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Google Sued Over Deceptive Search Results
biggles266 writes "Internet goliath Google claims to rank search results by relevance, but the search engine engages in deceptive conduct by selling off the top positions to commercial partners, a Sydney court has heard.
The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) is taking world-first legal action in the Federal Court against Google Inc over allegedly deceptive conduct related to sponsored links on its websites.
The ACCC has brought a two-pronged case against Trading Post and Google — including subsidiaries Google Australia and Google Ireland — for potentially misleading consumers.
The consumer watchdog alleges Google does not do enough to differentiate "organic" search results — those ranked by relevance — from sponsored links which appear at the top of the results page."
Suing my doctor because of the choice of meds he offered me happened to match those in the advertising crapola that he got sent.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Are they talking about the "Sponsered Links" section at the top? They're clearly marked. Or are they talking about the normal results?
So they should do something other than giving them a different background color and adding the text "Sponsored Links"?
The cake is a pie
Don't Google's sponsored links say "Sponsored Links" right next to them? They also have a different background which is visible even on my low contrast display. Anything more would make it look obnoxious I think.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Thats utter bullshit; the results are only ambiguous if you can't read.
Does anyone here have trouble telling the difference between paid ad placements and non-paid search results on Google?
Since when does a website legally have to tell you what is an isn't an ad?
but if you cannot tell the difference between those adds and the "results" you probably shouldn't be on the internet.
~Vexed and loving it!
This is happening in Australia, but don't let that stop you from shooting off your mouth.
Suing has been the US business model for at least a decade now.
Obviously the consumer cannot tell the difference because it is not a "Flash" ad moving wildly across the screen saying "Spank the Monkey, Spank the Monkey!"
I guess using Google does not qualify your ability to understand the search results.
Seriously, is suing google the newest business model in the US?
Did Australia become part of the US when Bush was down there last week?
This guy's the limit!
turn off "SafeSearch filtering". That ought to give a more representative result on what consumers want.
You know it makes sense, a little reminder from jointm1k.
One appears to be the sponsored links section, which seems like it ought to be obvious to anyone looking at a results page.
The other issue is that Google appears to have sold the names of some local car dealerships as AdWords to a competitor. That seems to be a trademark violation, at very least. It does raise a question of responsibility, however. Is Google responsible for checking all uses of AdWords, to make sure that they are not trademark violations? Many cases are clear (as this one is), but others are more ambiguous. Clearly, Trading Post is in the wrong, but does Google share that responsibility?
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Maybe, but this is happening in Australia. I can almost understand not reading the article, but see the first and second sentences of the summary. sheesh
Developers: We can use your help.
Here we go again. Let us keep adjusting society based off of the dumbest individuals and not the average individual.
I read the article and decided to try to get some sponsored links to appear. Doing a search for "Digital Camera" resulted in some pretty obviously highlighted results that have the words "Sponsored Links" in the highlight. Who the hell is this not clear enough for? I am not an advocate of mass murder but we really need to figure out a way to weed the gene pool.
FTFA, one of the complaints generated involved searches that produced sponsored results that linked to a party with no commercial affiliation to the object of the search. Given that a user understood that the link was sponsored, they might wrongly assume a relationship with the business that does not exist. This could be benign, or damaging to the reputation of the business. It's more complex than whether users know whether a link is advertising or the genuine algorithmic results of the search.
Anyone who uses Google can figure out that the search results are not simply a blind mathematical formula. Google has always said that their aim is to provide the most relevant results. Not the most fair or unbiased. The most relevant, and they fudge the numbers to give people the results they are expecting. There is a reason that Wikipedia always shows up in the top two or three results. As long as the results that Google returns are what people are looking for, I fail to see how they generating those results matters at all. And if they are not giving people what they want, then some other search engine will.
Read tfa... Just mistyped since I live in the US, google is based in the US, so naturally the first thing I think of is the US when posting google-related comments.
/. crowd is cranky...
