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Comment by 1f60c | Hacker News Reader

> Try searching for Ozonetel on Google. There will be six competitor ads and then our website will show up :)

DHH (of RoR and Basecamp fame) has been beating the drum about this for a while now.

I'm surprised that's legal, since they're literally referencing somebody else's trademark.

There's nothing illegal about referencing somebody else's trademark as long as you're using it to talk about their product.

Having a trademark doesn't forbid your competitors from talking about you.

What I think should be made illegal is that Google (and others) is essentially collecting another toll even when users enter in the brand name of the target business in the first place. That is:

1. User types CompanyFoo (whose real URL is www.companyfoo.com) into their address bar, which lands them on Google (because Google owns Chrome and pays billions for the privilege on other browsers).

2. Since Google will sell this keywords to others, many businesses always bid on their own brand name to ensure it comes up first.

3. Thus, an ad for CompanyFoo shows up first, even though www.companyfoo.com is the first search result, so when user clicks on the CompanyFoo ad Google takes its cut. Again, this is also because Google has done as much as possible to make ads as visually similar to SEO results as possible - just the teeny 'ad' banner, compare to the big yellow box of early Google.

I don't have as much objection for other companies buying branded keywords, but the way Google has set up things up they are taking their cut from everyone even when they are giving very little value.

This Google squeez also happens when a company spends on offline ad campaigns as often the first action in response to an ad is to type the company name into the browser. The searcher then arrives at the Google gate where friction is applied to divert a percentage of those to click on competitor online ads. Google is also taxing global offline ad spend.

What do you expect should happen? The browser should automatically load the first google search result? Google should prevent companies bidding on their own name? Or that they should make bidding on their own name free?

How about they clearly separate search results from ads and don't put the ads first.

There was a search engine that got really popular doing that. I think they were called Google..?

Well, I think there are two options.

Either Google should take a note from the old days when they were not rent-seeking jerks but did no evil and actually distinguished search results and ads by placing the ads to the side bar.

Or their practical search monopoly and all the profitablity from there should be regulated to oblivion.

That's just what I think should happen. The sensible me understands that obviously neither is going to happen.

I'm pretty sure that if I typed foo in my browser back in the early 2000s I'd go to foo.com or www.foo.com. Now I type foo in Chrome, see the logo for foo, but end up at a Google search page. This is very clearly a step back in terms of user experience.

In modern Safari this pattern will often take you directly to the website (or some other, non-Google website when it guesses wrong). When it works it's very nice.

I wonder how it works, if its powered by google or if its their own search engine in use.

You are under no obligation to use Google's browser or search engine if you believe it doesn't provide you with a valuable search experience.

You have no control over the browser or search engine your potential customers use.

The problem is that a lot of times they act like they are the trademarked brand in the ad to trick the user. This is unethical and should be illegal.

That not only should be illegal, it is. Using somebody else's trademark in a way that could decieve a customer into thinking your product is theirs is like the definition of infringement.

But from what I've seen, the vast majority of ads that incorporate a competitors trademark are not doing that, and making it very clear they are advertising an alternative to the trademark being referenced.

This seems like a positive thing imo. A lot of adverts are formatted as "Tired of x? Check out Y!". I see no way this is infringement and its a net benefit to the world since it shows people new things without tricking them.

Yeah, there's lots of places where IP law is pretty dumb, but this is one of those spots where they struck a pretty good balance and things are mostly working well.

I first ran my such Google Ad in 2005. And yeah our competitor at the time was pissed.

Google makes money with these so they allow it as long as the ad text does contain the trademark.

You need to have a thick skin in business. What matters are whether consumers are happy.

Yes, we have also been beating the drum since a long time. But unfortunately our drum is not as big as DHH :)

Curious: why do you feel your competitors shouldn't be able to do this? If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine? More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

As I have mentioned, I have no problem with my competitors being able to do this. The problem is how Google buries ozonetel.com below everything else. It should be absolutely fine if Google puts Ozonetel as first search result(because there is a brand and company called Ozonetel), and then puts the ads below that. Its win-win for everyone.

"If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine?"

It's because now mostly people(including me) search for a brand we know and click on the site. Mainly we type in the address bar(without .com) and press enter. The default search engine brings up the list and we click.

