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Google Have Lost A Domain Name Lawsuit

It doesn’t happen very often but Google have lost a lawsuit in Canada to gain control of a domain name that have been registered that sounds much like Google. The domain Groovle.com has been set up as a personal homepage for web users. Google have decided to take action on the website because it sounds to close the their own brand.

The court in Canada however have decided against Google and have said that the names are not confusing and that groovle sounds more like the word Groovy than Google.

From my personal observations i am surprised that the Canadian courts have made this decision and I’m not sure they even looked at the website. The homepage has links to all Google’s services laid out very similar to the way Google does it. The feature that takes the biscuit however is the search feature on the website. The search feature simply loads a search page covered in Google adsence.

As a court case it should have been a no brainer. The people who have set up groovle.com have basically taken a word that sounds like Google, given it a layout like Google, made a lot of the links link directly to Google and then used Google’s search engine to provide search results! The website offers nothing of value to a user in any way shape or form! The domain name may sound more like groovy but the content on the page should be enough to realise they are trying to be as much like Google as possible!