Google Sued over Page Ranking

OrangeHairMan writes "Google.com is being sued by SearchKing.com because Google "purposefully devalued his companies' and his customers' web sites, causing his business to suffer financially." There's a page on SearchKing.com's site too." Does anyone besides me find this hilarious? My favorite part is that the name of the site is "Search King".

IIRC,

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, these guys were previously featured in a Slashdot article for taking advantage of their relatively high standing in the pagerank algorithms by selling prominent links on theif front to the highest bidders for the express purpose of raising their rank in the search results?

Re:PlowKing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Barney Gumble ran Plow King. Homer ran the Mr. Plow business.

Signed,
Simpsons Nerd

Re:Maybe I Am Missing the Point

[JabberWokky]

No. SearchKing is a 'service' that says they will improve your score on search engines like Google. They do this by trying to exploit the algorithms of engines like the Google PageRank system. So Google updated their algorithm to prevent the abuse.

It's a bit like Captain Midnight suing HBO. Very bizarre.

--
Evan

Re:Blackmailing Google?

[gorilla]

Yes they can.

PageRank

[QuiK_ChaoS]

PageRank [google.com] states its pupose. I got a kick out of this.

"Integrity
Google's complex, automated methods make human tampering with our results extremely difficult. And though we do run relevant ads above and next to our results, Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a higher PageRank). A Google search is an easy, honest and objective way to find high-quality websites with information relevant to your search. "

haha, no one can buy a higher page rank. Isn't this what they are doing in the long run? Sheesh, what a sore lus3r...

Time for the wayback machine

[Ektanoor]

As this kind of lawsuit concerns the life of this company on the Matrix, this link may give some info on how this company ran up till now:

Wayback on SearchKing [archive.org]

Re:how rich is Google?

[cptgrudge]

I suppose if you really want to help "support" google, you can go to the google store [googlestore.com].
Yay. I'm gonna buy a pen. And a hat.

However, I don't think they are hurting right now. Take a look at all the business deals they have made in their timeline [google.com].

Re:Maybe I Am Missing the Point

[orenmnero]

Case in point; In google, my open source application comes up first [google.com] in a search, in SearchKing, the same search bring me up number 10 [searchking.com], after all the commercial vendors. If SearchKing had its way, I would be pushed down in google as well.

SearchKing seems worthless as a search engine

[eno2001]

I tried doing a few searches there to see if they are truely an alternative to Google as their owner claims. The searches featured ads prominently and only the most obvious hits for real information. The other problem is that rather than ads being separated out from real information, it's intermingled with it. This makes it difficult for "joe user" to find valid info for their searches. More than likely all they will find are products and services that are vaguely related to their searches. In many cases this doesn't help anyone. The real answer would be to establish two different kinds of search engine categories. Those that operate like Google and Altavista and bring you reliable info for your search, and those that are geared towards goods and services. I think it would be great if I could go to a search engine and type in "Oil Change", +Nissan, +City and get a list of oil change shops in the city I am in along with customer ratings and maybe a Mapquest link. Or, I could do "Hard Drives", +Maxtor, vendor=OL (online only) and get a list of web dealers for hard drives along with customer rankings, etc... Maybe even a link to BBB reports. Now, if SearchKing did that, then maybe their PageRanks wouldn't be so low. I highly doubt that Google ranks them low to keep them from competing, it's just that they are currently a pretty crappy search engine.

And the rest are stolen

[wirefarm]

I just searched for MMDC (my own site) on SearchKing and the results seemed to be lifted directly from Google:
Google's index of my site:

MMDC Tokyo :: Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas ...
Aug 29, 2002 - 11:43 PM, MMDC Tokyo, Time is an illusion.
Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams, Main Menu. ...
mmdc.net/ - 47k - Cached - Similar pages

SearchKing's:

MMDC Tokyo :: Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas ...
Aug 29, 2002 - 11:43 PM, MMDC Tokyo, Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams, Main Menu. ...

What are the odds that they both crawled my site at exactly the same minute on the same day?

These clowns are pathetic.

