Google found guilty of misleading advertising with Adwords | Hacker News Reader

Google found guilty of misleading advertising with Adwords

abc.net.au

19 pointshartror24 comments

IANAL but it appears to me that Google lost because the court has taken the position that Google does more than publish the advertisements because Google uses algorithms to match advertisements with searches. In the original ruling Google won with the position that they were like a newspaper, simply taking someone else's copy and publishing it on their site.

It is a very interesting case and I am not sure where I personally stand on it.

Either way I'm sure we will hear more from Google on the matter, they still have an avenue for appeal. They can apply to the High Court which may or may not accept to hear their appeal, I am not sure on what grounds this is decided however.

The article says, "Google's conduct involved the use by an advertiser of a competitor's name as a keyword triggering an advertisement for the advertiser with a matching headline,"

I interpret that as, the advertiser defined the competitor as the keyword and that is Google's fault for not preventing it.

Isn't that the end goal of most advertisements (overtly or not)? Tempt a captive audience away from the alternative? Clearly I'm not familiar with nuances of advertising laws (particularly abroad). Interesting article nonetheless.

Not discussed in the article but I have read elsewhere that advertisers also used the competitors name as the title of the advertisement. This is I believe the "misleading" part of of the breach of the laws.

that indeed would make it misleading.

this article speaks to that a bit more: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/accc-wins-appeal-against-google-...

"An ad headlined with "Honda.com.au" that redirected to car trading website CarSales"

It would be misleading if the ad attempted to fool users that they were about to click through to the site they were looking for using the trademarked name of the intended site. Searching for "Honda" and clicking on a link to Honda.com that redirected to another site is very shady. However, all ad units in Google search results are marked as such and I would say at this point 99% of the population knows the difference between an ad and a genuine result. Buying a competitor's name as a keyword gets you exposure to people looking for options and i dont see anything wrong with it assuming you are not impersonating someone else's brand. I can think of a certain billboard right here in LA that advertises an organic market and is placed directly above the Whole Foods on Santa Monica and Fairfax. Whole Foods might not be happy about it, but it is clever ad placement.

I think you are far over-estimating the size of the set of people who know the difference between ads and organic results on Google. I would also bet the percentage of people who can differentiate sites by URL is is very small. If the link text says "Honda", many (most?) will believe they are going to a Honda sanctioned site.

I would love to see real user research on this topic. Google showed pretty well there are a lot of people who are confused, to say the least[1].

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ&sns=em

Sure, 99% is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but I do think most people are pretty savvy to the difference. It seems like in this case the advertisers were going after the people who were searching for the URL rather than just typing it in, which in my opinion, is the less savvy percentage of the population. It brings to mind the blog post that took the number 1 spot in search for "facebook login" and caused outrage by people clicking through thinking they were going to log into Facebook, landed on the blog post, then complained that Facebook had changed designs - off the top of my head I don't have a citation for that case. But I do think its safe to say the majority of people know the difference between ads and results.

Ad units do appear differently from organic results - this was ventilated in the original case, where the judgement was that there was definitely misleading conduct - on behalf of the advertiser.

It seems that the on appeal, the full bench decided that google was actually responsible - given their algorithms were responsible for placing the ad in the context.

This doesn't seem to be quite the same as the ambush marketing you mention. That would be more placing an ad for "dell" when searching for "elegant mobile personal computer".

Agreed, trying to find the actual court documents is annoyingly hard. It read like the court found issue with folks who use the search query to rewrite their headline (sort of the 'Find troll bugs on Ebay' when you search for 'troll bugs' kind of stuff)

It will be interesting to hear what Eric Goldman thinks too (he has followed all of the US trademarks vs AdWords cases which have almost universally gone in Google's favor)

(http://www.news.com.au/technology/accc-wins-appeal-against-g...)

(http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/04/03/oukin-uk-google-aus...)

> "It is Google's technology which creates that which is displayed," said the judges, who examined four cases of misleading search results.

(http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/ACCC-wins...)

> “Google's conduct cannot fairly be described as merely passing on the statements of the advertiser for what they are worth,” Chief Justice Patrick Keane and Justices Peter Jacobson and Bruce Lander said, according to the AFR. “That it happens to headline a keyword chosen by the advertiser does not make it any the less Google's response.”

(http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-03/accc-wins-case-against...)

> "Although the key words are selected by the advertiser, perhaps with input by Google, what is critical to the process is the triggering of the link by Google using its algorithms."

Australia is already one of the only places in the world where Google allow companies with trademarks to block keywords matching their trademark. This result just sounds like it pushes Google further down this path which doesn't apply to any of the other major markets.

It makes like had as an affiliate or merchant where a supplier can block trademarks and make it much harder to effectively advertise your business based off their products.

I wonder how fast laws would change if Google decided that Australia just wasn't worth it anymore, shuttered all Aussie operations, and blocked Australian ISPs from accessing any Google domain.

edit: Didn't see DiabloD3's comment before posting this.

I'm still confused - why is having ads linking to a competitors site illegal?

The 'above natural' results are an amazing fountain of profit for Google driven by searchers who don't realize those are paid ads, or think that those are especially Google-endorsed. A company that is already the top natural result for its own name may still find it profitable or necessary to be the top paid result as well, to catch that traffic.

In some e-commerce contexts, even if the top natural result is the direct source of a certain product, selling at the best price, a significant amount of traffic will go to a reseller who has higher-prices, but appears in the first paid position.

For those categories, Google and the reseller are a tag-team distribution-power middleman siphoning value from both the searcher and the target site, compared to the 'platonic ideal' of just giving the searcher what they want. It's not quite 'evil', given that it subsidizes other Google benefits on less economically-valuable categories, but it's not Google being a White Knight for the searcher's best interest, either.

What stops Google from just pulling out of Australia stating Australian laws are anti-free speech and unworkable for American countries, and then blacklisting all .au TLDed sites from the index?

American countries?

DiabloD3 probably meant American companies.

That correction doesn't make the comment less inane though. I'm pretty sure that getting into a pissing match with a sovereign Western nation would be a no-win situation for Google - lose and, well, you lost; win and you've got every other government (including the U.S.) painting a target on your back.

Especially when they admit it is a problem and that it is against their TOU.

You know, all the countries that matter, the ammerican one.

</Canadian who wanted to watch the The Daily Show's extended interviews>

> Canadian who wanted to watch the The Daily Show's extended interviews

Try this: http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-daily-show-with-jon-ste...

Whoops, too late to edit now I think. I meant American companies.

Also, to those downvoting me: this isn't a troll, I am honestly asking as I am not a lawyer nor a CEO of a multi-billion dollar company.

Because of the billions of other google users that might want to access .au domains. If google won't index it, you can bet Bing will capitalise.

It might let some competitor get a foothold in Australia, which anyone who's played Risk knows is a powerful position.

A technological reason might be that it is quite handy to have a place with similar demographics but a small user base to test stuff. For example, they might use it to see how easy/hard it is to implement country-specific rulesets.

When I worked for a national insurer, Tasmania got all the new stuff first so we could see what broke and what didn't.

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