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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."
I'd just remove them completely from the search enginge. Google is a private company and has the right to exclude anyone they choose.
Previous LawMeme Coverage here, including a nasty reply from the SearchKing himself.
Google didn't reduce SearchKing's page rank, Google changed the page rank formula.
This is the same as sueing the "A" group in highschool for not deeming you cool and because of that your self esteem suffered and you became a computer science major.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Who goes to a search engine to search for other search engines anyway? That's like me training a dog to find other dogs that are trained to find dogs. I don't see how search king could possibly even claim to have a case here.
to think they can win a case like this. these people are probably only doing this to get some free press (and it seems to be working). my advice to anyone would be; don't talk about it, don't write about it, and if you have to, don't mention there name.
Acts@core.mailboks.com Acrux@core.mailboks.com Adam@core.mailboks.com Adar@core.mailboks.com Ada@core.mailboks.com
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.
Can I start up "Slashdot King"?
Google has the right to enforce any formula they wish, including a modified one or even an outright fudged one. They're a private company. They can choose to link to whatever sites they wish. They also provide the courtesy of delisting sites that wish to remain anonymous.
Not only is SearchKing suing google, they are also selling (oh, sorry, they call it "making a donation") the legal documents. In order to get into the password protected site, you have to give them $20!
"Men lie."
"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."
-Dan Brown
II. Table of Authorities
United States Statutes and Other Authority
Hustler Magazine v. Falwell
485 U.S. 46, 53 (1988)
Sweet! Larry Flynt will set me straight. So happily did I turn on to page 10, for those playing along at home.
and it read: which is totally not what I was looking for. I even checked under the staples.
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."
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.
"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]
There is an interesting quote in the article that says: "Perhaps a search engine is important enough to be treated as a regulated utility, the same way that water, gas, and the cables over which search requests travel are. Google is good, most netizens seem to think, but what if it weren't?" If it weren't good the principles of free enterprise would kick in a Google would no longer be important... One of the hundred other search engines would become king of the pile. Remember Google is the third or fourth search engine that has been THE search engine. This is not a monsterous company with Billions of Assets like Microsoft or Standard Oil etc. Google is a reasonably small company doing what they do, and doing it well.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed (SK)
Now, I might have this all wrong, but to me it seems that SearchKings way of increasing it's customer's page ranking is just another form of electronic spam. It exposes Google users to information they do not require and furthermore may obscure the *real* information they are looking for.
This is exactly the same behaviour I see with email-based spamming. Any of the spammers tried to sue the manufacturers of spam-filter software yet?
I asked for a refund - and got my monkey back.
Wait a minute aren't *they* suing Google?
It should be a "Legal Attack Fund".
We should sue them for false representation!
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?
i disagree. the reason we like google (besides the simple interface and no pop-ups) is because it gives us relevant results. do you think that people who pay link farms to up their pagerank are the most relevant sites? i don't think so. so if the google people make the connection that searchking is bad, then it's up to them to lower searchking's pagerank. it up to google to decide what makes the most relevant results show up first, that's what keeps google the #1 search engine. if they screw up and the most relevant results are no longer the top results, then we'll find a new search engine.
Let me try to understand this: some spammer is charging money from other spammers to exploit and devalue Google's search service, and annoy Google's users at the same time with irrelevant results. When Google takes appropriate action against this, the spammer sues?!
Yeah, right. Next, I'll be sued by spammers for deleting their junk mail without reading it, and depriving them from their principal source of income.
Granted, I'm not an expert on lawsuits, but this one seems more complicated than most people see it.
I don't think SearchKing is trying to get Google to undo the changes it made to its PageRank algorithm. I think SearchKing is trying to use the fact that Google changed its PageRank in order to get a massive settlement out of court.
