Google Sued over Page Ranking 596
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".
Too Easy (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe I Am Missing the Point (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, really, this guy/company is stupid. Of course, "no publicity is bad publicity", just look at Acclaim...
LawMeme sums it up best (Score:5, Interesting)
Baseless claim (Score:5, Interesting)
Huh? (Score:2, Interesting)
Is that about how everything is working here?
SearchKing... of ads (Score:5, Interesting)
Hillarious? (Score:5, Interesting)
on the grounds the organization arbitrarily and purposefully devalued his companies' and his customers' web sites
So, it was an arbitrary ranking, that purposefully targeted him and his customers? I would have thought that arbitrary and purposeful targeting would be mutually exclusive.
I guess he never gave any thought to the possibility that his work sucks. It's always somebody else's fault, isn't it?
Re:and page rank goes up (Score:3, Interesting)
As it should, but I think (hope) that Google is more sophisticated than that. It will go up for queries like "google law suit", not for anything SearchKing cares about.
Maybe Google Should Sue SearchKing .... (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it just me, or does this wreak of a cheap PR campaign for SearchKing?
Has anyone even heard of searchking before this article?
Maybe searchking will be able to sell enough casino ads to pay Google for the rights to use thier name in a pointless law suit that is really just a cheap advertising campaign!
Two words for the wonderful people at Google : COUNTER SUIT!!!
Re:how rich is Google? (Score:3, Interesting)
It also wouldnt supprise me if they got a decent amount of donations just for being the best search engine around. How many hours of research have you saved by just going to google?
This is absurd (Score:2, Interesting)
From the motion filed [searchking.com]:
First of all, I'm sure this is majorly redundant, what did they expect? Google is not a peace-loving group of coding hippy monkies. It is a for-profit company. I liken this to someone writing a book report, and then someone else trying to sell the book using the book report as advertisment without asking the report's author for permission.
...and one more thing [pradnetwork.com]:
That itself speaks volumes!
Learning is fun (Score:3, Interesting)
Bob Massa, president of SearchKing., Inc. and PR Ad Network, filed a lawsuit today against Google on the grounds the organization arbitrarily and purposefully devalued his companies' and his customers' web sites, causing his business to suffer financially. Massa is asking that the court grant preliminary and permanent injunctions against Google.
Hate to tell you Bob, an action cannot be arbitrarily ("determined by chance") and purposefully ("intentional") committed.
Way to go you...CEO!
Re:Maybe I Am Missing the Point (Score:5, Interesting)
The claim is pretty bogus because it's sort of like saying "Our company advertises your company by writing grafitti on subway walls. We're suing the subway owners who keep cleaning up the grafitti."
Spamming Google for $$$ (Score:5, Interesting)
What's even funnier... (Score:4, Interesting)
The plaintiff (Search King) actually wants a jury trial. Granted, this is Oklahoma and not big-city New York and all; but one has to believe that Google has many clients there. And no matter how back-woods you get, people just hate those nasty people who are responsible for banner ads, annoying links, and all that jaz. Seems to me that Google won't have any problems.
Then again, we're only talking about $75,000 in damages alleged. That's not a lot of money, and Google might do well to just settle the case for around $50,000 or so (without admitting fault or altering their page rank system). Yeah, yeah, I know that it's all "about the point of the matter" and if Google gives in to one company they will look weak and all that. But there's a cost asociated with fighting the complaint, too. And sending attornies to Oklahoma all the time just to spend an hour or two in the court room to hash out every little piece of evidence seems silly. It just gets way too expensive, and settling isn't always a bad option. Sometimes you can spend a fortune proving you're right only to find that it cost you much more in the long run (sometimes even the core business due to the legal fees). Seems like a waste of precious time to me, when Google should be doing what it's best at--search engine technology. I'd almost hate to see them fight this with the risk of losing focus on the core business itself.
Re:Too Easy (Score:5, Interesting)
As a matter of interest, are Google under any legal obligation to provide an "fair" search?
By the way, the link in my original post gave searchking.de top billing as I am searching from Switzerland.
Re:PlowKing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:they just have... (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey look! (Score:5, Interesting)
Care to give him your take on it?
Help them by blogging their rank up (Score:3, Interesting)
If we could blog a bunch of links into google containing "Lawsuit Crazy Morons" and link to search king's site...
