Serial womaniser Russell Brand is about to tie the knot with singer Katy Perry, but his shock proposal wasn’t so much of a shock for the blushing bride to be. Perry admitted that she knew Russell was going to propose because she’d read about him buying engagement rings on the Internet.

How did she find this information? Rather that spend hours trawling through websites and search engine results pages (SERPs) looking for what her promiscuous boyfriend was up to, she’d simply set up Google Alerts on her own name. This meant that she received regular updates from Google, via email, for whenever her name was mentioned in Google News, or in the natural search results.

She liked to keep track of what was being said about her, which is good advice for anyone in the public eye or running their own company. You can set up Google Alerts on your name, or your company name, so that you’re informed of any (more…)

Last week we reported how Google was once again in court, this time because of the Rocky Mountain Bank who were taking legal action to get Google to reveal the identity of the owner of an email address to which they had mistakenly sent details of 1,325 customers.

In the financial crisis we’re currently in the middle of, this really fills you with confidence in the banks doesn’t it?

In a monumental error, the bank emailed details, including tax ID numbers and loan details, of 1,325 of its customers to someone’s email address; the wrong email address to which they should have been sending something else anyway.

Events like this call for a strong reputation management strategy to minimise the (more…)

Last week we reported how web designer and blogger Andrew Sharman managed to get an apology and an offer of a partial refund for his holiday from holiday company Thomson after he wrote about his experiences online. Andrew tried to resolve the situation through normal channels, by writing to Thomson’s complaints department, but they never responded to him.

It wasn’t until he wrote on his blog how his holiday wasn’t what he expected and how Thomson had ignored his complaint that he started to get any resolution. It was the fact that his blog ranked highly in Google for search terms relating to Thomson and their holidays to Tunisia that sparked Thomson into contacting Andrew and offering him a partial refund. The idea that other potential customers could be reading about their service and their lack of customer service is what finally forced Thomson’s hand into offering (more…)

If someone posts defamatory material on a website about another person or company, who is responsible for the content?

Is it the person who posted the comments in the first place? Is it the owner of the website for allowing the comments to be posted? Or, as Metropolitan International Schools (Train2Game) tried to claim, is it the search engine for indexing the content?

Metropolitan International Schools took Google to court because Google had indexed content on a website that it believed was defamatory to its brand. It claimed that Google was responsible because snippets of the negative comments were made available in Google’s results pages, meaning that Google itself was republishing the negative comments.

However, a high court judge ruled otherwise, saying that Google was (more…)