The Supreme Court of India has asked BharatMatrimony.com’s competitors Shaadi.com, SimplyMarry.com and JeevanSathi.com to restrain from displaying advertisements with names of the petitioner in the “AdWords” programme of the Google. Whenever BharatMatrimony’s name was displayed on Google search, the three competitive sites appeared on the right hand side thereby infringing the trademark of BharatMatrimony and its related sites.

The Madras High Court had refused to restrain Google and the three sites from displaying such pop-ups whenever ‘BharatMatrimony’ was keyed in during Google search. A three-judge Bench of Chief Justice Altamas Kabir and Justices S.S. Nijjar and J. Chelameswar granted the stay on the three websites after senior counsel Mujkul Rohatgi, appearing for Google, said the names of Shaadi.com, People Interactive Pvt. Ltd., Jeevansathi Internet Services P. Ltd. and Times Business Solutions Ltd. would be removed from the programme.

Senior counsel Aram Sundaram and counsel A.A. Mohan and K.V. Mohan appearing for BharatMatrimony submitted that by permitting the competitors to display their websites, Google was infringing the trademark rights of the company and capitalising on its goodwill and reputation.

In 2009, Chennai-based Consim Info, that runs Bharatmatrimony.com, had petitioned the Madras High Court against Google for displaying their competitors’ ads on Google search result page when someone searches for ‘bharatmatrimony’, and taken Google, Shaadi.com and SimplyMarry.com to court.