Google threatens China's Goojje with legal action

by Stevie Smith - Feb 9 2010, 10:23

Still dealing with the aftermath of a censorship row and a recent Internet Explorer exploit that allowed Google China to fall prey to hackers, search titan Google is now dealing with a rival Chinese service that uses a logo and layout bearing an extremely close resemblance to Google’s main search engine and its Baidu spin-off.

The search and social networking site in question is called Goojje. While not wholly the same aesthetically, the site’s logo uses an identical font and colour styling as seen in the trademarked ‘Google’ logo, while the first ‘j’ in ‘Goojje’ is even embedded in the familiar paw print utilised by Google’s Baidu search spin-off.

Clearly too close for comfort in the eyes of Google, a Tokyo-based spokesperson for the Internet heavyweight has confirmed that the owners of Goojje have been issued with a cease and desist order regarding use of the offending logo.

Although unlikely to resist any potential legal advances emanating from Google, the owners of Goojje claim their service to be legitimate, while the name itself is something of a phonetic play-on-words in Chinese.

For example, Reuters reports that the ‘Goo’ portion of the name is pronounced in a similar fashion to ‘gle’ which means ‘older brother’, while the ‘jje’ portion of the name is an abbreviation that means something akin to ‘little sister’.

At time of publication, The Tech Herald’s attempts to access goojje.com resulted in being redirected to dierqi.com. It is worth noting that the contentious Goojje logo still fronts the new site address and the surrounding layout is certainly perilously close to that of Google.

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