to enforce it, but the TOS hasn't been updated and the front-line employees do not have the tools to really identify who is actively infringing. Once the front-line employees come back with dozens of complaints (or users complain), the management realizes the mistakes and things get righted. I'm sure it's no different for you - once you create the policy, you experience the problems implementing the policy that then force/cause you to create the tools/etc.

It is hard to do it right. But that's the problem- they don't do it right. Doing it wrong is unacceptable.