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Comment by chrsstrm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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".

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