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".

Comments

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:how rich is Google?

[cptgrudge]

I suppose if you really want to help "support" google, you can go to the google store.
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.

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 Aug 2002 article Meet Mr. Anti-Google:

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 in the Guardian:

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

[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:

"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.

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: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:Whine Back To Bob...

[matrix29]

Registrant:
SearchKing, Inc.
13601 Quiet Cove
McLoud, OK 74851
US
405-386-4805
Fax:405-386-4806

Domain Name: SEARCHKING.COM

Administrative Contact:
Massa, Bob bobking@searchking.com
13601 Quiet Cove
McLoud, OK 74851
US
405-386-4805
Fax:405-386-4806

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

Bob Massa the Bulk Spammer

[ 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
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/

A bit of truth even from Bob Massa's lips
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."