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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that's legal, since they're literally referencing somebody else's trademark.

There's nothing illegal about referencing somebody else's trademark as long as you're using it to talk about their product.

Having a trademark doesn't forbid your competitors from talking about you.

What I think should be made illegal is that Google (and others) is essentially collecting another toll even when users enter in the brand name of the target business in the first place. That is:

1. User types CompanyFoo (whose real URL is www.companyfoo.com) into their address bar, which lands them on Google (because Google owns Chrome and pays billions for the privilege on other browsers).

2. Since Google will sell this keywords to others, many businesses always bid on their own brand name to ensure it comes up first.

3. Thus, an ad for CompanyFoo shows up first, even though www.companyfoo.com is the first search result, so when user clicks on the CompanyFoo ad Google takes its cut. Again, this is also because Google has done as much as possible to make ads as visually similar to SEO results as possible - just the teeny 'ad' banner, compare to the big yellow box of early Google.

I don't have as much objection for other companies buying branded keywords, but the way Google has set up things up they are taking their cut from everyone even when they are giving very little value.

You are under no obligation to use Google's browser or search engine if you believe it doesn't provide you with a valuable search experience.

You have no control over the browser or search engine your potential customers use.

What do you expect should happen? The browser should automatically load the first google search result? Google should prevent companies bidding on their own name? Or that they should make bidding on their own name free?

How about they clearly separate search results from ads and don't put the ads first.

There was a search engine that got really popular doing that. I think they were called Google..?

Well, I think there are two options.

Either Google should take a note from the old days when they were not rent-seeking jerks but did no evil and actually distinguished search results and ads by placing the ads to the side bar.

Or their practical search monopoly and all the profitablity from there should be regulated to oblivion.

That's just what I think should happen. The sensible me understands that obviously neither is going to happen.

I'm pretty sure that if I typed foo in my browser back in the early 2000s I'd go to foo.com or www.foo.com. Now I type foo in Chrome, see the logo for foo, but end up at a Google search page. This is very clearly a step back in terms of user experience.

In modern Safari this pattern will often take you directly to the website (or some other, non-Google website when it guesses wrong). When it works it's very nice.

I wonder how it works, if its powered by google or if its their own search engine in use.

This Google squeez also happens when a company spends on offline ad campaigns as often the first action in response to an ad is to type the company name into the browser. The searcher then arrives at the Google gate where friction is applied to divert a percentage of those to click on competitor online ads. Google is also taxing global offline ad spend.

The problem is that a lot of times they act like they are the trademarked brand in the ad to trick the user. This is unethical and should be illegal.

That not only should be illegal, it is. Using somebody else's trademark in a way that could decieve a customer into thinking your product is theirs is like the definition of infringement.

But from what I've seen, the vast majority of ads that incorporate a competitors trademark are not doing that, and making it very clear they are advertising an alternative to the trademark being referenced.

This seems like a positive thing imo. A lot of adverts are formatted as "Tired of x? Check out Y!". I see no way this is infringement and its a net benefit to the world since it shows people new things without tricking them.

Yeah, there's lots of places where IP law is pretty dumb, but this is one of those spots where they struck a pretty good balance and things are mostly working well.

I first ran my such Google Ad in 2005. And yeah our competitor at the time was pissed.

Google makes money with these so they allow it as long as the ad text does contain the trademark.

You need to have a thick skin in business. What matters are whether consumers are happy.

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