Google Ads and Trademarks

Google has got itself into hot water several times over the past few months. Its self-service pay per click advertising system, adwords, was hit with a number of legal actions due to trademark issues. Basically competitors were placing bids on keywords and phrases related to products and / or services from rivals. I've seen this happen in the Irish hosting market as well. As several of our competitors were running pay per click ad campaigns targetting certain key phrases I decided to lodge a complaint with Google through their official trademark complaint office. Although it took them several months to deal with my complaint it was upheld and the rivals' ad campaigns have now been stopped :)