I sincerely apologize to the slashdot crowd for my mistyping, it was due to lack of coffee resulting in a low blood-caffeine content this morning.
I need to remind myself to not go for the +1 funnies when the
I got nothin'
Here's what their complaint states [in simple terms]. Company B bought adwords that included the trademarks of company A. Company B is paying Google so that when you search for company A it gives links that point to Company B instead.
E.g. a google for [say] Pepsi brings links that *say* Pepsi but instead go to Coke when you click on them.
Since Google is selling this service they have no rights to use other peoples trademarks (making the distinction between this and their non-profit web search).
This is akin to company B buying ads in the local paper that say "Come to Company A's new sale, located at 123 Front St." and when you get to 123 Front St, you find Company B selling the same products. They're using the name (which is presumably trademarked) to draw attention. Trademark law says you can't do that.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Best anonymous prices at
www.anonymouscoward.com
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Did Australia become part of the US when Bush was down there last week?
What, you didn't get the memo?
Looking for a Rails developer in Chapel Hill?
Not reading the summary is the newest business model in the US.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I need to remind myself to not go for the +1 funnies when the /. crowd is cranky...
:)
At least wait until 3:15EST when we've just come back from our 3rd coffee break. Thanks.
Developers: We can use your help.
21 mil people isn't much in the way of marketshare. People there can just use US or GB Google, too.
If they can't tell a link is sponsored, they might accidentally purchase the wrong brand of toothpaste and die early from cancers. Lords knows, not enough morons are breeding or making it into middle management in this world as it is.
technical writing / development
I hope the jury awards them all the money they paid to Google as fees do the search.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If TFA is right then i think i can sense some wrongness in this. Selling adwords that points to some business or market to their competitors is a bit shady. I always cringe when i search for something Linux and for example Microsoft shows up. It should never be possible to buy misleding adwords. That takes away any usefullness of the whole adwords thing for the users. Myself i never look at them anymore because i know they are so skewed. I think google need to think about how people should be able to buy adwords for a long time.
HTTP/1.1 400
True.
But the company delivering the deception needs to have its wrists slapped too. And that's Google.
A contract killer doesn't get immunity just because some 3rd party paid for a bad deed to be done. And this is particularly the case when Google is flying a flag of "Do no evil".
Because the heading "Sponsored Links" is just simply too confusing.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
So, can we safely assume that Wikipedia is paying Google for the top spot on every single possible search query?
would like to see the sponsored links more clearly separated. A box round them or even just a horizontal line underneath would be fine for me. But the current pale yellow background is not all that obvious and pretty-much invisible in some lighting conditions.
I don't think better separation would be harmful to Google - I would happily read the sponsored links if I were looking to buy something, and I feel deceived if I accidentally click on when I'm only looking for info. Of course, if I'm only looking for info, my click is of no value to a sales site anyway unless they are deliberately looking for accidental clicks to raise brand awareness, and I'm not sure that associating a brand with feeling deceived is good for the brand anyway.
Next week we're renaming it South Hawaii.
This lawsuit is a ploy to get more web traffic to their sites. DON'T GIVE IN!
They probably want to get a higher spot on the search results for "Google lawsuit" too. They are slowly but surely moving up!
Why would Google "owe" any of us anything? Couldn't they just do whatever they want, I don't think I ever signed a contract with them specifying what behavior they are bound to?
With the speed that these things need to change to work, it would be pretty crippling if Google needed to check every single adword purchase for trademark infringement before it was published (and this would open up more cans of worms than I can be bothered to think of right now).
Surely this is simply down to another company using deceptive practises to earn trade, or just a knee jerk reaction by the victim to shoot the messenger.
This isn't anything new, I don't think. I work for a major online window treatment retailer in the U.S. that has, for years now, paid Google top dollar to be at the top of a number of queries related to our area of business, both in relevance and sponsored searches. I never assume we were the first to do so nor the last, and I'm curious as to why more people didn't know about this in the first place?
How am I a 'consumer' ? I have given Google nothing (directly), and they owe me nothing. How can I complain about a free service? Beggars can't be choosers?