Cheers,
Jim

A little background on searchking's owner

[Charles Kerr]

I'd never heard of SearchKing before, so I did a little karmawhor^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdigging with, erm, a search engine which will remain nameless... :)

From Salon's [salon.com] Aug 2002 article Meet Mr. Anti-Google [salon.com]:

Why would somebody pay $69 a month for an ad on maps.searchking.com, a PageRank 7 site? Because they think they know how Google works: If you get a link from an important site, your own site becomes more important. You don't pay the $69 for the clicks you might get from all the visitors to maps.searchking.com -- you pay it to get a higher rank in Google.

In an interview, Massa didn't come right out and say he is trying to sell higher rankings in Google. "I'm just saying that sites with high page rank have a huge perception of value, and if you want to pay more for that I'm not going to talk you out of it," he said. "When they put it on the toolbar and made it public, they must have known it's going to become a currency."

[snip]

Sullivan, of Search Engine Watch, says that Massa's is the first program he's seen that has been so "brazen about selling page rank" -- and he doesn't think it's going to work, especially since Google knows about the program.

From this Sept 5 2002 story Engine Trouble [guardian.co.uk] in the Guardian [guardian.co.uk]:

As [google] has become celebrated for taking users directly to the information they want, though, a question has emerged in the minds of internet entrepreneurs who are no longer the recipients of millions of easy dollars: could it be manipulated for much-needed profit? One of Google's advantages has always been its refusal to sell placements in its rankings to the highest bidder, but the PageRank system, some argue, has its loopholes. Because Google measures how many pages link to a site, what if you set up thousands of web pages solely for the purpose of linking to one commercial site?

Some have accused Bob Massa, proprietor of a "search optimisation" service called Searchking, of doing just that. "All I want is for webmasters with small sites to get rewarded fairly," he says. "This is a chance to see that those guys get visitors and put up good content. Google wants good content. I can't see any problem."

Re:Too Easy

[Derleth]

By the way, the link in my original post gave searchking.de top billing as I am searching from Switzerland.

Nope. It's first for me, too, and I'm searching from the USA. PageRank is geography-independent.

Context is fun

[Blkdeath]

Hate to tell you Bob, an action cannot be arbitrarily ("determined by chance") and purposefully ("intentional") committed

Do be sure to read the whole definition [dictionary.com]. Quoth the Dictionary;

"Determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle"

You may find that the most common use of 'arbitrary' is;

"Based on or subject to individual judgment or preference"

... or ...

"Not limited by law; despotic"

Re:Too Easy

[emac]

...because no-one else links to them

Not strictly true, Google says about 1570 sites link [google.com] to searchking.com. Although most of those are probably either his affiliates or stories about the lawsuit.

google is #3 in a Search King search, SK #4 haha

[asscroft]

search search king for search engines and google is #3, behind such "popular" engines as

calclicks and magiccity...yeah I've heard of them before. But most interesting is that Search King lists themselves as #4...

so whatever..

here's the link
http://www.searchking.com/servlet/SearchKing ?at=se arch&keyword=search+engines

Re:Google becoming a monopoly? This may be legit s

[The Bungi]

Legally, you are allowed to run a monopoly so long as you don't use the power it gives you to stifle competition.

It's a fine point, but it's more than just semantics.

Antitrust law deals with proving that a given entity used their monopoly to crush competitors, not to prove that the monopoly exists in the first place. That's almost always a fait acompli.

Re:Too Easy

[Ichijo]

Said by BoBaBrain:
"As a matter of interest, are Google under any legal obligation to provide an 'fair' search?"

Probably not. As a matter of fact, according to Google's own Terms of Service [google.com]:

"You may not use the Google Search Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales."

...which is exactly what Search King is trying to do for themselves and their customers. Needless to say,the case should be thrown out.

Re:Too Easy

[tevman]

hmmm maybe they would like a call or two... but i mean, under no circumstances should you call them... reallllyyy.... PR AD NETWORK 3517 S. Shields Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73129 Let's get started Call Toll free 888-956-7672 405-634-6562 Fax - 405-634-6568

Re:Google has a monopoly

[Mr Z]

Google has a monopoly on its PageRank technology.

Yeah, and KFC has a 'monopoly' on its "Original Recipe" with "11 herbs and spices." And Coke has a 'monopoly' on the particular formulas used to make Coke Classic and Diet Coke. So what? It's called trade secret , and it's an accepted, established part of doing business.

Where the rules change, as several other people have pointed out, is when your business is ruled to be a monopoly. Then you fall under regulation so that you cannot use your trade secrets to exert undue influence. It's basically modern capitalism's way of saying "You won this market, you've got the biggest pile. Now play nice with the little guys."

