Company tried to sell a product that Google prohibits. Where is the story here? Trying to say "well they do it too!" is not and is never a valid complaint, just as it wasn't in primary school -- their day will come. Further the desperate reaching to make Google evil is a stretch given that doing this can only possibly lose them money (favoring the "big guys" isn't rational for a bid-based service, where the highest bid gets Google the most money, regardless of the vendor).
The only real story here is that Google managed to achieve such dominance in advertising (though it certainly isn't as absolute as some are pretending).
The "big guys" sell a lot more products in a lot more categories, so are presumably putting in a much larer number of bids - it is not hard to believe that Google sees a lot more revenue from Amazon than some random knife shop.
I'm entirely sure that Amazon spends more. But for that keyword whoever bids the most spends the most. Google optimizes by the keyword, which of course they should, just as companies like Amazon don't bid on keywords because they're benevolent, but because they want to optimize their own return. Removing players from the market cannot possibly serve Google's financial interest, and that conspiratorial angle makes absolutely no sense.
Because their seems to be some confusion about how bid systems work (including by the dead post below), if Amazon and others outbid this company, netting more for Google, this would be a non-issue because you would have never seen this company's products.
It is notable that Google absolutely bans knives in the context of weapons, full stop (the author of the linked posting seems confused and thinks "such as" gives the specific culprits, when those are merely examples). This company may have authored their ads in a weapons manner, or targeted weapons-type keywords -- the sort of nonsense that gets Google sued by a bunch of state Attorneys down the road, everyone clucking about how evil Google is selling (indirectly) the knife that the kid used to do some evil.
EDIT: The only possible favoritism that Google might be showing her is in the context of legal responsibility. If some random knife site sells a kid a knife via a Adwords ad, everyone will come gunning for Google. If Walmart sells a knife to some kid, everyone will go gunning for Walmart, regardless of how they got the initial contact.
I don't think the keywords are relevant. The policy is "if you sell any weapon-knives, then you can't use AdWords at all" - nothing to do with keywords. The point being that Google would stand to lose a lot more revenue by enforcing an AdWords death-penalty against Amazon than they would against a much smaller business, like the one in question here.
I don't see a conspiracy here, either - it just looks like the huge advertisers like Amazon have a lot more leverage in their relationship with Google than the tiny ones do, so are less likely to have the rules enforced as strictly against them.
Company tried to sell a product that Google prohibits. Where is the story here? Trying to say "well they do it too!" is not and is never a valid complaint, just as it wasn't in primary school -- their day will come. Further the desperate reaching to make Google evil is a stretch given that doing this can only possibly lose them money (favoring the "big guys" isn't rational for a bid-based service, where the highest bid gets Google the most money, regardless of the vendor).
The only real story here is that Google managed to achieve such dominance in advertising (though it certainly isn't as absolute as some are pretending).