Once again Google is burned by wrongheaded (in my opinion) trademark rulings in Europe. A French court has upheld a previous ruling in favor of two companies suing Google for allowing AdWords ads containing their trademarks to appear on results page upon which they are listed. Google must pay a fine of about $100,000. (I have commented before on the oddly low fines in French cases.) I have the solution for Google in these cases, and I don't know why it didn't occur to me before. If these litigious companies don't want to appear on the same results page as their competitors (as if a cereal company would sue a supermarket for putting competing cereals side by side on the shelf), then Google should just eliminate the complaining sites from its index. I've got my tongue a little bit in my cheek here, but I'd like to see it happen. Surely, companies that believe they own Google's search results page do not actually believe they own Google's index.
1. That is a great point about the cereal companies not suing supermarket stores for placing their brand next to another. If companies do not want to be recognized in search engines then Google should just eliminate them altogether. There is no contract that says Google must show a companies link anyway.
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Dan Jensen