Search Ad Keyword Lawsuit, Now Over Privacy

Nov 20, 2009 at 9:29am ET by Barry Schwartz

We have covered many of the search ad keyword lawsuits aimed between competitors or directly at the search engines in the past. Nowadays, it seems like a new suit around this topic is filed weekly. Typically these suits go after trademark violations and the like, but a new suit is focusing on a privacy legality. Suit over search-engine keywords tries new angle from the Associated Press reports Habush Habush & Rottier is suing Cannon & Dunphy for buying their name on Google and Bing. Habush Habush & Rottier is taking the privacy angle, where in Wisconsin there is the "right-to-privacy st [...]

Filed in: Legal: Copyright, Legal: General, Legal: Trademarks

Google Removes Offensive Obama Image; Was It Justified?

Nov 19, 2009 at 1:19pm ET by Matt McGee

Saying the host site was serving malware to users, Google has removed a controversial photo of First Lady Michelle Obama from Google Image Search. The site itself, however, remains listed in Google web search results without any visible malware warning. Welcome to the murky world of free speech, politics, and Google. It began last week, when Search Engine Roundtable pointed out a racist image showing as the number one result in Google Image Search for the term [Michelle Obama]. The image was apparently removed yesterday. In a Google Web Search Help Forum thread discussing the image, [...]

Filed in: Google: Critics, Google: Images, Legal: Censorship, Top News

Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal On Track For Completion

Nov 19, 2009 at 6:53am ET by Greg Sterling

According to AllThingsD the MicroHoo search deal is nearing completion and "definitive agreement" status. Speculation that the deal was in trouble started happening when the two companies failed to meet their self-imposed October 27 deadline to finalize the complex agreement. However it appears the circumstances were just as reported in the parties' 8-K filing with the US Securities & Exchange Commission: The Letter Agreement specified that the parties would execute Definitive Agreements by October 27, 2009, but given the complex nature of the transaction, there remain some details to be [...]

Filed in: Legal: General, Microsoft: Bing, Yahoo: General, Yahoo: Partnerships, Yahoo: Search, Yahoo: Search Ads

NAR Changes Its Mind: Google Is Not A Scraper Site

Nov 18, 2009 at 2:17pm ET by Matt McGee

Backtracking on a controversial decision earlier this year, the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) has adopted a new policy that allows real estate professionals to have their sites -- including home listings that belong to others -- indexed by search engines. The controversy reached a peak this year when the NAR agreed with a local decision in Indianapolis that said real estate agents couldn't let Google and other search engines index the property listings on their sites if those listings belonged to other brokers/agents. In March, the Indianapolis board sent a letter to some agents [...]

Filed in: Google: Critics, Legal: Crawling & Indexing

Google Experiments With Paid Inclusion & Does “Promoted” Meet FTC Guidelines?

Nov 16, 2009 at 1:35pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Just when you thought paid inclusion was finally dead with holdout Yahoo getting out of the space, it's come back from the most unlikeliest of sources: Google. Below, a look at the experiment plus reexamining the FTC's guidelines about disclosing paid ads. Does saying "Promoted Videos" on YouTube rather than "Sponsored Videos" meet these? For those unfamiliar with paid inclusion, it is where advertisers pay to have their listings included within editorial results, rather than being listed separately from them as paid placement search ads. In paid inclusion, there's also no guarantee that th [...]

Filed in: Google: AdWords, Google: Business Issues, Google: Product Search, Google: User Interface, Google: YouTube & Video, Legal: General, Top News

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