By Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com
Reprinted with permission from Internet Search Advantage, ZD Journals. http://www.zdjournals.com
How to translate this article into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, or GermanComment traduire en français, Cómo traducir a los españoles, Come tradurre in italiano, Como traduzir em portuguêses, Wie man in Deutschen übersetzt.
A couple days ago I received the following email message from L-Soft International, Inc.
"It has come to our attention that you are using the term LISTSERV®( to describe electronic mail distribution lists on your site, http://www.samizdat.com Unfortunately, that term is a registered trademark.
"It is a common mistake to use LISTSERV® ( as a generic term. It would be helpful if you would replace it on your site with another phrase, such as 'mailing list' or 'announcement service.'
"We apologize if this causes any inconvenience. Your attention to this matter is greatly appreciated."
If you were trying to protect the trademarks of your company, how would you find out where in all the tens of millions of pages on the Web those words were being used in appropriately? And if you received a message like this, what could you do to find a particular trademark on your own pages so you could quickly make the necessary changes?
Many trademarks and service marks are made-up words or ordinary words spelled or joined or capitalized in unique ways. Often the intent is to come up with a word or phrase that is unique, but yet conveys the general concept or feeling of your product or service. Then, once having laid claim to that mark (having had experts do appropriate searches of existing marks to make sure no one who in any way competes with you already using the mark, and having applied to register your mark), it is your responsibility to use due diligence in protecting it.
Fortunately, AltaVista makes the Web-related part of this due diligence relatively easy. If a term is spelled uniquely, a simple search for that term should turn up all instances of it. The list of matches is likely to be relatively small (unless your company is very well known, like CocaCola or Xerox), and most the matches are likely to be of interest to you. A few may be simply typos or instances from totally unrelated industries, but most will probably be the kind of generic misuse that you will want to squelch, with a note like that quoted above.
AltaVista's methods for handling capitalization and punctuation also make it particularly effective for searching for trademarks. If you type a word or phrase in all in lower case, it will search for both lower case and upper case. But if any letter is in upper case, it looks for particular letter in upper case and only in upper case. Many brand names have unusual spelling, such as using all capital letters, like LISTSERV (or putting capital letters in the middle of words. If I at search at AltaVista for LISTSERV, I get exactly what I want, because every page in the results list should have a word exactly matches that unique spelling (unless the page has been edited since it was entered in the AltaVista index).
Keep in mind that AltaVista works the reverse of how you normally get information at a library. If you talk to a reference librarian, if you have a question that has many possible ways to answer it, the librarian will be happy -- pull a book off the shelf, give you an answer, and you walk away as a happy customer. But if you ask for something that is rare and difficult to find, that librarian is going to start tearing her hair out, and it's going to take a long time and be very painful to get that answer. At AltaVista, the more rare, the more unique, the more hard to find something is, the easier it is to find. Because the term is rare and because the index includes the full text of so many Web pages, the likelihood is very great that AltaVista will come back with just a few matches, and nearly all of them will be exactly what you want. The more rare it is, the easier it is. If it's rare, you're not going to have to worry about how to refine your search. It's just going to be there at the top of your list. And a bizarre spelling or unusual use of capital letters is a good way to make a search unique.
Once you find a site that you believe is misusing your trademark or service mark, you can do a search of that entire site, using the query host:domainname That will give you a sense of how widespread the abuse is at that particular site, and an opportunity to check out all the variants there before drafting your note of complaint.
AltaVista does not cover every page on the Web. That is an impossible goal, because 1) the Web is expanding so quickly, 2) some Web sites and pages are constructed in such as way as to preclude indexing. For instance, when a Web crawler arrive at a site that generates dynamic pages, that looks like division by zero -- like there were an infinite number of pages ahead. Also, content inside frames and in non-HTML formats (like PostScript and Acrobat), and behind firewalls and behind registration forms is not in the index. But the index today includes over 150 million Web pages, and it continues to grow at a rapid rate, with the crawlers visiting and revisiting 10 million pages a day. So while you can't expect to catch everything, a search at AltaVista (which can take just a few seconds) would probably be considered "due diligence" with regard to Web content. If you are going to do this same search regularly, then use Advanced Search and limit the query by date, so you only see material added to the Web since the last time you looked.
With more and more companies waking up to this fact, at one time or another, you will probably receive notes like the one I just got from L-Soft. When that happens, you will want to thoroughly search all your Web pages for the offending words and phrases. In my case, since all my pages are indexed at AltaVista (I submit the URL -- "add page" -- at AltaVista for each and every page I add or change), I can use AltaVista myself. A simple search for +host:samizdat.com +LISTSERV gives me all instances of pages at my Web site where that trademarked term appears.
As you try these techniques, please let me know about your experience. Send me your tips -- the creative approaches you have tried -- and also your questions. Let's share and learn from one another. You can reach me directly at seltzer@samizdat.com.
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