It seems that companies are suing Google for their contextual ads because searching for Brand X also brings up various paid advertisements for Brands Y and Z.

One of the named complainants in the article is American Blind and Wallpaper Factory. They whine about the contextual ads because it “dilutes” their brand and then praise Yahoo, who doesn’t allow such ads linked to brand names (until fairly recently, neither did Google).

There’s no meat to these complaints. Because there is no real directory of the web– i.e. no web-wide yellow pages– we have to search for key terms. The analogy on paper would be suing the local telco because when I search for one company in the yellow pages, other companies are listed right there next to them (gasp!). Or when I search through the white pages, there are other people with my last name right there in the same column polluting my brand identity.

Because there is no good way to “browse” the web when looking for specific information, we have a right to see contextual results. Unless we are going to mandate that searching for a brand name (or in this case, part of a brand name) can only bring up a single result, then complaining about contextual advertising is as ridiculous as complaining that there are other search results listed on the page.

At least Google has the good sense to put the ads on the right hand of the search results so that a search for “American Wallpaper” puts the American Blind and Wallpaper Factory in true first (as it should be), whereas Yahoo puts the sponsored links in the same column, something I have never liked.