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ARTICLE · 11 APRIL 2013

Search Engine Not Liable For Misleading Or Deceptive Sponsored Links

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Sponsored links appear alongside your search results and are intended to suggest products or services that will interest you, but which more often than not just look dodgy.

CanadaConsumer Protection
Neil Guthrie
Neil Guthrie
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Sponsored links appear alongside your search results and are intended to suggest products or services that will interest you, but which more often than not just look dodgy. And in Google Inc v Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, [2013] HCA 1, they really were dodgy: the sponsored links displayed with certain Google search results took the user not to the site he or she was probably looking for, but to that of a competitor who had signed up for Google's AdWords feature and paid to have its site come up as the sponsored link. A user who searched for 'Harvey World Travel', for example, got a link to that company in the search results, as well as a sponsored link to its competitor, STA Travel. The trial judge found that the individual advertisers who were behind sponsored links of this type had made misleading or deceptive representations under Australian consumer protection legislation, and this finding was not appealed. The question on appeal was whether

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