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Google Responds to SearchKing's Lawsuit
The Importance of writes "Back in October, SearchKing sued Google for reducing SearchKing's pagerank, as previously reported. Now, Google has filed a reply and a motion to dismiss. LawMeme has both documents as well as analysis."
Google didn't reduce SearchKing's page rank, Google changed the page rank formula.
This SearchKing fool actually claimed monetary damages. What a dumbass, if I've ever seen one!
[sig]www.masterslate.org[/sig]
SearchKing has a posting of Google's response, presumably with commentary. The link can be found here but you have to pay $20 to the "Legal Defense Fund" to view the entire documentation.
Fortunately, my curiousity is outweighed by me desire to NOT give SearchKing money.
"However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation."
"Jono Craig: One expected response from Google is that people should be careful what they pay for. They don't always get what they expect. That Google prefer algorithms to fight 'spam' but are happy to investigate claims of abuse manually if they need to. To me this would imply some form of intervention; both through public advice and possibly through filters or penalties to sites such as www.pradnetwork.com & www.searchking.com
Robert Massa: To me, it only illustrates the reason Google has become as successful as it has. They run a good search engine at least in part because they care enough to investigate. I'm not asking for or expecting any special consideration. "
So, he WAS all in favour of google doing what they like. Until it turned out to be something he didn't like. Uh huh.
People like searchking should be lined up and shot next to all the spammers.
[sig]www.masterslate.org[/sig]
... that must be because Google reduced SearchKing's pagerank, I think searchking should sue them.
That's Just a Burglar Alarm -- Ignore It!
Well, pointed out in a previous article, Google has kept the exact method of its page rank for this as well as all other cases on the lowdown. However, if link farms were getting downgraded, I would wager that such things as Scientology would start to drop as well. Then again, I just did do a search for Scientology and noticed quite a few highly ranked sites critical of Scientology. You'll note that scientology.org ranks very highly, but I believe that a domain that nearly exactly matches a search ranks very high for non-common terms. For instance, try searching for "searchking recipes". They're #1. Now, try searching for "recipes". They're still there, but they're in the 80s.
Though, my ultimately answer is: I don't know. But judging by the catastrophic drop of their pages, I would wager they just manually set the PageRank for any SearchKing site to a low value, or capped it similarly. Further, depending on how you read the wording in their reply, you could assume they are implying that:
Granted, I'm sure any strict logicican (and certainly Google's lawyers), would suggest that this simply means Google has a right to lower anyone's Page Rank either directly or indirectly through modification of their ranking algorithms, and it doesn't even state that Google changed its algorithms at all, let alone specifically to affect SearchKing.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
Another example was the Microsoft and "go to hell" incident which dissappeared from Google rather quickly once it became public.
Incidentally, searching for "SearchKing" on SearchKing doesn't even come up with SearchKing's front page, and the first result that is even close is number 7.
SearchKing's order form also claims that your "donation" to their legal defense fund is tax-deductible. I'm no tax expert, but I thought a tax deduction was available only for donations to recognized charities, not to a for-profit company like SearchKing.
Anyone want to file a complaint with the IRS that SearchKing might be a party to income tax evasion due to its misrepresenting itself as a 501(c)(3) charity?
From the link you posted, Bob Massa (of SearchKing) writes:
" If you take your web presence seriously, and accept that the words research.yale.edu means something, doesn't that put a responsibility on you to be open-minded and fair? To at least try to report objectively?"
This guy is almost as whiny as the Bernard Shifman twit! If you look at what was written, it says, basically, "this is a loser of a case and a waste of SearchKing's money." In other words, James Grimmelmann doesn't talk to Google either, he simply looks at the case on its merits and proclaims it is a loser.
I guarantee that if James stood on the opposite side of the fence it would be Massa proclaiming him a genius.
My
Limekiller
Well the reason Google is so important is that so many people use it, and the reason so many people use it instead of Yahoo or Altavista or Northernlights or Hotbot or LongDefunct.Com or Excite.com or Teoma or some of the other search engines out there is that they do a really excellent job. I used to use Altavista, who were not only the original big search engine, they were one of the best in terms of coverage, as opposed to Yahoo who had much better indexing but nowhere near as many pages. If you wanted to find something obscure, you'd use Altavista, but if you wanted to find something common, it might be hard because Altavista would get 50,000 references that you could look through 10 at a time. I switched to using Google because their search engine did a really good job of usually having the information I wanted in the first page or two, often in the first one or two references, as well as because their pages were lean and mean and not cluttered with dancing broken Javascript ads, and I've occasionally found the cache to be valuable for finding information that was once on the web but isn't any more.
As far as Daniel Brandt's rants about how the government ought to be regulating Google and PageRank because so many people use it, that's purely backwards. The government could accomplish any positive aspects of his goals by building their own search engines with their own page ranking algorithms, but if they go messing with Google, they're not only likely to censor some content and artificially inflate things they want to propagandize, but they're likely to make it less likely to have the material I want near the top, destroying the Pagerank in order to save it.
Some search engines have tried to make money by letting people pay for good placement - the pundits yell at them for it, and the public tends to use those engines less because they're better at finding advertising drivel than interesting content. Lots of web sites try to game the page ranking systems on all the major search engines, typically by including relevant keywords many many times in comments or meta-things, or by including them in small print at the bottom of the page, and the main reason the system doesn't get swamped by this is that the better algorithms try to detect this manipulation and neutralize it or seriously downrate for it. Otherwise the search engines would have a high proportion of uninteresting material near the top, mostly pages that are really just spam. If Google's PageRank didn't protect itself against whatever techniques SearchKing is using, he'd be doing the same thing, making it much easier to find pages people pay to promote than pages that are rated high because they're actually interesting. (I've got slightly mixed feelings about that, because his stuff seems to look less obnoxious than banner ads or dancing javascipts, and is usually on pages I don't ever read...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"SearchKing - Building a Better Internet"
Hah! Only a market droid could believe that spamming search engines and paying for unmarked higher ranks (thus polluting accuracy) make the Internet a better place.
What is it about their name that make me think of Barney Gumble? Perhaps Google should consult the legal advice of Mr. Search - "Call Mr. Search, that's my name, that name again is Mr. Search"
I'd like to take a few bytes to thank Google for doing things like this. At one point, some months ago, I was doing a search for some obscure points of naval history ("predreadnought") and most of the top 50 results (mid 30s) were all to a set of linked pages. These were all lists of keywords to sweeten your metatags with. And they all linked to each other.
It wasn't SearchKing, it was all related to some bozo promoting techniques for improving search results. He had a lot of good ideas, some of which were even ethical.
I fired off an email to Google and at some point those pages disappeared. SearchKing might just be the only ones who sued.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Prior to spamming google with false links he spammed ordinary netizens email boxes.
Search on Google for "Altavista"
The first result is altavista.com
Search on search.msn.com for "Linux"
The first result is "buy Linux software on Amazon." The second is "Alternatives to Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP" on Microsoft.com. Linux.org is down in the double digits.
Of course, we would expect someone's Internet search engine to reflect their preferences, so this is neither shocking nor bad. It would only be a problem if MS somehow tied IE to their search engine and their search engine only.
All's true that is mistrusted