Domain Food - Archive - Google loses fight for plural of trademark "Froogles.com"

Two of the three judges on the panel of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, rejected Google's argument that Froogles.com was "confusingly similar" to Google.

"The dissimilar letters in the domain name are sufficiently different to make it distinguishable from Google's mark," the panel found. The name Froogles.com "creates an entirely new word and conveys an entirely singular meaning from the mark."

The search-engine company's loss has no immediate impact on its use of the name Froogle. But it means that the Froogles.com name will remain with Richard Wolfe, a disabled Holtsville, N.Y., carpenter who started the Web shopping site in March 2001, before Google introduced Froogle in December 2002.