Another Local Victory for Google: Google.by

Good news for Google from the former Soviet Union space – in Byelorussia Google has finally launched its search engine intended for the people in the country on the Google.by website. The domain is located in the official first level domain zone for Byelorussia and is an obvious thing for many internet users from the country to type in their browsers’ address bars when they are thinking about using Google to do a quick search.

Until now the domain was used to host a customized Google search page that was only intended to serve search results in Belorussian only. The search site has been running since 2004 while Google’s own search engine has been running on Google.com.by. Starting today both websites run identical official Google search for Byelorussia.

The most intriguing part about the whole situation (and probably the factor that made Google more than determined to get the domain to itself) was that the site’s previous owner fully copied Google’s interface and made the site look exactly like it was one of the numerous local versions of the famous search engine – just like any such site Google offers to users around the world. The only difference was that the site was not owned by Google and served ads that generated revenue to someone else instead of Google as well.

So it is no wonder that Google really wanted to do something about the site – and late last year the Supreme Court of Byelorussia ruled that the domain should be passed to Google Inc. as it contains a trademark registered by Google, Inc. And now that Google officially owns Google in Byelorussia it has finally launched its official local search engine on the site.

All in all, Google has been quite active trying to prove its right to own various local domains in the national top level domain zones – like they managed to get Google.ru in Russia back in 2004. Of course there are some places where the giant corporation is less lucky – for example, some of you may remember the situation around Gmail.pl domain name in Poland.

And I here will stay wondering what Google will do about Gmail.ru – a free email provider that has no affiliation with Google but probably does pretty well in terms of users adoption given that the first thing a typical Russian user will do when thinking about getting an email account on Gmail is type Gmail.ru – and who cares how exactly original Gmail is supposed to look like? And while the domain was registered in Russia 2.5 years before Google launched its popular Gmail service, I have a feeling that the corporation will hardly want to leave the situation as it now is with users going to someone else instead of joining Google empire when they type .ru instead of .com looking for the much-hyped email solution.

Via (in Russian)