Two Internet gamblers, Mario Cisneros and Michael Voight, who lost large sums of money playing at Internet gambling web sites, have brought a case against Yahoo! Inc., Google Inc., and other Internet search engines on behalf of the California public. The lawsuit, which concerns advertisements for online casinos that appear alongside Internet search results, has brought to the forefront the legal issues surrounding online gambling sites and the whether search engine companies are allowed to display advertisements or trademarks for those sites. In the case of Cisneros and Voight, both men used sponsored links found at search engines or Web sites to locate the online casinos where they did their gambling and eventually lost their money.

Yahoo! Inc., Google Inc., Ask Jeeves, and the ten other Internet search engine companies that are being sued went to court hoping to persuade the judge to dismiss the lawsuit, but California state Judge, Richard Kramer from San Francisco, ruled in favor of allowing the evidence gathering process of the case to continue. “The court gave us a green light to move forward,” said Ira Rothken, a lawyer for Cisneros and Voight. “Unless the case is settled it’s extremely likely we’ll go to trial”, he said.

From the time that Cisneros and Voight filed the lawsuit, most of the search engine companies have ceased displaying advertisements for online gambling sites. Prior to that, Rothken pointed out that Yahoo! made as much as $12.97 each time a person clicked on an ad that directed him to an illegal Internet gambling web site.

Steve Langdon, a spokesman for Google, which is based in Mountain View, California, noted that Google doesn’t even permit advertising for online casinos, saying that the whole case is without merit. Langdon cited company guidelines that were established prior to when the suit was even filed that prohibit ads “with the primary purpose of driving traffic to online gambling sites”.

Colby Zintl, a spokeswoman for the search engine company, Ask Jeeves, said that the Oakland, California-based search engine company doesn’t comment on pending litigation. Spokeswoman for Yahoo!, Joanna Stevens, did not respond to calls seeking a comment on the case.

If the stock market is any indication, neither Google, Yahoo!, or Ask Jeeves seem to be suffering from the potential lawsuit looming overhead. On Monday, Google shares climbed up to $10.68 or 3.8 percent to a record $290.94 on the Nasdaq. Ask Jeeves shares rose 23 cents to $31.33 and Yahoo! Shares rose 60 cents to $38.52.