Australian lawsuit over sponsored results

Author: Bill Marshall

Date Published: 19 September 2007, 12:00

We've known for ages that many users can't tell the difference between Sponsored Results and Organic Results on Google, now it appears that the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) can't either. They are taking legal action alleging deceptive conduct over its sponsored links.

Their general complaint seems to be that Google doesn't do enough to differentiate "organic" search results from sponsored ones, while a more specific complaint is that they allowed a company called Trading Post to breach the Trade Practices Act by using competitors names as links to its own site within sponsored results and bid on those names as terms within an Adwords campaign so that when a user searched on their competitors' names their advert appeared.

As always when the worlds of IT and Law collide it will be interesting to see whether the two sides understand each other's terminology and point of view. For Google it is just the latest in a long series of lawsuits it has had to defend in various countries around the world.