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."

Comments

Silly

[unterderbrucke]

Google didn't reduce SearchKing's page rank, Google changed the page rank formula.

SearchKing's Response to Google's Response

[NeuroKoan]

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.

More proof that this guy is a moron...

[MasterSLATE]

According to the serachking guy's website, it says this specifically:

We have no control over what google may or may not do. If they make a PR 9 drop to a PR 8, it doesn't mean that the site has any less link popularity, less traffic or less quality. It only means they are counting things differently. If the site was making you money, it should continue to do so, but remember, we have no way of knowing what you, google or the inventory partner will do at any given time. We are just the brokers.

Hmm, that applies to your site too, buddy!
People like searchking should be lined up and shot next to all the spammers.

Re:PlowKing!

[OldMiner]

Yes but was it against SearchKing specifically or any site that did what SearchKing did?

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:

And Search King admitted that Google had the right to take action in response, including changing Google's opinion of the importance of the Search King site by changing the PageRank assigned to that site.

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.

Searching for SearchKing

[minesweeper]

It's interesting to search for "SearchKing" on Google. Back when this story first hit Slashdot in October, SearchKing's website came up somewhere on the fourth page of listings on Google. Now it comes up as number one, but their PageRank still remains at 4. It shows that there is some behind-the-scenes results manipulation going on at Google... which of course is their perogative.

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.

Re:$20 to read the documents?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Why Google is So Important

[billstewart]

Searchking hasn't been the only attack on Google. There's also Daniel Brandt, the Google-watch guy, who thinks that Google ought to be regulated, because it's so important. Both of these people are wrong - the Searchking guy because he's a parasite, and the Google-watch guy because, as near as I can tell, he's one of those misguided people who wants to tell everybody what to do because he knows better but does not in fact understand what makes the Net work so well, which is that anybody can put any material they want out there.

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...)

Re:PageRank explainted

[Maserati]

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.