Internet Marketing

This has been a confusing topic on what Google’s stance is on trademark and tradename protection. If you do a search for “American Airlines” on Google you will see that Google is now protecting that trade name and even some common mispellings of it. American Airlines doesn’t even have to buy it’s own trade name and it appears top of the natural results as it should. Now do a search for “Match.com” and you’ll see that Match.com has to buy a paid placement ad because there are 5 other competitors bidding on their tradename.

American Airlines settled a law suit in July of this year with Google because they complained that users searching for its trademarked terms can get “confused” and click on a competitors’ ads. Isn’t that what Google’s position has always been since the get go? If you are looking for Coca-Cola then you might also be interested in Pepsi or RC Cola. That should be one of the main functions of a search engine to allow consumers to comparison shop. Don’t you think that if the user puts a branded search in the search box that competitors should be allowed to buy those terms as the user might be looking for related sites especially when it comes to travel.

Now search portals like Yahoo and MSN have been protecting branded terms for quite sometime especially if you have filed your trademarks with them directly which you can do online:

Yahoo Search Marketing Trademark Policy

MSN Trademark Concern Form

What bothers me about Google allowing these large companies to bully them around because of the advertising dollars they spend with them is that the smaller companies with limited legal resources in the meantime get raped on their tradenames from the larger competitors. It is a very unfair environment when the large sites can buy your USPTO registered trademark but you can’t in turn buy theirs. Google has settled similar cases with companies like Geico and American Blind & Wallpaper Factory. I see this being a new trend that will eventually hit Google’s purse pretty hard if everyone starts pushing to protect their names on Google searches. I estimate trade name searches to be in the double digits on Google because consumers will search a name instead of putting it directly in the address bar out of pure convenience. I used to think this was very retarded until I found myself doing the same thing. If you put a .com in the Google toolbar it will automatically take you to the site which basically shows that a ton of people must be doing this too.

-Brian R.