Bing!…Google is on to you

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 | Internet Marketing, Internet News, Search Engine Marketing | No Comments

The new “decision engine” with its 80 million dollar advertising budget sure has got its money’s worth with all the news, online articles and blogs circling around its arrival.

“Its beating Yahoo in search engine share!”

“Its not technically beating Yahoo’s search share.”

“This surge in search share percentage is temporary!”

” The home page graphics are a waste of time. ”

“No its Appealing and everyone loves a good useless fact!”

Whatever your opinion is about it, why not check out how others are using it to get to your site.  Google blog has announced that they will be able to track Bing! as a search engine through Google Analytics fairly soon.  If you cant wait, simply add the code below to your google analytic code: (currently Bing! is a refereeing site under traffic sources)

pageTracker._addOrganic(“bing”, “q”);

Now we play the waiting game….

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Tags: alternative search engine, Bing, Search Engines

Creating a Slippery Slope

Monday, December 17th, 2007 | Search Engine Optimization | No Comments

If I search myself on Google and find a cyber-gripe site about me and end up getting attacked because some crazy person found it and decided they wanted me dead – is Google also to blame because they indexed the site?

What if my biggest competitor runs an ad on prime time TV openly misleading the population about my company and product and sells the same thing with a typo’ed version of my product name – is CBS responsible?

I think we create a slippery slope when we are allowed to place blame, or cast a net of liability, regarding trademark infringement to search engines. The advertising and keywords that they put up are really just user-generated content when you boil it down – and more and more websites are insulating themselves from any liability whatsoever from user-generated content.

Just look at MySpace and your favorite networking sites. Simply saying – “But! Google (or MySpace) let me put it up! Why isn’t it their fault?” is not an excuse – my mom would say, if Google told you to jump off a bridge, would you?

On this issue, I stand on the side which feels that it’s up to businesses, and their representatives, to protect their brands, and feel that a reactive position by search engines with policies which remove the infringement, protect a trademark, and remove indexed pages from their cache is appropriate.

Web 2.0 is ALL about user-generated content and vamped up advertising platforms and I don’t think this issue (and the ones related to it) is going away any time soon.

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Tags: google, Keywords, MySpace, Networking Site, Search Engines, Trademark Infringement, Web 2.0

Who is Responsible?

Friday, December 14th, 2007 | Search Engine Optimization | No Comments

The other day a collegue and I had a discussion about the ads which are presented on typosquatted and cybersquatted sites. His point was that the ad presenters, for instance Google’s AdSense platform, were responsible for trademark infringements since they made a direct profit from the ads. I, on the other hand, respectfully disagree. Although Google does profit from ads that are sitting on these cybersquatted sites (more like pages), in the end the person who set them up to run also profits. Why does this matter? Because the person who set them up to run on the pages probably also registered the [allegedly] infringing domain name. If a criminal robs a bank (an inherently illegal thing, not unlike like trademark infringement) is the manufacturer of the get away car responsible too? The car manufacturer did serve, literally as a vehicle, to aid the criminal in his act, so are they liable? Of course not! Why then would we feel that Google was responsible for serving ads on a site which was cybersquatted or typosquatted when they didn’t register the domain name?

We see the culpability that search engines feel for trademark infringements reflected in their user agreements which speak to the issue, and even their policies for the protection of registered trademark terms too.

However, search engines aren’t proactive about protecting marks, they are simply reactive and I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. Should we put more weight on search engines to protect trademarked terms? Where does it become their responsibility?

I am always a champion when it comes to acknowledging intellectual property rights and protecting brands for businesses – but just because search engines provide a vehicle for advertising doesn’t necessarily make them responsible or liable for infringements.

I think it’s up to the trademark holder to protect their brand the same way they would protect themselves against any other attack. I caution that if we hold search engines responsible for selling advertising space which contains trademark infringements – where does it stop?

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Tags: google, Registered Trademark, Search Engines, Trademark Infringement