The CEO of SearchKing is trying to force Google into a position where they will either have to give him a huge stack of cash or they will have to reveal more detailed secrets about the workings of PageRank in court. Google's entire business depends on PageRank remaining a trade secret. If I were Google, I'd fork over the cash if it looked like it might come down to that.
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
http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/google/skgoogle 101702cmp.pdf
e 101702pimot.pdf
http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/google/skgoogl
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
Google explains it as well:
http://www.google.com/technology/index.html
PageRank Explained
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
The paragraph that got me rolling was:
"In these documents, you will find answers, (according to google), to questions like:
DID GOOGLE DO IT INTENTIONALLY?
CAN GOOGLE DO IT TO YOU?
WHAT CAN YOU DO IF THEY DO?
HOW IMPORTANT IS PAGE RANK TO PLACEMENT?
ARE THEY WORRIED ABOUT OTHER LAWSUITS?
You can learn answers to these questions and more ---- but not for free. It's going to cost you $20 to see the documents. The $20 for the password to view these papers is not a sale. It is a donation to the SearchKing legal fund. "
W * O * W
That's so stupid it's just simply impressive. I have this morbid curiosity to find out just how many people would spend $20 to read this moron's "insights." Me thinks I've learned more from my cats.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry!
Google is a site designed to be a resource for US. That is their mission. They don't give a flying fsck about providing a profit center to some other company--nor should it be considered their responsibility to support.
Gads.
The apocalypse must certainly be arriving Monday. Or, at least, I hope it is.
-buf
I went to altavista and type
+ozzy +osbourne -searchking
I am hurting their business.
Uh oh.. Now they're gonna sue you for taking away their right to a revenue stream! You must stop your anticompetitive behavior immediately and let them sell their public domain documents for $20.
The obvious answer to this "larger question" is this: if Google becomes an arbitrary dictator, giving popular sites low rankings, they will quickly lose their dictatorship. Imagine if a search for "apache" gave apache.org a PageRank of 346. Google wouldn't last long.
But if Google gives SearchKing sites a low rank? Well, nobody seems to be complaining but SearchKing.Read this. From the linked article:
Someone out there in the world makes a living as a Web accessibility consultant???
I'll risk redundancy in order to educate you folks that want to turn the Internet into $$$ by invalidating everything it stands for. This is Lawrence Lessig's quote from this Alan Cox essay:
Google is a search engine. It is a good search engine. When it fails to work for you, there are other search engines that you can use. That someone is earning a living by bumping up search engine results combined with this lawsuit by an obviously clueless company makes me worry about the future of this wonderful network that was created in an environment without MBAs, script-kiddies, and lawyers (apologies to EFF and LL...no offense).
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
You're saying that PageRank itself isn't an expression of opinion, but that it is an aid to expressing an opinion. Of course they're making human decisions about what's good or bad - that's the function of their algorithm. That's why they modified it. As the lawmeme article says, there's no way to 'objectively' determine where SearchKing should be - 8, 4, 2. All any search engine can be is an expression of opinion. "We reckon that if you're searching for a water lily then this is the 'best' site for you.
Alister
The SearchKing website looks no differen't than those web-portals for squatted urls. But they promise such good results! So here are some query response:
Search: "Fuck You"
-1. Get Paid To Surf The Internet!
-2. Where to find music CDs, DVDs, select MP3 music tracks, free music download
-3. Never Be Sued Again!
-4. Get Paid to Surf
-5. Kudos and Compliments for You and for Those Who Bring You Happiness
-6. (see 5)
-7. How To Start A Money Brokerage Business
and I think you get the point. Perhaps a more 'relevant' search query could yield better results:
Search: Car
-1. 765469
-2. License Plates - Vanity License Plates
-3. Next Honda of New England
-4. Ramsfield.com Auto Parts
Hmm. Better results than the search for "Fuck You". But I still wanna know the logic that went into making "765469" the number one result. Oh, and another nice feature is that the linked pages come complete with a SearchKing adbar in a differen't frame.
