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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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I'm sure we are going to be hearing more of these types of stories in the future. Hopefully they will all be thrown out or what makes the internet great will be in trouble.
They are a private company. Google can do whatever they want to the rankings. If they wanted to rank everyone in reverse order starting tommorow they could. SearchKing was just some jackass company trying to get publicity and it worked.
from the article: Of course it's not a complete loss. SearchKing has received more attention with this lawsuit than they ever would have on their own business merits. That's part of why suing a big player like google or IBM is so lucrative even when your case is so flimsy. Attention whores.
Actually SearchKing got pissed after Google changed the rules in reaction to SearchKing abusing the ranking system in the first place.
:)
It's like a crybaby screaming because his parents realized he found a way to the cookie jar and finally locked the cupboard door... and it's quite sad that complains like these are allowed to made it to court and waste justice time...
Good thing they lost anyway. Sorry SearchKing, go find another business model
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
If that doesn't say unbiased, I don't know what does. :)
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
It's even funnier since I was thinking "wow a judge that knows enough about technology to do the right thing!" and he says he lost because the judge doesnt know about technology. hahaa
The fallacy?
Assigning a monetary value to pagerank.
SearchKing believes they can set a price on the value of a pagerank and sell it to consumers (by using appropriate technology investment to increase the pagerank value). However, 1) Google has not granted resale right to this entity, and more importantly 2) it is too volatile to monetize. It's like trying to predict the % change at close of penny stocks.
Google is under no obligation to stabilize this "good", which then helps SearchKing capitalize on it.
It may seem (at first) that one could assign a monetary value to pagerank because (at least for popular sites) pagerank is relatively stable with respect to other sites of similar popularity. But the reason why a site achieves page rank is because of popularity.
By attempting to inflate a site's pagerank through a monetary transaction (thus using artificial methods), you are essentially trying to buy popularity with money. Unfortunately, paying SearchKing won't make other people like your site more, so that transaction won't work (unless SearchKing can make everyone visit the site in question, and then like it).
I think SearchKing and its employees' grasp on reality is a little bit deficient.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I thought this was a really fun lawsuit. Basically Search King is upset that Google found a way to counter Search King's manipulation of the algorithm. This is like a shop lifter suing the kwikimart for putting the cigarettes behind the counter where they are out of reach.
Yes, not being able to manipulate the results hurts Search King. Google's changing the results helped those who weren't in the SEO business. Thank goodness a judge tossed out the case. Let's hope more suits get thrown out in the future.
Oh yeah? Where in the Bill of Rights (thought I'd expand it to the Big Ten instead of just the first) does it say that Google can do anything they damn well please?
Presumably because Google has the right to a free press, and thus retains (a modicum of) control over what it prints. No need to expand your search criteria to the entire bill of rights, though the ninth and tenth amendments could come in handy.
Google is valuable to its customers because it is both capacious (3 billion web pages) and it seems to do a decent job ranking search results. The first advantage stems from the fact that Google relies on automated cataloguing agents (spiders). The second advantage is that certain algorithms try to heureustically gauge relevence (otherwise mirrors of /usr/dict/words would crop up far more often.
It is all but impossible to assemble a 3 billion entry database of webpages without automation, and it is even more difficult to edit it down. If, on a spot check, it is noticed that the actual relevence of results differs greatly from Google's relevence, it is not appropriate to hand edit the scores. Rather, new algorithms must be devised that recalibrate the "relevancy" of thousands or millions of pages, so any miscalibration will be, in the eyes of Google's users, shortlived. Hand editing isn't fast enough.
But you want to add lawyers to the mix. What a nifty idea. I suppose you have a plan involving the use of "selling pagerank" so as to offset the massive increase in legal fees paid by Google...
Meanwhile, the world will move onto another search engine.
Hello? He filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging that it committed improprieties. He called Google a monopoly and said that its actions were intended to squash competition. He's wrongfully accused Google of breaking a variety of laws and then has the audicity to claim that he's the victim?
A wake-up call: SearchKing was never accused of anything. Bob Massa publically stated that SearchKing was selling links in an attempt to boost his customers' PageRanks; a practice explicitly forbidden by Google (as described here):
This is obviously Google's prerogative and, moreover, what's best for Google's users (and the Internet) as a whole. So while SearchKing CEO Bob Massa is whining about Google attempting "to restrict the legal business of another without due process" and the "thousands of innocent people" that have suffered because of this decision, the truth of it is that he's the one trying to restrict the legal business of another and reduce the usability of Google, thereby negatively affecting the vast majority of Internet users.
That cements the asshole part. The cluelessness is even easier to prove. The lawsuit obviously never had a leg to stand on and everyone knew it. And while some might attribute it to a shrewd marketing move by Massa, it's garnered only niche coverage and a lot of negative publicity; the inevitable loss has effectively ended his business of attempting to sell PageRank and cost him legal fees besides. He releases a settlement offer, too, which means he either expects us to believe that this suit was ever about a noble endeavor to better the Internet or he honestly believed that there exists some legal standard by which he might've won the case. Yet more evidence: his settlement offer demands that Google put sites who have broken Google's terms of service on notice -- but Google's policy concerning people trying to artificially inflate PageRank is both obvious and public. His whole settlement offer would be laughable if it weren't so tragically stupid.
