Google Guidelines for Third Party Use of Google's Trademarks

Although Google is now a household word used daily by millions of people around the world, Google™ is also a trademark of Google™ Inc. As a result, there are strict legal limitations on what use can be made of the Google™ trademark online or elsewhere.

Google has a special page online titled "Google Permissions" which provides Guidelines for Third Party Use of Google's Trademarks.

We abide, for example, by one of these rules in formulating the name of this blog "Google Pundit", where Google is an adjective describing just what kind of Pundit we are, e.g. to distinguish us from "Law Pundit". As Google writes in the Guidelines "Use the trademark ONLY as an adjective, NEVER as a noun or verb, and NEVER in the plural or possessive form".

Here is how we see the law, but this is only our opinion, and not legal advice.

Trademarks relate to products and services of a company and the whole idea of trademark law is to permit trademark holders to distinguish their goods and services from those of others and to profit from the goodwill of their trademark. Without a license from Google for example, no one is permitted to produce any kind of a product with the name Google used in that name. For example, a software product named "Google Search Optimizer" - without a license from Google to use its Google trademark in the name of the product - would violate that trademark.

In our opinion, our blog title (and anyone else's blog title with Google in the name of the blog) would be a clear case of trademark infringement if it created confusion with regard to its ownership, and that is why our blog specifically contains a prominent notice that Google Pundit is in no way related to Google Inc. but rather presents third-party information about that company and its products and services. Indeed, the subtitle of our blog is "An informative blog about Google which is NOT affiliated with Google™ Inc. in any way."

Take a look at the "Google Permissions" at Guidelines for Third Party Use of Google's Trademarks. You will see that Google has many trademarks.