And what about when I go to the supermarket and buy cat food, and on the back of the print-out receipt is a coupon for a competing cat food? Can the manufacturer of the cat food that I bought sue the supermarket?
I prefer "fudgoogle" as a tag for nonsense like this. Lawsuits like this are created to FUD Google's business model and services. Other search engines do the same and worse.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
On what basis do these idiots think Google has some contract with me or anyone else _except_ their advertisers to show any kind of search result in any kind of order at all?
We've been the 51st state since 1966
Just in case you didn't know, we fought in Vietnam, and Korea, and now in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we have the body bags to prove it. All thanks to our leaders sucking up to Uncle Sam in the vain hope of getting some respect.Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=email&fr=yfp-t-501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8
Ask: http://www.ask.com/web?q=email&search=search&qsrc=178&o=0&l=dir
Lycos: http://search.lycos.com/?query=email&x=0&y=0
Iwon: http://iwon.ask.com/web?q=email&o=10361&qsrc=247
Lycos and Ask use sponsored results that are harder to differentiate from normal ones because they don't use a different colored background. Ebay even allows sellers to pay to be at the top, but they also name them Featured Items and put them in their own area.
Once again, they're all free services. Go out and create a perfect search engine and charge people to use it, or you can use Excite, which doesn't appear to use featured or paid search results.
Of course I'm kidding, we should sue the people that sue Google.
Not doing a enough to differentiate their sponsored links? Of all the search engines around, they're the ones who differentiated it the most with a different font and background color. It seems strange to accuse them of this when they (at one time) were the only search engine to bother making the difference obvious. Interesting to note though... After reading this article, I checked google and there are NO sponsored links anywhere.
Informing people about the scams, shams, and bunk that assault them on a daily basis. http://www.jeremyduffy.com
I'm a law student, and this is an issue that has come up in my Trademark class (as a good hypothetical situation, since it has not really been resolved yet). The sponsored link does NOT contain the trademark itself. If I search for "Coke" and one of the sponsored links contains the word "Pepsi" (and links to the Pepsi site), that is very different from me clicking on a sponsored link that says "Coke" and ending up on a Pepsi's website (which is the direct analogy to your example). THAT would be trademark infringement. This is still up in the air.
Has anyone here even searched some common stuff like opening a business.
All it gets you is spammed commercial businesses.
All the hype that google gets is undeserved.
There is no more clean uncommercial information on google search. It's all been tainted.
This is what you get for believing using links on websites as indicators of quality results.
Time to find something better. Turn off that firefox auto google search too while your at it.
It is a shame. They are off to the right of the page and have the heading of sponsored links over them...
This is right up with the cups at Atlanta Bread that have the waring, "Hot drinks served hot".
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I rely less and less on Google to resolve some of my searches since they seem tainted by commercial pressures. China is one BIG case in point. If this company will fold to demands of censorship from a communist corporation it's a no brainer to think what they will do for the capitalist ones.
-NT
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
For some reason when Google is searched for Ron Paul news articles many satires tend to pop up.
Libertas in infinitum
If you've ever worked around non-google savy individuals and watched them use google, it is pretty obvious they get tripped up by "sponsored links" often. In fact i'm pretty sure that 99.999% of google's click-throughs are from this type of individual and here is why.
What everyone seems to be ignoring is that the people who are savvy google users never ever click sponsored links because they know from experience that they are mostly auto-generated crap: GET $X HERE NOW, BEST $X ON THE INTERNET, CHEAP $X HERE and because of their experience using the internet/google they know where or what will actually get them to what they're looking for.
It's like Google's entire business model is self destructive. On one hand they sell advertising and on the other they provide a service which makes advertising an inferior way to find a product.
Back in the old-school AOL days, everything was an advertisement. Nothing misleading you more than the next.
Perfect solution for those confused, get them back on AOL where they belong!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
To me, the current yellow box that's labeled "Sponsored Links" is enough.
