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Comment by hartror | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)

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