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My list of the ways Google is like my hometown of Chicago comes down to one item: They both have parking problems that are rooted in history and long overdue for a solution. And in both cases, conspiracy-minded observers see a plot to keep the revenue stream open.

Chicago hasn't revised its parking regulations since 1957, when there were 5.6 residents per automobile. It's a town of three-flat brownstones and two-car garages, so you do the math. Why hasn't anyone fixed it? I'm sure the $1.5 billion in parking tickets in 2005 had nothing to do with the lack of a solution.

In Google's case, the parking is being done by domain-name speculators. These guys buy a domain name — some popular word or phrase ending in “.com” that some portion of the public may type into a browser navigation bar thinking they'll find an authoritative site on, let's say, recipes. What they get is a site full of pay-per-click ads, sometimes with a little content but often not.

Not a noble way to earn a dollar, but not down there with adulterating orphans' milk, either.

But here's the thing: Advertisers that run PPC ads on the Google Search Network — not the content network, mind you, but the one supposedly delivering ads to search results pages — may find they're paying for clicks that come not from a results page but from these parked sites that exist pretty much to make revenue from Google AdWords.

Google runs several different ad networks. There's Google Search, which serves ads to results pages on Google.com, and the Google content network, which places contextually related PPC ads next to articles on non-search Web pages.

But within Google Search, advertisers can choose to market on something called the Google Search Network. Many do, because they can get their ads served on some high-quality sites that deliver Google ads to search pages, including AOL.com, Ask.com and Earthlink.com.

There also are any number of parked domains in the Google search network. Google won't say how many, but there must be thousands, thanks to deals with domain portfolio companies such as Sedo Parking and DomainSponsor, which manage those sites for a fee. And lately a number of search marketers and agencies have been surprised to find traffic coming from these parked domains even when they've turned off the Google content network.

For example, Richard Ball of Maryland-based Apogee Consulting says that one of his AdWords clients saw 11% of its PPC traffic coming from parked domains in the Google Search Network. In one instance, 72% of the traffic for a keyword came from a single domain, searchportalinformation.com, owned by a domain parking parent called Oversee.net.

Ball considers those clicks “garbage traffic” and resents having to pay as much for them as for clicks from searchers on AOL. Others in the blogosphere have called this “distribution fraud” and are calling for more transparency in the Google Search Network.

They may have been riled up by a move Google made for its contextual advertisers in January, removing a 500-site cap from the “site exclusion” tool on its content network to give marketers more control over their ad placement.

But there's no exclusion possible in the search network. If you want to reach AOL and Ask with your Google ads, you have to accept that you may also show up on some relatively worthless parked domains if your keywords relate. Worse yet, some of these Google Search Network parked domains have been linked to click fraud, spyware and adware.

Why does Google lump these sites, some of which barely qualify as Web pages, in with full-fledged search properties? As with Chicago parking, the answers may be rooted in history and money. Back in 2003, when its contextual network was still a-borning, Google bought a company called Applied Semantics which ran a program called DomainPark. After the acquisition, DomainPark became Google AdSense for Domains.

Google's AdWords Help Center says some parked domains may help users further refine a search and “offer ads that may be relevant to a search query.” That may have been so in 2003, but today, with search marketers scrambling for every penny of profitability, it's too often a wasted ad spend.

Of course, Google could move these parked sites to the content network, where their presence might be slightly plausible. Those with an eye on the cash nexus say the company's reluctant to do so because the bid prices are lower on the contextual side.

“They really need a third classification for these parked domains — something that's not search and not content,” Ball says. “But then again, I can't imagine who'd advertise there.”

For the latest on search engine marketing, subscribe to SearchLine, a weekly newsletter by Brian Quinton, at www.directmag.com/newsletters.