My vote, then, is that Bob Massa is both clueless and a complete asshole. This ought to be a poll, really.
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
So, I am pleased by this ruling not only for what it means for google, but for what it may mean for DNSbls.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
It is obvious google justly won the lawsuit, but the question remains whether it is proper that one search engine should accumulate so much power. Suppose one day google is sold to Microsoft. Will you then start using another search engine? I currently don't know of another engine which even gets near google's quality. What should we do then? Wait until the patent on PageRank expires? Or perhaps we should put our faith on the google owners never to do such a thing?
Umm... Altavista did so regularly before Google came along. Google has raised the bar by an order of magnitude - but it's still a matter of subjectivity, as the judge rightly ruled. One man's useless search result is another man's goldmine.
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How to be a good businessman: Shut up.
Or, "What I don't say can't be used against me".
Karma: Food Fight (Mostly affected by Date Plate).
If it's not proper, feel free to start your own search engine, eh?
Google didn't abuse monopoly power to get where they are; they have not in any way coerced or threatened any other search engine, they simply made a search system that was innovative, unique, and desirable to people. They didn't rest their success on marketing, or anything else but pure technological innovation.
Now, I don't think google can do no wrong, they are a company, they have a bottom line... but so far, the reason they are on top is because google provides the results we want. EVery other search engine, if you don't remember, provided CRAP for links, either irrelevant, or paid placements.
Pagerank isnt' patented, is it? Got a patent number? I'd like to read how it works.
I thought the pagerank formula was secret...
This is not even reminiscant of a valid argument.
The CEO of Google could, perfectly within his rights, "hit the switch" right now . That's it; no more Google. Format the drives, massive eBay auction of the servers, and store the software safely in a vault for all eternity. By the logic above, that would "break" all of these businesses who, for whatever inexplicable reason are relying solely on Google's free services for their page hits. (Did I emphasize that enough? Free? Free. FREE !). Nobody has any right to be included in Google's database, likewise nobody has the right to demand that any site be removed from Google's database.
There's a concept in business known as "advertising". It is something that must be accounted for in a business plan, budgetted for annually, forecasted for the future and carefully considered at all times. Simply submitting your URL to an online form and hoping you get a good PageRank is NOT how a business advertises; it's how homepages and Blogs advertise.
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Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
I did carefully point out the difference between TV and Internet. TV is a limited resource. Internet is not. Thus no FCC regulation of content. Nonetheless, there are analogies, such as the advertising supported business model, which I used as an anology, while carefully observing the differences.
Google has absolutely no obligation to provide what you or I think is good content. No responsibility. None.
If people stop visiting their site. Their ad revenue is eventually indirectly affected. They do have a responsibility to their shareholders. But none to their website visitors.
Are you seriously arguing that a website, even one owned by a public corporation, has a responsibility to it's visitors?
Do the following sites have some kind of responsibility in the content they provide...
Slashdot better start providing a fair and accurate view of Microsoft. After all, Slashdot is (1) owned by a public corporation, (2) supported by ads and subscriptions.
(Of course, I would suppose that perhaps Slashdot does provide an fair and accurate view of Microsoft
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
(not lawyer)
Actually, the opposing verdicts in the criminal and civil OJ trials are a good thing.
In criminal cases, one must be proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. This reduces the number of wrongfully convicted.
In civil cases, where penalties can typically only come in the form of fines and injunctions, the burden of proof is reduced, and the side with the most convincing case wins.
So, from these, rather than drawing the conclusion that there's some kind of conflict of logic, one can simply see that, in the eyes of the judicial apparatus, OJ was more than 50%, but less than 100%, likely to be guilty.
While it sounds, at first glance, illogical, it's no different from an auto accident in which one's cleared of any charge of reckless driving but still is considered responsible for repairs - the differing burdens of proof in civil and criminal trials allow minor issues and financial damages to be worked out on a fair basis, while still maintaining the philosophy that it's better to let a guilty man free than jail an innocent.
So you design your web page and design to maximise page rank rather than quality. See, that pretty clearly states that you're the bottom feeding sort of Internet abuser that we really don't need. Make a good page. Provide a useful service, and/or have interesting information on it. Even just stupid cartoons. If people like it, they'll link to it. You don't have to do anything to manipulate your page rank. Stop thinking about page rank. Just make a good site. If you want to show up on google, buy some ad words.
What do you mean, you think google should be REGULATED?
ANYONE is free to purchase technology from them, start their own search engine to compete with it, or WHATEVER. "Control of such a vital tool?"
They control THEIR tool, and absolutely NOTHING they do prevents anyone from doing anything else. They are not an illegal monopoly and don't do anything that would seem to violate antitrust issues, legally or morally.
Remember, a monopoly is not a bad thing or an illegal thing, it's when a monopoly abuses it's position that it's bad.
Google can lose it's popularity just as fast as it gained it if they screw up and change things.