Ask HN: Google displays trademark infringing ads after acknowledging complaint?

2 points by grncdr ↗ HN
I'm sure our company is not the first one this has happened to, and I'm curious if others have experienced this and know what else we can do.

For over a month now, one of our competitors has advertising on Google search results using our company name in the ad text/title.

That is, if you search for OUR COMPANY, the first result is literally:

    Ad · https://competitor.example.com/
    OUR COMPANY - title copied from our company website

    $Competitor is blah blah blah
The ads are clearly deceptive and meant to misdirect people searching for our service.

We filed a Trademark complaint with ads-trademarks-support@google.com and today we received this response:

    We completed our investigation regarding OUR COMPANY in ads using the
    following display URL(s) that you identified in your complaint:
    competitor.example.com. Ads from the(se) URLs using the(se) trademark(s)
    in ad text should not display unless they comply with our Reseller and
    informational site policy or target countries and/or regions outside the
    scope of your trademark complaint.

From reading the e-mail, it seems like the problem should be resolved, however the offending ads are still being displayed whenever I search for OUR COMPANY. Has anybody else experienced this? What can we do next?

2 comments

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Remember the Rosetta Stone case. After some claims made it past SJ, Google settled. Perhaps Google did not want to let a court hear more evidence.
Thanks, I hadn't heard of this case. Our company (and the competitors) are both based in Germany, so I think the EU trademark regulations would be applicable.