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

Too Easy

[BoBaBrain]

Case closed.

Re:Too Easy

[BoBaBrain]

Unless Google are deliberately out to get them, then SearchKing don't have a point. If SearchKing is being subjected to the same search algorithm as every other site then I don't see what the problem is. Unless that algorithm was designed specifically to weed out SsearchKing...

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:Too Easy

[tiedyejeremy]

• 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.

Re:Too Easy

[DavidTC]

Geez. If I really wanted to just go to the site that paid the most in advertising I'd stick with watching TV so I could just get my info from commercials. We all know how honest and accurate THAT system is.

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.

LawMeme sums it up best

[Kusanagi]

I was thinking along the same lines when LawMeme said "The King does have a point: when your "business" consists of shoplifting and the corner store installs a security camera, you're going to go out of business quickly enough that an injunction is your only hope."

Baseless claim

[Drizzten]

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.

SearchKing began business as an Internet search engine and web hosting company in 1997, approximately a year before Google's inception. In August 2002, PR Ad Network began placing text ads for businesses on web sites with a high PageRank from Google, thereby becoming one of very few competitors to Google's advertising service. According to the lawsuit, once Google became aware of this, it lowered SearchKing's PageRank and the ranking of the web sites it hosts.

PageRank (PR) is a Google-developed system of determining the value of a particular website. The PR of a site, which ranges from one to 10 (10 being the highest), is displayed publicly on each site visited through the use of the Google tool bar, which can be down loaded to any computer for free, PR value is determined several ways, including calculating the number of web pages (links) pointing to a particular page and how relevant they are to the topic at hand.

"From February of 2001 to last month, SearchKing's PageRank was seven" Massa said. "Within 30 days of launching PR Ad Network's services, our PageRank dropped to four"

Due to the high value associated with PR, Massa claims in his lawsuit that the purposeful reduction of SearchKing and its related web sites' rankings has damaged the company's reputation and diminished its value.

[...]

"This action by Google clearly demonstrates the free-trade threat that now faces all businesses with an Internet presence," Massa said. "If using the PageRank were a threat to Google, why would they release it to the public? In many ways, our use of PageRank serves only to validate the system."

This isn't a threat to free trade. Real threats to free trade come from government intervention and business fraud. Google, for reasons it choose on it's own (or maybe even through automated processes out of it's day-to-day monitoring), changed the rank of some webpages. This affected advertising revenue...but there is no mention of any contract among Google, SearchKing, and PR Ad Network formally laying out some mutually-beneficial binding system. This suit seems more like a grasping of straws rather than a serious case.

SearchKing... of ads

[Diclophis]

results for "php" on searchking Note that the first page of results has nuthin to do with php, or its development, hell it doesnt even return php.net (php's homepage). Meanwhile Google's results return very informational and useful sites, and clearly define which results are paid for. I suppose this is just a window into the obviuos.

Hillarious?

[FreeLinux]

No, it's pathetic that Google actually will have to waste money defending against such a frivolous suite. I did find this funny though...

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?

Maybe Google Should Sue SearchKing ....

[mustangdavis]

for using Google's good name for free advertising!

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:Maybe I Am Missing the Point

[cfulmer]

My view of what's happening is that SearchKing is in the business of artificially inflating the ranks of their customers on google.com. Google has noticed this and has taken steps to un-inflate those ranks. SearchKing sues of the basis of Tortious Interference (ie they claim that google.com is interfering with a business relationship.)

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 $$$

[KjetilK]

Well, Searchking's business model consists of making people pay them to spam google for them, by making non-paid documents coming up lower. What Searchking doesn't get is that I'm not interested in being spammed by their customers, I'm interested in good search results. It is comforting to see that Google penalizes sites that tries such tactics, because it means that I get better search results. Go Google!

Re:they just have...

[Midnight Thunder]

Yep, SearchKings search algorithm doesn't work too well either. I put in the name of the company I work for (kept anonymous), and it didn't appear top. Given that the name of the company is two words I am suprised that it came up with references to the company, before it even listed the companies web site? Google shows the company's web site first. Hmm, try searching both sites for 'slashdot' for example.

Hey look!

[FreeLinux]

SearchKing has forums. I like this post best. It is from the SearchKing himself, Bob King. It is a defense of his actions. It seems that he's taking heat for this on his own site.

Care to give him your take on it?

Re:and page rank goes up

[darksaber]

What they don't realize is that their ranking probably went down because they changed their own link structure. If they read the published PageRank papers, they would have know that this would happen. In essence, they devalued themselves as a hub/portal page when they added links for unrelated ads which would naturally bring down their ranking. Any upswing in ranking would be because more incoming links are "assigning authority" to them.

"Devalued"? *snort*

[Charles Kerr]

According to their PR release, SearchKing's been around since 1997 and is located in Oklahoma City.

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. :)

Google becoming a monopoly? This may be legit soo

[blastedtokyo]

According to this page Google has a 55.1% search share as of Oct 17th. When you throw in that Google runs Aol searches that brings them up to 58.6%. And before June 2002 they were running Yahoo's searches (20.6%).

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.

Does Google recognize link farms yet?

[Animats]

The main way to spam Google is to create lots of sites which link to each other, thereby creating an illusion of popularity. This trick is widely used by porno sites and by Scientology. Google needs to recognize such site groups, and treat them as a single site for ranking purposes. That's difficult, but maybe they've made some progress, which would kill SearchKing.

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.