We thought we'd seen all kinds of click-fraud lawsuits, but this one takes the cake: Management consultant Theresa Bradley has sued Google for, among other things, wasting her time, eWeek's Google Watch blog reports. Bradley's $250,000 lawsuit alleges that her staff spent 100 hours placing Google AdSense ads on Bradley's Brava Corporation website, only to have Google remove them, alleging that Bradley clicked on her own ads in violation of the AdSense user agreement. (For a website's publisher to click on one's own ads is widely considered "click fraud," which is why online-advertising distributors like Google and Yahoo forbid it.)

But Bradley contends that she only clicked on the ads to verify that they weren't for competing products. Google promises to remove such competitive ads on request. And it might seem she has a point there: Without clicking on them, how else would she know whether they're for competing products? Except for one thing... AdSense has a preview tool that lets you see ads' destination websites without actually clicking them on your live site. Nice try, Bradley.

Another thing that seems curious about Bradley's lawsuit, notes Jennifer Slegg on JenSense, is that Bradley's website only has 27 pages. So Bradley's suing Google for her staff having spent roughly four hours per page to put AdSense on her site. The Browser has implemented AdSense before, and it takes all of a minute per page, tops. We have to wonder: Can Google countersue Bradley for being a complete dolt?