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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.'"
Can it be added back in later if we find out that they really are crooks?
...many other here will say it, but what would the French Court say if Google simply removed Lyonnaise de Garantie's website from *all* their results....
Whenever French users search for "Lyonnaise de Garantie," Google should just return "Your search - Lyonnaise de Garantie - did not match any documents." And then a list of competing insurance companies.
There! Problem solved!
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I don't know whether Lyonnaise de Garantie are crooks, but this is the mother of Streisand effects.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Didn't they do that a few years ago with some papers and such from Belgium, and then they came screaming back about it when their sites dropped around 80% of their traffic? I'm sure I read that here on /. a few days ago, well considering my memory it could have been a few years ago too.
Om, nomnomnom...
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!
Are Lyonnaise de Garantie escroc?
I don't know whether Lyonnaise de Garantie are crooks, but I do know that they tried to censor the web to remove any association between Lyonnaise de Garantie and crooks, or as the French say, Lyonnaise de Garantie and escroc. Which is interesting. I wonder what Ms Streisand in her lovely beach house has to say about it all.
Monopolies are held to different standards of the law by governments, in order to ensure fair competition. If the monopoly search engine is calling a business bad names, algorithmically or not, well, apparently France believes that's not fair competition.
Search engines do not call business bad names.
They don't call anything.
Search engines simply index the content of pages, and words that appear together on said pages. If thousands of sites routinely place one word next to another how is that Google's problem? Why not go after the web pages that were used to build the search database?
When I googled the quoted phrase "overly critical guy" and appended the word idiot, I came up with a page someone posted about you. Is this something google did? Is a court order in the offing?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I'm not advocating the decision of the court (and so the downloads of my post are just weird), I'm simply explaining why they made the decision. The search engine did call a business a bad name--it associated a negative term with the name of the business. If Google was just another search engine, nobody would care, but they're practically the gateway to the web and the #1 way that people find information about things.
Remember when Microsoft instituted a browser ballot? But they listed them in alphabetical order, and so Opera complained about their placement on the list, forcing Microsoft to randomize the order? Microsoft could have argued that they weren't placing the browsers in any sort of priority list, and that it was the order of the alphabet that placed them that way, but that wasn't the point--the courts decided that Microsoft's influence was so huge that, regardless of the reason, the list was biased against browsers that placed lower than others alphabetically.
The same is true here. Google didn't intervene and call anybody names, but their influence is so huge and dominant that the court has decided it is a violation of free market competition for it to libel (as they perceive it) a business. I'm not advocating any position; I'm just explaining why Google is being held to such a unique standard, just as Microsoft was.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Then the solution is to remove "Lyonnaise de Garantie" from the search engine all together. Wipe them off any search result what-so-ever. Nothing in French law requires Google to index any site...
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Google most definitely has a monopoly in web advertising...it's why they're being investigated in Europe for antitrust. The DOJ lead who went after Microsoft ten years ago considers Google a monopoly, and Eric Schmidt told the U.S. Senate that Google was "in the area" of being a monopoly. I think there's so much resistance to admitting it on Slashdot because "monopoly!" was an anti-Microsoft rallying cry for so many years, and to put Google in the same boat kind of stings a little.
I have to say, though, that watching the moderators attack anyone who even dares utter the words "monopoly" and "Google" in the same sentence is both amusing and sad. How many ongoing investigations are there of Google right now, particularly in Europe? I mean, come on. It's not trolling to point out that Google is friggin' huge.
No Google is pretty clearing suggesting these are the search terms you might want based on the fact others used these search terms. You'd have to be pretty F'ing brain dead not understand that. Its a factual statement, Google isn't saying the company has committed fraud or anything of the sort, just that you might be looking for these search terms.
I actually do exactly that often. I Google companies (especially local service providers) and combine their names with words like: fraud, theft, poor, dirty, etc/. Most of the time nothing comes up and that's good.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
It was called communism, and it failed miserably. That expectation of receiving money for your work was changed for, go work or else.
"There is talk about the failure of socialism, yet where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America? Where is the success of capitalism in places where thousands of millions of people live? I believe that the failure of capitalism should be discussed as much as the failure of socialism in a small number of countries. Capitalism failed in more than 100 countries, which now face a truly desperate situation." - Fidel Castro, 1991.
And communism was never tried, not in a large scale. Try to read about its ideas before you make a fool of yourself again, or at least refrain from talking about what you don't understand. And that goes for other topics too, if you have no idea what it is about your uneducated opinion is irrelevant.