This would be something like the "talentless hack" trick (mentioned some time ago on slashdot). In fact, we could do this for a number of sites... who wants to blog Microsoft up as "absolute evil?"
The King is Screwed (Score:4, Interesting)
Right there, you said it King. You have no way to control someone else's own business. If you don't like it, fcsk you.
Later he goes on saying, "In the event the PR of a page with an ad changed, we would simply adjust the pricing or adjust where the ad was being displayed at the advertisers request."
I suppose you will sell your services at a real low price, very shortly :)
Re:Maybe Google Should Sue SearchKing .... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's their way of trying to stay alive when they have NO business plan, NO real product, and NO way to succeed except cheating!
Actually, if google were to put a few lines of code in to totally ignore any links to "Search King", et. al., they'd still be within the law. Google is (last time I looked, anyway) a private business, with no obligation to parasites like Massa.
A better analogy (Score:4, Interesting)
An even better analogy to the description he uses in his own press release is that of a car thief that specializes in stealing and stripping Hondas announcing that he's one of Honda's few competitors, and that he has the right to sue Honda if they improve their alarms and anti-theft devices.
you're missing the point (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the point he is trying to make is that Google is inherently a commercial entity as they provide business referrals. They also value those referral sources relative to one another, and that value determines the number of referrals they are able to push.
Bob King decided to buy/sell pagerank as a commodity, since it has value, and is there. Very American no?
When Bob did this, Google decided to lower the value of his site. What Bob is arguing is that Google did this arbitrarily, not naturally, and that his business (which was in the business, I presume, of convincing people they can attain a high pagerank on google for you, you know Search Engine Optimization) is damaged by being assigned a low pagerank. Which obviously it is. I wouldn't hire and SEO firm with a PR of 4, and neither would you anyone with a clue. Bob knows this.
In a way Bob has a point, if not a case within that point.
Re:and page rank goes up (Score:5, Interesting)
One has to wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
Where's google on search king? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmmm, no link to google on page 1
How about page 2, um, nope
Oh the irony - phorm
Re:How stupid do you have to be? (Score:3, Interesting)
Justifiably, there is no case at all to be made. Regardless of Google's popularity, there is no way that Search King can even begin to claim that Google is even required to index their stuff. Dominant or not, Google is still technically a web page, and we all know that unless your server's TOS (i.e. Geocities or Tripod, if the latter still exists) requires banners or other such crap. So if Google runs their own site off their own servers, it's entirely their decision what goes on the site. Even if they're dominant, there are plenty of options out there. This suit is nothing but bullying.
Why, why, why? (Score:3, Interesting)
This one is beyond my comprehension...
Re:cheap plublicity stunt (Score:2, Interesting)
Just the slashdot visitors curious about the site will be significant. Also, all the links from the news websites would increase the rank, as well.
I wonder if the guy is that clever, or if he just got lucky.
"Devalued"? *snort* (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been yahooing/altavista-ing/metacrawling/googling (in that order, chronologically) since 1997, and lived in Oklahoma City since then, and I've never heard of these people before now.
I suspect they've got a lot of work ahead of them to prove devaluation. :)
Re:Too Easy (Score:5, Interesting)
- Robert Massa:There is nothing wrong with wanting link popularity for your site and I'm saying there is nothing wrong with sending out email to people you don't know from Adam and trying to conduct business without the benefit of money, but there is also nothing wrong with paying for the value you perceive with cash. I call it doing business.
I call it SPAM!!!!!!- Robert Massa: Maybe I really am the Internet anti-Christ for saying this, but here goes.
I am a salesman. I sell things for a living. I get hired by my clients to sell things. That's what I do, I'm good at it and I make no apologies for it. If a cynical SEO uses the term "eke out cash" as a synonym for "make a sale," then yes, I am guilty.
You are the anti-christ. Case Closed.Google is a monopoly and should be watched! (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's what I posted in my web log [sooke.bc.ca] when this story broke a couple days ago:
SearchKing runs an elaborate baiting scheme of fake Web pages that link to each other, to try to convince the Google robot to rank its clients' pages higher than you or I would think the pages deserve. Google updated its algorithm to better resist the scheme. SearchKing loses money because of that; SearchKing sues.
