Please count me as being among those that need a larger filter.

My filter is almost full. There are no "competitive advertisers" in there. Just sleazy ones.

Each day I filter 2-5 domains wich redirects to same garbage site.
My filter list is almost full.
It's like a never ending story.

When I started to filter out the competitive garbage website, my earnings went down. So, I deleted all the filter. From now on, I just leave the decision to Google.

The filter does not work perfectly. One needs to keep revisiting and adding same URL's again and again for it to stay effective.

Can't add same URL twice.

... I too notice that very occasionally, the system displays an ad that's in my filter list. ... in my experience it's very transitory.

Uhm.. ya... uhm ok. Is it just me? But I have to say... How can this not work? A junior programmer could not screw this up.

IF NOT INFILTERLIST(ADURL) THEN
 SHOW_DA_AD()
ELSE
 DONT_SHOW_DA_FRIKKIN_AD()

seriously tho... come on!

I suspect the fact that the filter list seems to not be working occasionally is not due to programming. I rather suspect it is due to an incomplete (or corrupted) database of account filters that has been mirrored (or possibly just partially mirrored) across the Google Adsense server system.

" The filter does not work perfectly. One needs to keep revisiting and adding same URL's again and again for it to stay effective. "

The URL already added mysteriously vanishes. Then I have to again add the same and it gets blocked once again. I seem to repeat this process, once / twice a month.

Yes, we need better filtering tools.

Maybe they are afraid, if every other publisher blocks all the MFA's then where will the poor bugggers go? G revenues could take a hit and no shareholder likes that.

I think Google are aware of the problems these ads cause. Hence the quality scores initiative. The problem for us is that it doesn't apply to content, so all of the crap dissapears from Google's search pages and on to our pages instead!

To me, that might indicate they want to get rid of them, but are afraid to make rash decisions because of possible shareholder reaction in not understanding that decision - hence doing a halfway house on QS.

It might also indicate they don't give a crap about content - which would be a foolish decision as they do very nively thank you out of content advertising.

I understand that they are introducing higher bids for ads submitted automatically by advertisers using an API soon.

I personally think that they are aware of the damage MFA's do, and the fact that they don't actually make a profit as the MFA's are all taking out more from adsense than they invest in adwords. They are aware that they only exist to profeteer by scamming the system.

The real problem that they have is having created the monster, they have absolutely no idea how to deal with the self-created problems.

But to stay on track, I totally agree that having an unlimited filter is an absolute necessity - as are the tools to manage the list. The feature I'd really like to see is to block all ads from one advertiser - that would really cut down on the junk :)

"david_uk : The feature I'd really like to see is to block all ads from one advertiser - that would really cut down on the junk"

I totally agree with this idea. That would be the ticket!

Here's a thought:

Could G's quality score algorithm take into account the number of times a site is included in the competitive Ad Filter? If it doesn't, then perhaps it should.

However - there are lots of people out there who are in a war with Google - they are tweaking names and URLs to squirm out of the problem of disabled keywords. In doing so, they may also bypass their inclusion in competetive ad filters.