Aussie trade watchdog charges Google over keyword misuse

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 12 July 2007 10:24

Your IT - Home IT

Australia's trade regulator, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), has mounted what it claims is the first legal challenge in the world against the misuse of proprietary words and phrases as keyword search terms in search marketing campaigns.

For example, by including the word 'Toyota' as a keyword in its adverts designed to appear on search sites in response to specific searches, one of Toyota's competitors could see its adverts appear when anyone searches on the term 'Toyota'. To compound the problem such adverts are not always easy to distinguish from bona fide search hits when the results of the page are displayed.

The ACCC has launched its action against a number of Google subsidiaries and against Trading Post Australia Pty Ltd. Trading Post produces a very long established weekly magazine dedicated solely to classified adverts of goods for sale. In recent years this has been complemented by a web site. The company was bought some years ago by Telstra for over $600 million and recent reports suggest it has not been performing very well.

If the action is successful it would require Google, and other search sites, to much more carefully monitor the use of keywords by clients of their search adverting offerings.

The ACCC is seeking, among other things, injunctions to restrain Google from publishing sponsored links of advertisers representing an association, sponsorship or affiliation where one does not exist and injunctions restraining Google from publishing search results that do not expressly distinguish advertisements from organic search results.

This task could prove very onerous. At the launch this week of its new search marketing platform, the head of Yahoo! Search Marketing in Australia, Craig Wax, said that some large advertisers used over a million keywords.