/There are 10 types of people in this world; those who steal sigs and those don't
I had copied Exhibit A from the PDF, and didn't pay attention to the URL I got from Acrobat
http://w.qooqle.com/technolouv/index. html
Anyway, this was qooqle's (not google's) response to my request
http://paradise.qooqle.com/404.html
"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pron surfed weak and weary.
Over many a strange and spurious pronsite of 'hot XXX galore'.
While I clicked my fav'rite bookmark, suddenly there came a warning.
And my heart was filled with mourning, mourning for my dear amour.
"'Tis not possible", I muttered, "give me back my free hardcore!"
Quoth the server,
404
OCR wins again.
Maybe they can sue google for taking that away from them too.
No sig, sorry.
I find this lawsuit to be more than ridiculous. I find it disgusting.
/.'ers, I propose we take an active role in this
wretched little saga: I propose we write to EVERY SINGLE CLIENT
displayed on SearchKing's site and tell them that we despise the
SearchKing lawsuit against Google and that we will NOT visit, support,
recommend or in any way help them until they have moved to another
hosting service or convinced SearchKing to desist in their legal
efforts. The same treatment should be directed at SearchKing's
advertisers, even if one of them is, sadly, Penguin Computing.
/. had over half a million subscribers. I think
that should get their attention. Don't you?
To sue Google for acting in its best interest and with a view to retain its effectiveness and credibility is nothing short of despicable. Whether SearchKing did it because it truly believes it is right or because it seeks publicity is irrelevant. Its actions are illogical:
a) SearchKing has come to depend on Google (as it stated) because Google can be trusted.
b) Google can be trusted because its algorithms are pretty accurate.
c) SearchKing tried to interfere with those algorithms, seeking INACCURATE results from Google.
d) Google modified said algorithms to counterbalance the interference, seeking its much-valued accuracy.
e) SearchKing sues Google.
I've read the LawMeme analysis and SearchKing's opinions and all I see is another unscrupulous dotcom trying to discredit a very respectable service to serve its own needs, regardless of the damage it may cause. So, fellow
Last time I checked,
Cheers,
Morel
"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"
Hmmmm, perhaps this Internet King can provide faster nudity....
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
If your intent as a search engine is to provide relevant results, you have to tweak your algorithm to remove the irrevelant ones. Since searchking is indeed irrevelant, it would be extremely susceptible to falling on its face for this. To be honest, I'm almost aghast that they had the gall to get mad about this.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
If you want to know how the folks at Google feel about Scientology, try a Google search for "goatse". No, really! Look at the suggested category...
:-)
Nice hack
Where fraud comes in is when false claims are used to deceive someone into buying a product. For example, if the claim on that soap was "Cures Athlete's Foot" and you have athlete's foot, but it doesn't really cure athlete's foot, you would have been defrauded because you relied on the stated claim as a material part of your purchasing decision. But harmless puffery like "Our results are better because of our patented PageRank(tm) algorithm!" are no more fraud than "perfect for all of your 2000 parts!" on this box of Lever 2000 soap. You use Google because it works better, not because of harmless puffery that makes no material difference in your decision to use it or not.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
IRC section 501(c)(3) technically has nothing to do with the deductibility of contributions. That is governed by section 170, which merely happens to cover almost, but not quite, exactly the same entities as sec. 501(c)(3).
It is conceivable, but just barely, that the "contribution" could be deductible for some other reason -- if it's just an ordinary and necessary business expense, and for some reason exempt from capitalization, say -- but not for most "contributors." I'm fairly certain it is a crime for SearchKing to falsely claim these contributions are deductible.
I Can't Believe It's A Law Firm, LLP does not necessarily endorse the contents of this message.
The strength of Google's case here (as described in the analysis) is also good news for DNS-based blacklists, such as SPEWS. While it seems obvious that publishing such a list should be protected on free speech grounds, it is nice that such a close analogy is being tested.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky