Suing Google Over Pagerank

Yardboy wrote in to tell us about a story from Reuters describing a lawsuit by parental advice company Kinderstart.com against Google for 'charging it unfairly deprived the company of customers by downgrading its search-result ranking without reason or warning.' Kinderssart claims Google is responsible for 'a "cataclysmic" 70 percent fall in its audience -- and a resulting 80 percent decline in revenue.' I guess the courts will now decide: Can google taketh what they giveth?

sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

Can google taketh what they giveth?

Sorry, but that's just wrong. I know you're trying to sound cute and all, but even Shakespeare would say "Can google take what they give?"

They are just a search engine?

[LiquidCoooled]

They have been astroturfing all over the place and I don't see any actual content pages.

They advertise themselves as a search engine.
Google still indexes over 25000 pages by them, and from my initial examination, theres no content.
They appear to be just a linkfarm

Google aren't wrong, this kind of thing is what we have been asking them to do for ages (clear out the crap)

You reap what you sow

[pariahdecss]

They have since cleaned up their site . . . but they were using every type of outmoded, pseudo seo hacks - alt tag spamming, invisible #FFFFFF links at the bottom of their pages pointing to keyword spam duplicate pages ad nauseum

So don't whine if you get back slapped

Re:Well, they are spammed with traffic now...

[Uber Banker]

For the lazy, the link to the website whose design truely sucks. [kinderstart.com]

If I wanted to find some information on what they do it would be tough navigating through that. Good website design skills: provide information as quickly as possible, seem to have been misplaced.

But they don't really do anything, other than linking other sites. They're a link site, plain and simple. Probably harvesting click through revenue and add little value to the internet. And on a wild guess here, since a year ago, using the same search parameters, I have had many less 'link sites' coming up in Google searches which I see as only a good thing. Ironically they may well find the sites they link to through Google.

traffic

[mrowton]

you can see how their traffic started falling here [alexa.com]

Re:fp

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm always disappointed when somebody refers to the right to free speech without knowing what it really means...

Congress shall make no law ... restricting free speech ... (from memory, may be inaccurate).

The Bill of Rights only restricts the government. It has no influence on any other entity.

Re:fp

[AKAImBatman]

They are suing because Google wont say why it ranks some sites hight and bans other sites.

SearchKing sued Google over the same thing a couple of years ago [slashdot.org], and lost the suit. [slashdot.org] The judge's comment was:

The court simply finds there is no conceivable way to prove that the relative significance assigned to a given Web site is false.

KinderStart will lose. Case closed.

I don't think they have a leg to stand on

[Mister Transistor]

IIRC It was already upheld in a court that search results and rankings were officially considered "opinion", and as such was constitutionally-protected free speech.

If my opinion is that your site sucks, you can't sue me for that.

Re:So which is it...

[sydneyfong]

It's likely that the patent covers the general pagerank algorithm (or even just the idea of ranking sites based on how many other sites link to them, and their respective ranks, etc), without the actual parameters or tweaks (eg. if you have been linked from warez sites you take a penalty). It's very likely that Google tweaks the ranking system from time to time, or even rewrites the code for it (who knows? ;-) and those tweaks won't show up in the (original) pagerank patent.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

A little of both

[jfengel]

The PageRank algorithm is patented (patent 6,285,999 [uspto.gov]) and public.

But Google's results are much more than page rank. It also involves other algorithms relating to the search keys for a particular search. And there are tuning factors to the particular PageRank implementation. Google's proprietary tweaks keep ahead of the people who try to artificially inflate their page rank (like, apparently, these guys). Those are secret, and search engine optimizers would dearly love to know them so that they could fake out Google.

They seem to have articles too

[markov_chain]

http://www.kinderstart.com:8080/kindertoday/114264 8153 [kinderstart.com]

The funny thing is, it looks like they are using slash!

PageRank

[deblau]

Read U.S. Pat. No. 6,526,440 [uspto.gov]. Seriously, it's quite informative.

Re:This site deserves it

[YoYoY]

Funnily enough http://www.kinderstart.co.uk/ [kinderstart.co.uk]seems to be a valid site promoting a chain of nursery schools in the UK. It comes at the very top of google.co.uk's list when you search for "kinderstart". Google just seem to have downranked the US site because it's a junk link, providing no-one with any useful information, which is exactly what they should have done! Hope the suit gets thrown out and the judge orders them to pay Google's costs.

Re:fp

[tinkertim]

Looks like a human being (at google) checked the site. I just did too, and found absolutely no meaningful content on it whatsoever. In fact, every link I clicked took me to some place where I could spend money, thus compensating kinderstart for the referral.

This is known as a "clicktrap" and (imho) is the most annoying thing in the world to happen upon.

People use Google because your chances of finding what you want, quickly are good. I.e. being taken directly to the "end of the line" , either right to a store itself, or to an article, or something else related to your search. Not to one of the stupid internet polluting man in the middle wastes of disk space.

You can go to a site like shitlance [scriptlance.com] and pay someone from India a few hundred bucks to arrange hundreds of lasting (and good) backlinks. Search that site for "SEO" and you'll see what I mean.

Off my soapbox :)

Even traded companies are still private

[rkcallaghan]

Mod Parent (-1, Wrong)

No, Google is a public company. You see there's this obscure institution called the "stock market"...

No, Google offered some shares to be exchanged on a particular market, making them a publically traded company, but they are in fact, a private entity all the same. In this short review of high school level Social Studies, the public sector is the Government, and the private sector is everything else. The unrelated term "publically traded" simply means that there are no buyer restrictions on who may own or trade their stocks. There is such a thing as stocks that are not publically traded as well.

Regardless of the trading of their stock certificates in the marketplace, Google does not gain some new requirement to rank companies/sites according to anyone elses wishes on how they should be ranked.

~Rebecca

Re:Try the 'in-your-shoes' test

[Mistlefoot]

Google is a competitor is it not? If you visit http://www.kinderstart.com you will see that it offers itself as a search engine.

I think Google should sue them though. If I type "google" into their search engine all I get is:

Home : Search Results
__________________________________________________ __________
Results for 'google' (0 matches found).

Page 1 of 1

Re:They seem to have articles too

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, THAT article (and, presumably, most others on their site) was stolen. Try googling for "Bottled Vs Tap Water: Uncovering the Myth to Protect Your Kids' Drinking Water".

Re:They seem to have articles too

[Bogtha]

No, they aren't running Slash, they are running Squishdot [squishdot.org], which is a Slash clone built on top of Zope [zope.org].

private as in private sector

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_sector [wikipedia.org]

use some common sense when interpreting people comments before launching into a canned lecture.

Re:fp

[Glonoinha]

After that comment I had to go look.
Here it was I thought they were producing something, or selling something (hence the terms 'customers' and 'revenue').
Nope. Just a big-ass referral site, sucking down affiliate fees for driving real customers to real sites that sell real stuff.

Now I understand why Google k-lined them.

They're using SlashCode!

[Chris Snook]

http://www.kinderstart.com:8080/kindertoday/addPos tingForm [kinderstart.com]

I'm submitting this story:

http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-1011740.html [com.com]

Thanks AKAImBatman!

Page rank is opinion. Freedom of speech

[tod_miller]

Page rank is a distillation through technology of how the designers believe attributes are important.

It is their opinion, expressed in code.

If I do not like the food at a restaurant, can they sue me?

If I do not like Nike trainers (sneakers) can they sue me?

If I am allergic to nuts, can some nut sue me?

Failing that, google can google the judge and jury, find all their dirt, and black-mail them

mauhahahahahahahahahah on an evil scale that rates less than loosing the case, so it is ok.