They stopped me saying something along the lines of

"compatible with Windows/Apple/Linux"

because of the word Apple.

Why only protect apple?

If they make advertising on competitors words "bad", they will need to stop those "made on the spot" coupons that are produced at the checkout counter. It has LONG been known that they are mostly for a competing product.

Oh, well. If Google were smart, it should say to the trademark owner, come up with more money, and the words are yours. Until then, be quiet!

Apple is a manufacturer, not a product. Therefore "compatible with apple" makes no sense anyway. You should be claiming compatibility with a *specific* apple product or range of products.

between google and the yellow pages?

If someone opens the Yellow Pages to get the phone number for the American Blind & Wallpaper Factory, they are faced with a couple of pages of ABWF's competitors.

If they want to avoid that, they have to pay to take out a full page ad. Same deal here. If they want the search result to be exclusive, cough up the dosh.

I think the biggest hole in this case will be the difference between searching for

American Blind & Wallpaper Factory

and

"American Blind & Wallpaper Factory"

as an example. Since the intention of Google AdWords is to provide relevant adverts, only for the second search would AWDF's advert be the only one that I would expect to see as the search, in quotes, is for the exact name of the company where as the first one implies that I am searching for factories in America that make blinds and wallpaper. There is a significant difference between the two which I suspect will make up a fair component of the defence put up by Google's lawyers.

I agree with Ian... It's no different to any other media where an ad appears on the page alongside other things.

The Google ads are a separate part of the page, labeled as an ad, and pretty obviously not related to the actual search results.