The rivalry between Workshare and DocsCorp in the document comparison and metadata management market seems to be getting personal, if not downright nasty. If you run a Google search for ‘docscorp’, ‘pdfdocs’, ‘comparedocs’ and ‘metadata assistant’ – all brand and product names belonging to DocsCorp – the sponsored link at the top of the results pages points you to the rival Workshare site. We seem to recall this technique is known as metatag hijacking or keyword passing-off – a bit like the old trick of adding ‘Britney Spears naked’ to your metadata in the hope of attracting web traffic that would otherwise not visit a website.Commenting on this, a spokesman for DocsCorp said “Needless to say we will be contacting Google and following whatever other legal recourse we have.”
• For the record, the Orange Rag checked out the Google searches at around 10:30am, Tuesday 24 March.