Search Engines Sued For Pay-For-Placement Results

from the interesting... dept

I've never liked search engines like Overture (GoTo) that use the whole paid-placement model. However, I never realized that people would sue about it. The owners of Body Solutions are suing most of the pay-for-placement search engines over trademark violations. Since competitors have bought up the keywords at higher prices, if someone does a search for "Body Solutions" they get sent to a different company. The Body Solutions people say that that is a bait-and-switch situation, and that the search engines are performing a form of extortion, by making the company have to outpay its competitors just to get a reasonable placement.