France : Politics + Adwords = Funny Mess « planetOzh

For those who don't know, in France we have mainly two parties : on the left hand we have the PS (Parti Socialiste), and on the right hand is the UMP, currently governing (I don't even remember what "UMP" stands for). Apart from these two, there are of course dozens of more or less important parties. I won't describe any of them, this is not the point, and since politics bores me to death, no matter what side it's from.

The funny things is : the UMP has a very controversial, aggresive and somehow confusing strategy with Google's Adwords. In Google, search for any PS (their opponents) related terms : "Segolene Royal", "Lionel Jospin", "parti socialiste", "Dominique Strauss-Kahn", "laurent fabius" … and look what contextual ad comes first. You guessed it, all these searches serve ads for the UMP. A bit like if googling for "linux" would return ads for "Windows XP".

I'm not sure this is completely sane from a legal point of view. I know you cannot freely bid on competitors' trademarks and keywords, but what about their own persons' names ?

Anyway, as a complete moron who definitely wants to remain ignorant when it comes to politics, I find this very amusing :)