I think this is actually less clear-cut than it sounds. SearchKing are bad actors - they were trying to cheat, they don't have a right to do that, it's okay for Google to tweak its algorithms to avoid them, that much is clear. However: what everyone is going to say about this is that Google is a private company and they have a free-speech right to rank pages however the heck they want, and I'm not sure that's actually true. I think there could be situations (not this one, but) where it would be okay for a company to sue Google for ranking them too low.
The reason is that Google is in a monopoly position. Let me say that again: Google is in a monopoly position. It really is. If your Web site gets delisted by Google, or penalized by Google's page ranking algorithm, you don't have the option of saying, "Oh, well, people will find us in some other search engine." It doesn't work that way - everyone uses Google, and if you're not in Google, you're nowhere. Just like everyone uses Microsoft Windows, and if you can't run under Microsoft Windows, you can't run anywhere. Linux, sure, but if you can't run under Windows, you can't run in a large enough number of places that you have a big problem if you were counting on running under Windows. The Google monopoly is actually more solid than Microsoft's because it's not tied to specific independent companies (Intel, etc.) for support.
Google's monopoly means that it does not have complete freedom to rank things however the heck it wants to, the way a smaller search engine might. Google has responsibilities that come from its monopoly. Microsoft cannot legally design its operating system to deliberately screw up its competitors' applications. (Okay, they do that, but they do it illegally.) Google, similarly, should not be allowed to tweak its ranking algorithm in ways that are sneaky and bad. I don't think that penalizing SearchKing is sneaky and bad... but it's easy to imagine that Google could do things that would be sneaky and bad. We just have to trust them not to, and that gives me the willies, especially because Google could do all kinds of things that we'd never know about.
For instance, Google could decide to advocate a political party, and rank that party's pages higher than others, always. Maybe if you searched "Democrat" you would get the Republican anti-Democrat site before the actual Democrat site. (I name U.S. parties because it's more plausible that Google would care about them.) They have plausible deniability, because they could claim that the ranking comes from an objective ranking scheme based on how many links there are, and "Oh, well, I guess there were a whole lot of links to the Republican Web site". That would be sneaky and bad. Google has already shown a willingness to tamper with their search results for reasons that have nothing to do with page relevance, in the xenu.net affair [sooke.bc.ca]. Granted they were between a rock and a hard place on that one, legally, but I'm not sure they made the right decision, and it's a step that puts them on a slippery slope.
Suppose Google quietly made a site disappear; or, better yet, they just make it appear a few notches lower on the list than it otherwise would. That's a very real harm to the site because people only look at the top few links in the search results; losing one position on the list translates into a loss of a large amount of mindshare. If it was a small site that would normally appear low on the list anyway, would we ever know there was manipulation going on? That's why Google's monopoly frightens me - PageRank is secret, we can tell that overall it seems to work fairly, but they could make a large number of individual exceptions to fair ranking and we, the users, would just chalk that up to "Oh, the algorithm isn't perfect". Google could manipulate its results a whole lot and we would have no way of knowing. We just have to trust Google to be honest. Just like we have to trust censorware companies not to put their political and social agendas into the blocking lists. You know how far I trust censorware companies.
I don't think that Google is abusing its monopoly yet - certainly not in the SearchKing case and probably not anywhere else either. But I do think Google has a monopoly, I do think that monopolies are very dangerous, and I think the Google monopoly needs to be watched. I don't think we should be fooled by their open-source heritage and their cute holiday graphics and so on. Google is a large U.S. corporation that's making a lot of money from their monopoly on an important part of the computing business, we have very little way of knowing whether they are acting honestly, and they have incentives to act dishonestly. This is a dangerous situation. Who will be the Linux to Google's Microsoft?
Oh, and hey, they decided they wanted everyone to come to them first for Internet news reporting too. When Conrad Black did that with Canadian news papers, a lot of us were kind of concerned; but when it's the Web, and it's Google, it's all good, and we all like it, because Google Is Cool. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Google becoming a monopoly? This may be legit soo (Score:5, Interesting)
If they get back up to that 79% number and hold it for any length of time, legally, that makes them a monopoly. No matter how much we may like Google today, it's a lot of power for one search engine to be able to have. It seems like a matter of time if they keep gaining share before they start abusing that power. Microsoft was innovating when they were at war against 1-2-3 and Wordperfect just as Google is today against Overture. With AskJeeves, Inktomi and Altavista looking like they'll go away soon, we will see Google to keep 'innovating ' making the little guys not show up in their search engine anymore?
