American Airlines seeks damages against Google

World's largest airline says its suing the Internet search leader Google for selling search words involving its name.

The story "American Airlines seeks damages against Google" published August 17, 2007 at 2:25 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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[Neotrope]

More Power to AA

I'm totally in support of what AA is doing... I've written several ad industry articles on the topic of how Google is selling your (and my) trademarks to the highest bidder in their search, and make no consideration to trademark holders. Why should a trademark holder need to get into a bidding war with upstart companies to pay for their own brands in AdWords? I had two sites, much smaller and less known, who would bid on Google against my brand. When it got to be more than a $1 a click I refused to play that game. Google's only response is to bar use of a trademark within a description for an ad, but there is no recourse for selling searches against trademarks. I wrote a very informative article about my experiences with Yahoo and Google in this regard many months back (pardon the plug here, but it IS relevant):
http://advertisingindustrynewswire.com/2007/03/03/241_205157.php

[Heebee Jeebies]

Apparently....

You want to protect your trademarks but you don't seem to have any problems spamming other companies web sites or using other companies messaging systems to increase your sites viewer ship. Hmmm.... Maybe c|net needs to send you a bill for your advertising. Spammer!

Robert

[dog0906]

Do *Some* Evil

Neotrope,

Thanks for the post... many of us are going through the same thing. It is too bad you can't say anything bad about Google due to the many people who love the company.

Do no evil? Yea, right. Depends on your definition of evil. Also depends on if Google can make a dollar... at least in Europe they actually win against google... not in the US so far.

[t8]

I'm sorry but you did...

I'm sorry but you did use CNET's brand and service to promote your product in the same way Google uses search results to promote ads.

Is it not a bit hypocritical of you to say Google can't but you can?

[tanis143]

Not understanding

Ok, maybe I'm a bit late on this, but when I did a search on google for American Airlines, the first page was nothing but links to American Airlines. So.... who is the other person that supposedly has bought the search words for AA and aa.com? And if the first few links are to AA itself, then what is the harm? From the way they are making it sound its as if I type in American Airlines and some ticketing agency comes up first instead of AA.

[kgsbca]

Not surprising, they're an airline

It's a difficult concept for an old company to grasp, but google is not violating any trademarks. The AA trademark still refers to American Airlines, google is just selling ads that will be viewed when people do a search on AA. They're not taking any business away from the airline, if anything, they are helping them. If you consider the source, however, you shouldn't be surprised.

If you own a bakery, you mark down your day-old bread because if you don't sell it soon, it will ge worthless. Supermarkets sort of do the same thing with meat that is old and can't be changed with food coloring, they lower the price. The airlines? A day before a flight, when they can't use any unsold seats, they raise the prices. If they fly empty, they will never get any more revenue from it (not even on ebay). Instead of lowering fares as a flight approaches, most airlines raise them. And then they whine and moan about labor costs and fuel costs making it impossible for them to be profitable, even though there are airlines that make money.

[t8]

The problem is

that Google won't be able to put nay advertising anywhere because in the world nearly everything is trademarked.

I a page of 10 search results there are bound to be some trademarks and then there are the ads.

If Google give in to AA, then they will have to give in to everything till ZZ.

[fortyonejb]

Some of you just don't get it.

Lets say i start a widget company called WidgetsForAll. Now i trademark that name and run with it. So, I have a competitor called WidgetMakers. When average google user goes and searches "where can i buy widgets" then all bets are off, the highest bidder deserves the top paid spot. BUT lets say google user searches "WidgetsForAll". Well somehow my good buddies at WidgetMakers decided to pay more for that keyword. That keyword though is my actual trademark meaning WidgetMakers are using my trademark to drive customers to their site. If you search an actual trademarked name, no one else should be able to take the top spot for it. Otherwise why get a trademark?

[t8]

Sounds to me like...

You might as well complain that your local grocery store is selling both Coke and Pepsi even though it ran a Pepsi ad in the local paper.

[MND_Malvern]

American Airlines - what a joke!

AA.COM is not a search term exclusive to American Airlines, the UK also has a company called AA, and it's services ARE truly global in support of it's customer base; no doubt many other countries also can lay claim to this URL if it were up for sale. So even we in the UK can offer to buy that search term from Google and if American Airlines do not like it, then they can go bust, there are plenty more bully boy organisations like you that flying customers can happily give their money to.
The USA already over uses the .COM url terminology and many companies in the USA should actually be using .CO.US
Pardon the pun but since when does the USA and it's home companies own exclusive rights to the internet? The rest of us realise that the USA INSANELY thinks it also owns the universe and speaks for the world, yet a lot of Americans think that buses, TV and cinemas do not exist outside the USA... Yes - it's true that's what we see of your inteligence and it's from your own words.

Go back to kindergarten and start again.

[Professor Cornbread]

US commercial can't use CO.US domains

There is no United States commercial TLD, as co.us stands for the state of Colorado, United States. It is not treated the same as co.uk, co.jp, co.au, etc. So US commercial can ONLY use the .com TLD, not because we think we have 'exclusive' rights over the internet. Anyone worldwide can register the .com/.net/.org TLDs, and the reason why most .coms are registered to American companies can probably be attributed to our early interest and commerical exploitation of the internet. The assignment originated in the US, so the US companies bought up the popular ones first and retained them.

Please read more of the domain name history before you make unfounded claims:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.us,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com

Also...yes, we are aware the rest of the world has the same comforts and conveniences as we do, I don't know to which 'a lot of Americans' you are talking about. It doesn't give your opinion validity to add additional irrelevant, made up, information. We are talking about trademarked domain names, remember?

Go back and research your claims and start again.

[Seaspray0]

Results should be based on a relavent attribute

If I search for a term, I should get an ordered response based on an attribute such as popularity, or exactness of the search phrase. If google is allowing their search response order to be influenced by money, then it should clearly state so in the results. "These results are ordered according to who payed us the most money." I would accept an alternative. If you wish to pay for advertising based on a search term, it should be seperated from the actual search results. That way I know the results are based accurately and still have the option to view links provided by sponsors. Newspapers function on this basis. They place adds around articles, but DO NOT change the article. Is googles intention to rewrite docuements from their true form? Could you imagine reading "We hold these truths provided by Pepsi Inc to be self evident?"

[ralfthedog]

Thats how it works.

When you do a search with Google, you get clearly marked "Sponsored links" in yellow at the top. Below that are the normal search results.

[ralfthedog]

I had the same problem with MSN search. It was easy to fix.

One of our competitors was paying around $4.00 a click for our name. Did I sue? No, however I do know that a very large number of people were clicking 3 or 4 times a day.

If I had to guess I would say that I had 700 to 800 clickers.