Hacker News Reader

Comment by oliwarner | Hacker News Reader

Our great-grandchildren are going to look back on history and struggle to understand why we used a search engines that intentionally accept bribes to poison their SERPs.

I hope we can get this right one day. Allowing trademark squatting helps nobody but scammers (and search engines).

View on HN

They wont struggle, they will easily understand the phenomena and even group it under the same umbrella of the rubber barons,Spanish conquistadors and the opium merchants . A group of thugs exploiting a market by mercilessly taking advantage of undefined, inadequate and slow regulation on which it is basically a new situation, all this helped by buying the politicians.

Bands of rubber barons!

As a relatively small business with no clout we've had to deal with fly-by-night operations violating our trademark with Google ads (basically randoms running ads that look like they are from US when people search our web domain) and Google not doing anything because we didn't register the trademark. Of course Google won't do anything—it'd hurt their bottom line!

As I understand it, if you didn't register the trademark then it's not your trademark legally except as a defense against lawsuits. So Google seems to have followed the law. Better than them becoming some sort of extra-legal arbitrator of quasi-trademarks.

This is exactly the mentality I was talking about in my first comment.

You think it's better than Google only follows the letter of the law, and destroy it's search credibility, than put some process in place to prevent deceptive advertising.

Searching for one thing, seeing something different at the top of the page feels pretty deceptive to me. If it didn't work, they probably wouldn't do it.

Facebook is not bribing anyone. Facebook is not trademark squatting.

Words matter. Inflammatory nonsense has no place on HN.

> Facebook is not trademark squatting.

Signal is a registered Trademark. They are buying ads for the word Signal. How is that not Trademark squatting?

> Facebook is not bribing anyone.

I think OPs point is that it should be considered bribery to pay Google to show up at the top of the search results. I think they chose their words very intentionally.

Trademark squatting and bribery have specific, legal definitions and in many countries are illegal.

It does not mean bidding on your competitor's keywords or paying to use Google's advertising platform.

You do understand that what you are saying is libellous right ?

I read it in the context of "some day". They may be expressing optimism that the legal definitions could be corrected to match what they (and I) consider to be the commonly used meanings of these words.

> Trademark squatting is when one party intentionally files a trademark application for a second party's registered trademark in a country where the second party does not currently hold a trademark registration.

https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/newsletter/inve...

They're paying money to a trusted authority for preferential treatment on a literal registered trademark, in such a way to try and poach customers.

It's legal, but I don't understand why. The broader discussion point is why we do this to ourselves.

"Under U.S. law, use of a competitor's trademark in accurate and non-deceptive comparative advertising is legal and does not constitute trademark infringement" [1]

Which shows that it is a fairly grey area. "Fair use" doctrines apply to trademark infringement and using your competitor's name in this way has in the past been allowed.

[1] https://corporate.findlaw.com/intellectual-property/ours-wor...

It seems difficult to do this in general when so many search terms can have multiple meanings. Are you suggesting there should be human review for every ad? (Which is not saying it's necessarily a bad idea; just trying to understand how you imagine it'd work.)

I think a lot of people here will say that there should be a decentralized "global" index that any search provider frontend can source their results from. I'm not sure exactly how that would work. But the goal is to separate advertising from the search index itself.

I'm confused, what is the relevance of that to this problem? Wherever the results are coming from, ads will have to appear before them pretty much by definition, right?

If the owner of the search index is also the advertising broker then you end up in situations like this. If the search results themselves are effectively commoditized, then the advertising layer becomes less of an issue.

Hm so what would happen if Facebook tries to buy Messenger ads for "Signal" in that scenario? Sorry I'm still not following.

Yahoo Search used to have a list of brand keywords that advertising was restricted on. Not perfect but covers the vast majority of cases especially if you allow additions over time. Apparently since then the courts have ruled that it's not a legal issue so it's not done anymore.

That seems reasonable, though likely less effective for some countries. It seems like an interesting regulatory idea though - maybe some regulator should maintain a list of trademarks whose advertising should be restricted? Not sure if that might end up becoming gameable.

You may be assuming too much of our great-grandchildren. Based on what we can see of mobile phones today, they will be having their attention spans minutely controlled at all times, and may not be thinking anything.

Ads are clearly marked as ads and are separate from the actual search results.

> Ads are clearly marked as ads and are separate from the actual search results.

Except for the time they weren't... https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/23/squint-and-youll-click-it/

Many non-technical or older people can't easily tell the difference. I've seen it in action with colleagues and relatives (smart well-educated experts in their fields).

or just people not paying attention

Hear hear.

You are assuming that people will have great-grandchildren.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com