Deception

You know how you just type in the name of a company sometimes expecting that you will likely be taken to the companies website. Today I typed in seimens (I guess I should have gone with the old "i" before "e", but didn't). At the top of the page it says seimens.com and "Brining you the best mobile phone resources on the net". Of course, I was actually looking for Siemens. A casual browser may think they found what they were looking for. Of course, this appears to be one of those sites that fully expects to get some of Siemens traffic. It kind of follows what Libby talked about in her post: More unethical behavior. A bit of deceptive.

Under the Main Categories they actually have "Siemens phone" listed. The link there simply does a search on the seimens site for "siemens and phone" and displays the search results within the frame to the right of it. Of course, none of the links there will get you to Siemens either.

It is not the first time I have seen this type of behavior either.

I have also seen instances where the real name is actually registered to a lesser known company with a similar name. Big money companies have often been able to get those respective names, but not always. Case in point would be Uzi Nissan's site nissan.com. He can't use it for his computer business anymore, but he still has the domain name. I would say he keeps it just to spite Nissan after the whole fiasco of them trying to wrangle it from him. He never claimed to be the car company or tried to deceive anyone in that regard. It would not hurt for him to simply add a link to his site for those trying to find the car company as I imagine that is what produces 99.999% of the hits on his site, but that is his prerogative (Okay, get the old baggy pants Bobby Brown tune out of your head).

I commend those that may have similar names, that do not try to deceive the browsing public and make note up front that their site should not be confused with another and/or put a link to the other site. An example here I believe would be the Yamaha site, although one might make the case that it is a bit deceptive as it does not make mention of the difference in companies, it does it in a well intentioned manner. As I enjoy automobiles I know this one got me when the net was young. I believe, Yamaha, the company that makes musical instruments, has had the domain name along. How can one fault them for that. I am sure that the other yamaha that has to do with motorcycles, atvs, watercraft and the like would like to have the domain name. I don't believe the companies are actually related, but I have not taken the time to actually research that either. At some point links were added to the music companies site that will take you to the other Yamaha (yamaha-motor). I don't know if this was per a genuine act of understanding by the musical instrument company or if money played into it, but one can easily see the link to the motor site and seamlessly head in the direction they intended from yamaha.com.