>The problem is how Google buries ozonetel.com below everything else. It should be absolutely fine if Google puts Ozonetel as first search result(because there is a brand and company called Ozonetel), and then puts the ads below that.

Sure, and I want to watch a show and then have all of the commercials run at then end after I turn off the TV.

>More generally: if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?

So what would your answer to this be?

"if I search for "apple", what should the first result be? Wikipedia or Apple.com?"

Apple is a common noun in the English language. So I would assume the first result to be Wikipedia or some site which gives the best details about apples. The second result could be Apple.com or whoever has applied for the keyword.

Thank you for answering. But that is inconsistent with what you said about your brand appearing first before any ads. In Apple’s case, are competitors allowed to bid on this keyword, since it is a common noun in English? Why or why not? I assume your brand is not a common word in the English language but what if it is in another language? As you can see, I can continue muddying the waters until it’s not so trivial to make a decision on these things — especially automatically.

Now you’re comparing apples and Ozonetels. Ozonetel is not a common noun.

I'm behind a Pihole and the top result for Ozonetel is ozonetel.com. On mobile, there is a "People also search for" bar that takes me to Google searches for their competitors, but it's mostly the Ozonetel home page, LinkedIn, Twitter, Crunchbase etc.

Normal users don't type domains, they type where they want to go into the address bar. my aunt will type "google" into chromes url bae to bring up the classic google search page she knows, and then will continue to type something like "jcpenney" into that box.

If the site is in her browser history she'll get an autocomplete suggestion for jcpenney.com .

One justification might be that it creates an environment where everyone but the ad provider loses.

If, hypothetically, Google was more pervasive than it already is, and made their ads more intrusive until consumers overwhelmongly clicked the highest priced ad for a given keyword, and Exotel bought the Ozonetel keyword, Ozonetel would have no choice but to buy ads for its own name. They could also buy ads for the Exotel keyword. The two could get stuck in a bidding war, wastefully sending money to Google when the optimal thing would be to just send users to the site they're trying to reach.

We're long past the point where you should expect users to try to guess domain names and to pretend that Google is just another general-purpose search engine. That universe could be nice but we don't live in it.

This is exactly what happened and a bidding war started(long time back).

And then we decided to step back from the bidding war. One reason to do so was because we did not have VC funded money. If we had VC money, maybe we would have continued the bidding war. But glad that we could make the right choice.

When Google used to show organic results front and center and made advertising conspicuous, this was reasonable. Now that there is a pile of undifferentiated advertising on top of organic results, it's borderline fraud.

> When Google used to show organic results front and center and made advertising conspicuous, this was reasonable. Now that there is a pile of undifferentiated advertising on top of organic results, it's borderline fraud.

One of the things I would like the antitrust investigations to dig into is Google's decision to make ads look more like search results, after a long-held principled stance of clear differentiation between the two.

IIRC, Google never did comment publicly on that particular design change.

I'm sure any internal discussions on the topic will be fascinating reading.

As a practical matter, search is how 99% of everyone gets to everything. Even if the browser fills in http:// for me so I can just type a name to get a complete URL why would I risk misspelling or mis-domaining a URL and possibly getting a fake or time wasting similarly named site? It doesn’t really matter whether the apple wiki or apple.com comes first because there is no chance I will confuse the two (unlike, say competing online furniture companies).

If you trust Google more than your browser and your own self, surely they deserve to make money off the hard work they put in to earn your trust.

1) Not if that goes to a place that isn't the best answer for it, as expected by a normal person not paid by Google or purchasing Google advertisements. Might this threaten the ability of Google to screw with smaller companies for money? Darn, that's a shame. They'll have to make only a transcendental amount of money instead of all of the money.

2) Related to the above: Google has decided they want to be a critical cog in the body politic. We as citizens get to have a say in how critical cogs in the body politic function. If Google doesn't like that, Google should not put themselves in that spot. We can help them with that if needed.

> If your customers intend to go directly to you, why do they not go directly to your site but instead search for it on a general search engine?

Plenty of people use the search engine as their homepage or reflexively open it when making a new tab, and searching for the name of the service (you don’t have to remember the TLD) becomes a habit.

    why do they not go directly to your site but
    instead search for it on a general search engine?

Do you honestly expect people to remember the domain names of the brands of everything they have or are interested in?

My grandmother still searches Google for "google images".

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