Unfair trade practices don't come into play here. Using one of my examples above, just because Popeye's Chicken can't use KFC's Original Recipe doesn't mean KFC's wronged them. And if KFC accepts competitor's coupons, still no problem. And if KFC launches an advertising campaign saying "we taste better than Popeye's," I'm pretty sure you're still ok.

Unfair trade practices would be something like KFC making deals with poultry distributors so that Popeye's couldn't buy chicken at a decent price. Totally different kind of problem. For instance, Google would be guilty of unfair trade practices only if they went to SearchKing's ISP and exerted muscle on them to degrade SearchKing's connectivity, raise SearchKing's costs, or otherwise affect them. That's totally different than tweaking a private algorithm to cut out the freeloading and search-engine abuse.

--Joe

Two sides to every beef.

[crucini]

Did anyone bother reading the page on Search King's site? I'm not defending SK, because they appear to be an unethical business that tried to sell ranking on Google. But it's disturbing that almost noone has even read the other side of the story.

This isn't about the "PageRank algorithm". It's about Google manually assigning a page rank of zero ("the dreaded PR zero" as SK calls it) to punish SK for attempting to abuse the system. SK also claims that Google enforces an idea of "bad neighborhoods" by assigning PR 0 to anyone who links to a PR 0 page.

In other words, Google appears to be using similar tactics to the spam blacklist SPEWS. Both entities:

1. Claim to be automated and objective, while manually manipulating the listings.
   
2. Penalize not only "bad guys" but those who associate with "bad guys", thereby seeking to isolate the "bad guys" from the rest of the internet.
   
3. Had predecessors (MAPS, AV) that were were easily abused.
   
4. Produce listings by a secret method.
   

I use both SPEWS and Google. I like the results. But I realize that concentrated power tends to be abused. And inability to see both sides of the story makes abuse easier.

Re:Google is a monopoly and should be watched!

[sykora]

EVERYBODY does not use Google. Google is not the only search engine out there, and people do not rely on just google to search things. Some people still have never heard of Google.

Re:Whine Back To Bob...

[matrix29]

Registrant:
SearchKing, Inc.
13601 Quiet Cove
McLoud, OK 74851
US
405-386-4805
Fax:[phone]

Domain Name: SEARCHKING.COM

Administrative Contact:
Massa, Bob [e-mail]
13601 Quiet Cove
McLoud, OK 74851
US
405-386-4805
Fax:[phone]

Let us drop [ "Bob Massa" ] into GOOGLE and see what we find...

Bob Massa the Bulk Spammer [larrysworld.com]

[ a bit down the webpage ]
Who's spamming, and does it work?
Bulk e-mail can be effective, but it's not always worth the trouble it can cause the sender. Bob Massa, owner of Magic-City.Net, an Oklahoma City, Okla., company that helps other organizations increase Web traffic by submitting their URLs to search engines, used to send out bulk e-mail to advertise his service. "It was more effective than anything else I've known," he says. "When I started, I was sending 30,000 messages a night and getting about a 1 percent response rate. There were times when I got as many as 200 orders in one day."

So why did Massa quit? Because "it's no longer worth it," he says. "Anti-spammers were sending me mail bombs, hacking my site and harassing me. One irate person sent me snail mail saying that he had mailed me a pregnant venomous spider and hoped it would bite someone and cause serious injury or death."

Calvin Fuller, a Burlingame, Calif.-based entrepreneur, has had similar experiences. Fuller has been involved with several Internet businesses and is developing an online and print magazine called Bikini Models, which he describes as a "PG-rated publication that includes pictures of bikini-clad models."

During the past couple of years, Fuller has used spam extensively but has backed off lately for a number of reasons, including the reactions he got from some recipients. "For every person who is excited about what I'm promoting, I'll hear from a lot more people who take the same amount of time to say how they are annoyed."

Fuller is also having trouble finding ISPs that will let him send bulk e-mail. "Most of the major providers of bulk e-mail-friendly accounts have shut down because other ISPs will block their incoming traffic."

