Sponsoring Theft

Are companies like eBay knowingly peddling stolen goods? Surely not, but I wonder about their advertising strategy.

I get confused about how sponsored results work. You know, those textual ads that appear alongside search results or on a webpage. I mean, I thought I knew how they worked: someone buys a word and when that word appears they get their ad next to it. But when I look for "laptop stolen" on Yahoo! Answers, I get this:

So what keyword are eBay, DealTime and Shopping.com sponsoring here? Or do they really have good stolen laptops for sale? And if so, wasn't I told? Or these poor folks, whose tales of woe appear right next to these add:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interestingly, trying the same search but for "laptop vomit" throws  up no sponsored ads at all. So "stolen" must be a sponsored word? (It does throw up, so to speak, cases of people feeling unwell over their keyboard. I guess that's the Yahoo! Answers type of crowd. )

 

Technorati tags: laptop, theft, advertising, ebay, vomit