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Searchking Loses Suit Against Google
An anonymous reader submits this story that Searchking has lost its suit against Google for lowering search rankings. Silly lawsuit, good riddance. See our original story.
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Did you read the article? This had nothing to do with patents or copyrights, it had to do with SearchKing getting pissed because Google was reducing the rank of its links. Even the article synopsis indicates it's not about patents: "...a suit that alleged the company manipulated search results in its powerful Web index."
The judge dismissed the case because Google's system "constitutes opinions protected by the First Amendment."
SearchKing wanted to be "restored to its previous PageRank and to be awarded $75,000 in damages."
While the lawsuit was dismissed by the court, Google had to restore (voluntarily) the Searchking rankings. That means those damn search engine spammers can continue their evil doings. :( Google tried to adapt its system to abuse, but failed. Unfortunately, it seems that the more important Google becomes, the less freedom they will have to arbitrarily change (fine-tune) the system. Users lose as usual. :(
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The reason why Google didn't come up first when you searched for "search engine" is that you weren't specific enough.
Actually, that's not true. If you read the actual judgement here , you'll find that the strongest argument centered around patents, in the following vein:
(1) Google claimed its rankings were opinion and thus protected by the First Amendment.
(2) Search King claimed that they couldn't be opinions precisely because Google holds a patent on the process used to make them.
(3) The judge found Search King's argument "not wholly without merit" (p. 6), but that Google could still alter the result of that patented process in a subjective manner and thus it was protected as free speech.
The critical argument by Search King (p. 5):
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Of course both sides incurred legal fees. Rarely do lawyers do contingency work; plaintiff-side lawyers who work on class actions or are suing corporations in products liability cases are really the only ones who might work on contingency.
It doesn't matter if there was no trial. The motions involved are pre-trial motions -- Google motioned to dismiss, and SearchKing asked for a preliminary injunction. Judge Miles-LaGrange granted the motion to dismiss, and (obviously) denied the motion for a PI. A PI is a temporary order by the court to prevent the defendant from doing whatever it is that the plaintiff is suing about because it will cause immediate hardship (it's more complicated than that, but essentially that's the point).
SearchKing isn't obligated to pay Google. The are a very few, specific circumstances in which a loser in an American court must pay the winner, and this situation isn't one of them. The other possibility would have been pursuant to a settlement agreement, but that's negotiated and thus different in every case.
...And I found a document at SearchKing itself where they have commented it.
Here.
True ravers don't need drugs
They do have a responsibility to their shareholders. But none to their website visitors.
This whole thread is still getting one key point of fact wrong: Google is not a publicly traded company.
Here: go look them up. Type in "Google." Nothing, right?
The people that run Google could get spectacularly rich if they were to issue an IPO. Some have theorized that any IPO from Google would fuel a new tech boom, and some have the audacity to claim that it's Google's responsibility to do this and single-handedly save the stock market.
But they don't want that. They realize that they run their company in slightly untraditional ways-- they don't hold profit as the top priority at the expense of all else (which is why you don't see larger ads, or any willingness to sell rankings on their search engine), and they like that they can make decisions based on right-and-wrong gut reactions. Their tech guy, Sergei Brin, has a nice outlook on what they value, which you can find in this slightly older Forbes article, and he's never yet changed his tune.
Therefore, they have even less responsibility to anybody than even you might think. They don't have to justify their actions to stockholders, and they're not under the legal guidelines the SEC would impose if they were a publicly-traded company.
They can do what they want, and are content (for now) to do so.