Slashdot Mirror
French Court Frowns On Autocomplete, Tells Google To Remove Searches
New submitter Lexx Greatrex writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "Google had been sued by insurance company Lyonnaise de Garantie, which was offended by search results including the word 'escroc,' meaning crook, according to a story posted Tuesday by the Courthouse News Service. 'Google had argued that it was not liable since the word, added under Google Suggest, was the result of an automatic algorithm and did not come from human thought,' the article states. 'A Paris court ruled against Google, however, pointing out that the search engine ignored requests to remove the offending word... In addition to the fine, Google must also remove the term from searches associated with Lyonnaise de Garantie.'"
Crooks, that is? One really has to wonder how many people they had to screw over for this auto-complete suggestion to be show up. That sort of autocomplete result is usually an indication of a fairly large number of people using those words in the same general context. Even now, the sixth suggestion for them ends with problème....
Maybe Google's argument should not have been that Google wasn't responsible, but rather that it's not libel if it is true (I'm assuming that this is the case under French law) or that it is not possible to defame something that is already a disgrace....
More to the point, maybe the company in question should focus more on improving their image by actually improving their customer service instead of just metaphorically wallpapering over the rotting walls. If enough people think they are crooks to cause the Google search results to suggest this for several years in a row, that strongly suggests a very serious problem with the way they do business. I'm not saying that Lyonnaise de Garantie is a bunch of crooks, but they clearly have a serious image problem, and you can't cure that kind of problem by trying to sue people into silence. Doing so can only result in the Streisand Effect.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Frankly, I like having the suggestions pop up (and not just for the fun factor). There have been times that a suggested result reveals the truth of something when the marketing and SEO have worked to whitewash the search results themselves. When people run into problems with a product, they will search for their problem rather than the marketing speak. I wish I could give my real examples, but I'm contractually/legally obligated not to. I'll contrive a working one instead (though the contrived one is not as solid as my real examples...).
Contrived example: Pop the words "MS Antivirus" into google search. "MS Antivirus" is a name of a piece of malware posing as security software. For me, the third suggested search is "MS Antivirus malware". Without having that there, the search results for "MS Antivirus" that declare it as malware are all below the fold. The results for "MS Antivirus malware" have the wikipedia entry for the malware itself as the first result.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
1. Do enough bad things that people in your country start adding their word for "crook" to searches with your trademark
2. Sue Google instead of fixing your reputation problem
3. ?????
4. Profit!
FOR FUCK'S SAKE STOP POSTING THIS MONOPOLY CRAP. You're the only one pushing it, and it certainly hasn't been established as a fact in any court I've heard of. If it *had*, Microsoft would be all over it...
A monopoly means more than just "has a lot of market share". Try reading up on it before you start throwing it around.
It's worse. Google was merely complying with a court order--sought by these newspapers themselves--to either pay the newspapers, or stop indexing them. Then, these newspapers lost 80% of their traffic, and decided to grant Google "permission" to disobey the court order they had just won at great expense.
This has happened before. Google were sued over much the same thing, removed *ALL* references to the company in question and were then sued again for not including them.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Are you thinking of the case where a newspaper sued Google and demanded they remove links to them from all their pages? http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110508/16543114199/belgian-appeals-court-says-google-must-pay-up-linking-to-newspaper-websites.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110718/16394915157/belgian-newspapers-give-permission-to-google-to-return-them-to-search-results.shtml
Unless you are a French citizen or live in France you have no right to complain.
Oddly enough, you have made the single most insightful comment in this entire discussion - Albeit unintentionally.
Many people (mostly Americans, I expect) in this conversation have the mistaken impression that France has a legal system more-or-less the same as most of the rest of the civilized world.
That does not describe the reality of the situation.
France has a "legal system" in the same sense that ancient Rome did - Between two citizens of roughly equal stature, it does/did a pretty good job of doling out justice. Throw a foreigner into the mix, though, and he might as well just jump into the lion's mouth and save everyone the trouble.
I honestly don't understand why any modern (non-French) company bothers setting up shop there. In Google's shoes, I'd pull out of the whole damned country and change www.google.fr to one of their cute logo variants consisting entirely of obscene hand gestures.
As far as I can make out, this case is making at least some headlines in France too, and the general sentiment is outrage at the company and at the court system, very similar to here. See these:
link 1
link 2
link3
However, more interestingly, the last link points to some other case where the judgment went the other way, i.e. Google suggesting a derogatory term in their search suggestions, and the French court finding them innocent. The text in French is here (use google translate !) and shows much more common sense.
Interestingly, I do not recall seeing this well-reasoned judgment on the front page of Slashdot, much in the way of traditional news outlets not reporting good news as often as bad ones.