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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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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
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If that doesn't say unbiased, I don't know what does. :)
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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.
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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.
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.
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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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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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