Over at SearchEngineLand.com, Danny Sullivan is calling out Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. He says Schmidt, who has spent much electric ink dismissing most web content as being a “cesspool” of garbage, is in fact contributing to the problem.

In his article “The Google Sewage Factory, In Action: The Chocomize Story,” Sullivan relates how an innocent visit to Google Trends turned up something that he thought was very fishy. Finding the word “Chocomize” in the top ten Hot Searches one day, he noticed that this term, actually the name of a custom chocolate bar maker, had in fact spiked, causing many observers to wonder why. The Google trends page turned up a list of sites suddenly mentioning Chocomize. Upon closer inspection, he saw that the first listed site really had nothing to do with Chocomize or chocolate, but had merely added content about Chocomize. This caused Google AdSense to place PPC ads for two chocolate sellers on the page.

The second page listed in the search results, Sullivan says, was even more blatant. Supposedly a list of news articles, the site is merely another list trying to ride Chocomize’s trending.

Ultimately, Sullivan discovered that what got the Chocomize frenzy going was a CNN article listed in Google News that probably coincided with a CNN TV report about Chocomize. Companies saw the spike in searches for the company and jumped on, adding content about Chocomize just to ride the popularity bandwagon for as long as the wave lasted. Google, Sullivan said, allowed this to go on without so much as a warning to cease and desist.

Sullivan calls Google’s “pollution” of its own Google News “ridiculous…we get ‘news’ sites that have been admitted (by) just jumping on the Google Trends bandwagon, outranking the actual article.”

Sullivan wonders why Google doesn’t appear willing to change its policies. He implies the reluctance may be due to the fact that all these extra links to PPC ads are earning Google more money.