So what is actually going on? Crunchgear’s Greg Kumparak has a pretty solid theory; Due to the fact that Google won’t advertise for actual sex sites (only sex education-related sites pass muster), when a user searches for blacklisted stuff like “Sex Game Apps” the Google AdWords (and/or Automatic Match) algorithm treats the word “sex” as invisible and focuses on serving up ads triggered by the whitelisted keywords “Game Apps” in bold. Hence, why the iPod touch ad shows up above despite not having any mention of sex. The same trick works for “Nazi Game Apps” and myriad other racy iterations.
While AdWords loopholes like this are nothing new (try “Android Apps Boobs” if you’d like the Android compatible version), Apple’s inadvertent advertising against people searching for something the App Store explicitly doesn’t allow is enough to at least consider a change in policy, on either Google or Apple’s part.

Authors: Alexia Tsotsis