qwik - 8:52 pm on Aug 18, 2007 (gmt 0)

If I remember, in the Geico case the judge ruled that merely displaying a competitors ad next to search listings generated by using a trademarked search query does not in itself cause consumer confusion or harm the trademark holder.

In the yellow pages (Our offline search engine) this type of thing isnt (to my knowledge) an issue. Look up Pizza Hut and see how many other ads there are for Pizza.

I would like to see these trademark holders prove that a user searching for a trademarked term is intending only to find the company's website related to that trademark. My opinion is that this is quite infrequent. I just bought my wife a new keyboard. I searched for the make and model. The Yamaha website was not what I was looking for. Reviews and comparisons to other models as well as pricing information is what I was looking for.

If you cant prove that a user is intending to find the website owned by a trademark holder when a trademark is used in a search query, how can you prove that a consumer is being confused?

AA should spend more time improving their business instead of trying to get cheap PR.