Massa's and Fuller's tales of the treatment they received from anti-spammers were echoed by almost everyone I interviewed who had used spam to market products and services. Onsale Inc., a Menlo Park, Calif.-based public company that holds Web auctions, experimented with bulk e-mail but soon dropped it, according to Michelle Pettigrew, vice president of business development. Onsale used software to crawl the EBay Inc. auction site to pick up about 20,000 names and e-mail addresses.

Although Onsale received a significant number of positive inquiries as a result of its mailings, the company also got a lot of negative comment from EBay, Pettigrew says. In general, the potential for backlash is too great. "There are," Pettigrew adds, "ways to reach those customers through other means--such as banner ads--that are nontoxic."

The reaction against spam has been so strong that even people who use subscription-based lists sometimes get angry letters. I know because I'm one of them. I operate a free mailing list for people interested in following the articles I post to my Web site, www. larrysworld.com. The only way to get on the mailing list is to subscribe, but I've still received a number of angry letters from people who apparently forgot they had subscribed. For a while, a temporary glitch in my software failed to remove people who had asked to be deleted, resulting in several letters threatening legal action or requesting that ISPs block all mail from my account. Most people graciously accepted my apology, but a few remained angry.
[ more on the web page ]

A pic of Bob Massa [i-cop.org]
Bob also owns Searchking, Inc., a unique concept in search engine services which has been online since 1997 and is continuing to grow through a strategy of providing hosted search service software to the public. In a little over one year Searchking has become the largest "portal" host in the world with over 1,000 online portals on it's servers.

Yeah, I can see him as a large "portal" (www.goatse.cx)

But we only need look at his personal webpage
http://www.bobmassa.com/ [bobmassa.com]

A bit of truth even from Bob Massa's lips [buzzle.com]
As the engine has become celebrated for taking users directly to the information they want, though, a question has emerged in the minds of internet entrepreneurs who are no longer the recipients of millions of easy dollars: could it be manipulated for much-needed profit? One of Google's advantages has always been its refusal to sell placements in its rankings to the highest bidder, but the PageRank system, some argue, has its loopholes. Because Google measures how many pages link to a site, what if you set up thousands of web pages solely for the purpose of linking to one commercial site?

Some have accused Bob Massa, proprietor of a "search optimisation" service called Searchking, of doing just that. "All I want is for webmasters with small sites to get rewarded fairly," he says. "This is a chance to see that those guys get visitors and put up good content. Google wants good content. I can't see any problem."

Re:Google's PageRanking algorythm

[Dirtside]

Not even remotely. The DMCA only applies to devices or technologies that are used to break encryption that is protecting a copyrighted work. Reverse-engineering a trade secret (which is what PageRank is) has absolutely nothing to do with the DMCA, and in fact is a time-honored (and court-approved) method of business competition. If you manage to figure it out yourself, and don't engage in any illegal practices to get the trade secret (such as bribing one of the company's engineers), you're totally in the clear.

Yes, it's more complicated than that, but the DMCA has absolutely nothing to do with this.

Re:Two sides to every beef.

[DavidTC]

Link farms are against Google's written rules. Selling anything to do with Google's rankings are against Google's TOS. (Which could mean that Google could have a fun lawsuit against Search King, as Search King publically claims to accept money to do just that. If they've ever searched Google, they're in violation of Google's TOS...and it just so happens their website uses Google's API to...you guessed it.;..search Google.)

And Google explictly says they will remove people who try to manipulate their ranking system.

It's not a secret system at all. They explictly state they will do what they did if people do what he did.

Oh, and their algorythm isn't secret, it's just patented. You can go and look it up, I think it's on Google's site somewhere. Or you could just google for it. Plenty of other people license it, and if you do so, you can run a carbon copy of Google. (Of course, you need a lot of computers and a fast connection, and obviously if Google has manually assigned rankings you'll have to do it also.) This is actually how 'Search King' works, he writes pages that manipulate the (known) system of ranking by linking to each other, so Google has to manually delete them. I, personally, think that's a great thing for google to do.

And SPEWS isn't 'secret', either, BTW, it's just run secretly. How you get in SPEWS is well known, or at least well assumed...you send mail to their super secret spamtrap addresses. Now, it has no accountablity, but it's not using some voodoo to randomly pick people as spammers.

Re:Google is a monopoly and should be watched!

[Sodium Attack]

As this poster [slashdot.org] has pointed out, over 40% of searches are done using search engines other than Google.

Hardly the "monopoly" you claim them to be.