As much as we may love them now, remember who they're trying to serve: their venture (vulture) capitalists.
Re:Truth in advertising (Score:3, Interesting)
The court could trivially appoint an expert (computer programmer)to look at the code and compare it to the new code. As long as it doesn't specifically state something against their company, the center of their case falls out. If there was something against them specifically then google would have a little explaining to do.
Web crawling is a slow process. Somehow I just can't imagine Google slowing down their web searches by attempting to punish companies on a hit list.
Does Google recognize link farms yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
The defense mechanism needed in a link-based search engine is to identify groups of sites which link extensively within the group, but have few links from outside the group. The problem is that this is likely to identify as a group any set of sites devoted to a single but obscure subject where most of the people involved know about each other. It's hard to do this on topology alone, although it might turn out to be possible.
Re:Google actions cry out for government control (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh yes there is choice. Try www.alltheweb.com [alltheweb.com] and you will see they are quite close to google in quality. Sometimes they are better even.
And Bob claims the question is.... (Score:1, Interesting)
--If they did, that is against the law and I have a right to sue for protection.
No Bob, the question is - are you protected by the law if google arbitrarily takes action to modify SK's page rank regardless of intent?
Let's at least get the question right first.
Re:Hey look! (Score:3, Interesting)
It's called robots.txt. Learn it. Use it.
Caveat: I'm still reading about both sides of this case and trying not to give in to my visceral distaste of what Search King seems to be doing, so please bear with me.
The portion of Mr. King's comment you post refers to "express permission." robots.txt is an opt out system. In opt-out systems, permission is implied unless expressly forbidden. So, the presence of a robots.txt option does not address Mr. King's comment.
As an aside, it seems a bit disingenuous for a member of the Slashdot crowd to point to it as a fine solution when there have been reams of complaints about spammers who offer opt-out links.
A question to the poster: Do you really feel that an opt-out system is adequate in this case? If so, how is it fundamentally different than opt-out spammers?
Re:Truth in advertising (Score:3, Interesting)
Cheers,
Costyn.
Not at all. (Score:3, Interesting)
The guys at SK think Google has manualy degraded them, and hundreds of innocent parners sites, as a penalty for seling tex based ads, as a way to improve its Google PageRank(TM).
It is not alegally an algorithm problem. Is one big company banning and smashing a number of smaller companys who dare to sell what Google may only Google has the right to do: put you on top of the result search, paying for Google Adwords ads.
I personally belive SK has done a lot of stupid things, one of them suing Google. But I also think we should be more aware of who the Google Guys realy are: agressive ad dealers, who may think are the only guys arround entitle to put a price to who important our sites are.
Re:And the rest are stolen (Score:2, Interesting)
Aug 29, 2002 7:51 for both sites.
BTW, a search for "SearchKing" at search king doesnt bring up their page first!
-Jason
The Internet King (Score:4, Interesting)
Comic Book Guy: Oh, Captain Janeway. Lace: The Final Brassiere. Oh hurry up, I'm a busy man. Ugh, this high-speed modem is intolerably slow. [The download is interrupted by a banner ad for the "Internet King", with a little picture of Homer wearing a crown.] Hey, what the? Huh, the Internet King. I wonder if he can provide faster nudity.
[Scene changes to Homer's office]
Homer: Welcome to the internet my friend, how can I help you?
Comic Book Guy: I'm interested in upgrading my 28.8 kilobaud Internet connection to a 1.5 megabit fiber-optic T-1 line. Will you be able to provide an IP router that's compatible with my token ring Ethernet LAN configuration?
Homer: [long pause] Can I have some money now?
So you see, Homer ran a very typical Internet company. The only thing notable about it was the very untypical way it ended (for a dot-com, that is), with Bill Gates showing up in person to trash Homer's office. But you have to give the Simpson's writers credit. This was written in 1998 and back then nobody knew that an Internet company needs to turn a profit to survive.
Re:Spamming Google for $$$ (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Too Easy (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only that, but google has fricken ads down the side of the page. If I want to see who's willing to pay for my eyeballs, I'll look over there (and, indeed, I do sometimes, depends on what I'm searching for). That's where people pay to show up. The search results are not for that.
People paying to get bumped up in the page ranking are idiots. You want to go up in the page rankings, get more people to honestly link to you. You want to pay for more hits, buy an ad.