Louis Vuitton has lost a five year court case against Google after they tried to ban the search engine giant from allowing other companies to use their name in their adwords campaigns.

Adwords allow companies to bid on any words, including tradenames, in order to attract search customers to their sites when they type in those terms. Louis Vuitton were naturally unhappy that companies selling counterfeit goods were using their brand name to attract visitors.

According to a Bloomberg report, Patrice de Cande, a Vuitton Lawyer, told the European Court of Justice that:

‘Google’s advertisement activities have given companies which sell fake products unprecedented visibility beyond their wildest dreams.’

Google, who state that they have a very strict policy against counterfeiting, fought against the case claiming that restricting who has access to certain words within Adwords restricts the ‘fundamental principal behind the free flow of information over the internet.’

Writing in a blog post, Google’s senior litigation counsel Dr Harjinder S. Obhi said:

‘We believe that user interest is best served by maximising the choice of keywords, ensuring relevant and informative advertising for a wide variety of different contexts. For instance, if a user is searching for information about a particular car, he or she will want more than just that car’s website. They might be looking for different dealers that sell that car, secondhand cars, reviews about the car or looking for information about other cars in the same category.

‘Some companies want to limit choice for users by extending trademark law to encompass the use of keywords in online advertising. Ultimately, they want to be able to exercise greater control over the information available to users by preventing other companies from advertising when a user enters their trademark as a search query. In other words, controlling and restricting the amount of information that users may see in response to their searches.

‘Our guiding principle has always been that advertising should benefit users, and our aim is to ensure that ads are relevant and useful. We will study the decision as we move forward in order to make sure that we continue to deliver advertising that is perceived as both valuable and relevant by our users.’

So, for the moment Google will retain its right to do business in the way that it wants. It is required however, under European Law, for them to swiftly remove any campaign that is using copyrighted words in an illegal way. In contrast to this, businesses that use copyrighted words may still themselves be taken to court if they do not make it clear that they have no commercial link with the trademarked term they are using in their campaigns.

If you haven’t considered using social media as a way of marketing your business now is definitely the time to review your position. Google search in the US is now streaming up the minute information from popular social media sites into their search facilities.  This feature will be coming to UK search soon.

Google revealed their plans for Google Livesearch on their official blog:

‘First, we’re introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.’

Posts from sites like Twitter and FriendFeed are displayed as part of the Google search engine results. This new development shows the massive impact that social media has had on society. Using this new medium will now bring new attention to businesses who use it effectively.

The main search results feature a few social media posts but you can expand the feature to get more.

Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, wrote on the Google blog:

‘Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day.

‘Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we’re announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.’

Loius Vuitton has been trying to outlaw Google’s ability to allow any advertiser to use copyrighted trademarks as part of their Adwords keyword campaigns. The latest interim legal opinion has come out against Loius Vuitton.

In 2005 LVHM (owners of Louis Vuitton) appealed against Google in a French court. Their argument was that many companies were using their branded keywords in order to sell replica goods and that this was undermining not only their reputation but also their sales. They won the case and took their argument to the European Commission.

On 22nd September 2008, in a long line of legal battles, the European Court of Justice admitted that although there was a link established when a company used a branded keyword that this was not enough to deem the action an infringement of copyright.

The European Commission advocate-general, Poiares Maduro said that:

‘Google has not committed a trademark infringement by allowing advertisers to select, in AdWords, keywords corresponding to trademarks.

‘Such a use cannot therefore be considered as being a use made in relation to goods or services identical or similar to those covered by the trademarks. Similarly, advertisers themselves do not commit a trademark infringement by selecting in Adwords keywords corresponding to trademarks.’

‘Internet users are aware that not only the site of the trademark owner will appear as a result of a search in Google’s search engine and sometimes they may not even be looking for that site.

‘These users will only make an assessment as to the origin of the goods or services advertised on the basis of the content of the ad and by visiting the advertised sites; no assessment will be based solely on the fact that the ads are displayed following the entry of keywords corresponding to trademarks.’

The use of keywords does not imply the purchase of counterfeit goods. On the other hand it could be argued that the public expect keyword searches to deliver accurate information. And over and above that should Google and the other search engines promote illegal activities by allowing sites that are committing crimes to appear in the searches? If you type fake Louis Vuitton into Google you get a whole host of sites offering to sell you counterfeit goods and this applies if you search just for Louis Vuitton too.

Ebay no longer allow sellers to use keywords that do not represent the true articles being sold. If you search for Vuitton bags today you will find no sellers at all for this item.

A final verdict is expected to be delivered early in 2010.

The UK now has it very own version of Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft.

The latest version of the search engine was launched last Friday. It allows users to search for UK specific results.

Microsoft’s UK head of consumer and online, Ashley Highfield said:

‘This is a serious, long-term commitment from Microsoft to put a differentiated search product in to the market place. We have not just used the US version of Bing. We’ve had a UK team focusing on what will work particularly well over here.’

‘Bing is ready for the UK consumer, with our revolutionary way of searching the internet proving very popular.’

‘This is by no means the end of our development. We will continue to innovate and introduce new features on an ongoing basis by listening and responding to what UK search users find relevant. Removing our beta tag is merely the first step to signal Bing is here and already has features that are superior to those provided by other search engines.’

In the states Bing launched in May and they have managed to gain an increase of 7% of the search market between September and October.

The initial signs are that Bing is doing well. It is still no competition for Google but it is making a tiny mark. Its nearest rival is Yahoo who has 3.27% of the search market in the UK. Bing has 2.75% and Google has 92.06% so there is still some way to go.

According to a recent interview with Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, Matt hinted that speed of a site may now be taken into account in the ranking of pages on their search engine. And what a good idea this is.

Some would argue that we have reached a ridiculous stage where we are not prepared to wait even a few extra seconds for a page to download. Often is the very creative and visually full pages, often with moving elements, that take a long time to download and sometimes what you see is a disappointment. But simple sites can also be visually appealing and deliver the same results.

Wonderfully rich and creative but slow sites are often led by creatives. This is fine but in business we have to face consumer facts -people do move away very quickly when a site takes too long to download. There are too many other sites for us to see. Its only if we particularly want to see a site that we are prepared to wait.

Sometimes amateur sites are very slow because the developer knows little about how to streamline a sight for speed.

Now it seems that Google are hinting that they may penalise slow sites. Faster sites will be rewarded with higher rankings. This already happens naturally to some degree as sites that are slow to load get less repeat traffic anyway which makes them fall in the rankings.

Google’s Matt Cutts said:

‘Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.

‘I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘how do I have my site be fast,’ how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?’

Have a slow site is the equivalent of keeping a client waiting at the door for too long. No one is going to die but its just not good business practice. After all the principle of all web etiquette is to think of your customer first and customers are saying ‘we don’t like slow sites’.