Surviving America
No wonder Australia is still a third world hovel, with all of their whining lefties running around, thinking that they have a cause, screwing things up for those trying to move forward.
52nd state, right after Canada.
And it's been a lot longer than 6 years.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
As several people who RTFA pointed out. The complaint is not about if the sponsored links were labeled properly. The plaintiffs complain that the advertisers used their competitors' trademarks to drive traffic to their sites, and that Google did nothing to stop this.
Google's policy is that is up to the advertisers to make sure that their keywords aren't trademarks:
http://www.google.com/tm_complaint_adwords.html
However, I really had to work to find the link above, and although they claim that the limitations on trademarks is in the Terms and Conditions, it really isn't. Instead they link to a page that talks exclusively about Google trademarks:
https://adwords.google.com/select/TsAndCsFinder?country=AU
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
I'm sure this story was run a couple of months ago
There was an unknown error in the submission.
.
seems like we're getting a reasonable amount of coverage over there! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzNFs0MDUNY
Look over their, it's a grammar nazi
This is the exact reason why I am leaving Australia. Business over here is punished for generating profit. Because of this, business don't come down here unless they are interested in Mining or being a retailer. Additionally we have a culture which on the whole, hates immigration and so we aren't able to develop the markets that would counter balance this activity with competition.
Australia is the new Florida of the world. In that, this is where people come to complain about things, and die.
It's a bloody shame, but because the Australian government keeps us from being competitive, I don't have a single friend who is going to stay in the country to earn money, and this is representative of almost everyone I have talked to who has Graduated from University.
Either way, the message is clear, unless you want to be in mining, retail or an industry which supports these industries... go elsewhere!
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
And what do you know, the comments are almost identical to the last time...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Yeah, other than the text saying "Sponsored links" there's nothing to let you know those are sponsored links!
"If it's real, then it gets more interesting the closer you examine it. If it's not real, just the opposite is true." -
Nah, that happened years ago.
Athy, athier, athiest.
how everyone jumps to defend Google when they are rapidly heading down the same path of abuse of monopoly for which MS is repeatedly hammered.
Google are a big huge company with shareholders and a legal obligation to make as much profit as possible. It's becoming clear that their intent is to monopolize the web in much the same way Microsoft monopolized the desktop. They pretty much have a stranglehold on search. They are buying up online advertisers left, right and centre.
Google isn't a search engine company anymore. They are an advertising company with a search engine hook.
This is a pretty ridiculous suit, how is google (or any search engine) supposed to give accurate search results? Who are you to decide the results are not accurate? If it ranks paid URLs first, why is it bad?
Has the guy making the lawsuit actually paid google or any search engine for the service?
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_crowds
Slashdot = Sarcasm
"51% of Americans voted for George Bush Jr. Twice."
From what I have read a USA election doesn't even attract 51% of eligible voters, let alone 51% of Americans.
A misunderstanding is also evident by all the posts about "suing", the ACCC is a government body similar to an ombudsman. It has just enough teeth to nip at the heels of large corporations, they can impose fines when companies are colluding to rig prices and/or service levels. Most Aussies see the ACCC for what it is...state sponsored FUD department designed to misdirect real issues using irrelevant drivel about petrol prices and Google search rankings.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Come on Cmdrtaco - its probably worth mentioning that the beef of this story has buggerall to do with Google and everything to do with the fact that the Trading Post classifieds newspaper used adsense to pretend to be an affiliate of rival companies and to steal their customers.
From TFA:
"In particular, the ACCC claims Trading Post breached the Trade Practices Act in 2005 when it used the names of NSW car dealerships Kloster Ford and Charlestown Toyota as hyperlinks to its own site.
These hyperlinks appeared in a shaded area titled "Sponsored Links" at the top of the results page, but appeared to be the dealerships' official sites, or at least affiliated with the dealerships.
Christine Adamson SC, acting for the ACCC, said Trading Post had no such affiliation or link to either dealership."
Comment removed based on user account deletion