July 02, 2009

A software company has sued Google not only for trade mark infringement in Google's AdWords advertising system but for making its website invisible to the Google search engine.

Google has faced a string of law suits claiming that it breaks trade mark law when it allows third parties to buy the right for their ads to appear when another company's trade mark is typed into the search engine.

Ascentive has gone one step further, though, and has claimed that Google broke the law in the US when, after a dispute, it took Ascentive's website off the index used by its search engine, effectively making the site invisible to the world's biggest search engine.

Ascentive sells software that it says cleans computers of spyware and allows remote viewing of the use of a computer to allow parents to monitor children's access. Anti-malware non-profit Stopbadware.org, though, said that an earlier version of the software could harm computers.

Ascentive changed its software because of Stopbadware's concerns, but it said that the Stopbadware warnings may have been the reason that Google suspended not only Ascentive's advertising account but also its presence in Google's natural search results.