This means that non-trademark owners are able to place paid search ads in Google's UK search results pages when people search for trademarked brand names and other terms. This change has sparked concern of a "trademark bloodbath", with brands such as Tesco and Lastminute.com raising concerns.
Last year, Hitwise produced analysis that found that branded search is indeed on the rise in the UK.
Looking at the top 2,000 search terms over a four-week period during 2005, 2006 and 2007, Hitwise found that there had been an increase in the volume of branded or navigational search terms - such as "myspace'" or "ebay" - at the expense of more generic terms such as "flights to spain" or "free games". In 2007, 76% of search volume for the top 2,000 terms was branded in nature, up from 58.2% in 2005.
So, considering the growth of branded search and Google's dominance of the search market - nine out of 10 UK searches were conducted on Google properties in April - what impact will Google's trademark changes have on UK brands? In order to answer this question, Hitwise search data was used to determine what proportion of the top 100 brand searches in the UK and US ended up at the brand owners' websites.
The results showed that 91.8% of brand searches ended up on the brand owners' websites in the UK, compared to just 84.2% in the non-trademark-protected US. That is a gap of 7.6%, equivalent to millions of searches every day.
A comparison of branded search traffic for Expedia, a brand that is strong both in the UK and US, showed that 95.7% of people searching for "expedia" in the UK ended up on an Expedia property, compared to 88.6% in the US - a 7.1% gap that is primarily due to paid search activity - and very similar to the 7.6% gap identified in the Hitwise research.
By Robin Goad, director of research, Hitwise UK
Vital Stats: Google's trademark changes
On 5 May, Google changed its trademark protection rules so that non-trademark owners are able to bid on trademarked terms within Google's AdWords system in the UK.