Suing Google Over Pagerank 427
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?
fp (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:fp (Score:5, Interesting)
If Google opened its pagerank, then the order of search results would be the cleverness of the webmasters to craft their webpage to exploit Google's methods, instead of actual relevence to the search involved. You'd prefer that situation? Google would effectively denigrate into a giant billboard, and you'd then have to search through dozens of useless 'advertising' false links to get to the information you really want.
Re:Whats next? (Score:2, Interesting)
So, you see, all dot coms are not dot bombs!
Well, I think their time has come.
Tick, Tock. Tick, Tock.
Incidentally, even archive.org has stopped wasting space on them (last index march 2005)
Re:fp (Score:5, Interesting)
Google chooses not to reveal its pagerank algorithms precisely to prevent the kind of link-bombing in which Kinderstart was almost certainly engaged. And why should they? This is one of the few cases where "security through obscurity" kinda works -- unlike with, say, encryption algorithms, which depend for security on a secret number, and which generally get stronger when they're open for public scrutiny, the security of Google's page rankings depends on the secrecy of the algorithm itself. They have no obligation to reveal their algorithm to Kinderstart or anyone else.
Now, as a generally pro-F/OSS guy, I personally think it would be great if Google came up with "public key pagerank" -- i.e., a pagerank algorithm that could be released as open source without compromising its effectiveness for a specific application -- but apparently that hasn't happened yet.
If anyone has a case here, it's Google; they could sue Kinderstart and everyone else who tries to manipulate the rankings, and probably under the DMCA they could press criminal charges as well. They don't, for two reasons: it would interfere with the warm'n'fuzzy "don't be evil" vibe they're still trying to project, and it would be a waste of time and money, in that they'd probably spend a lot more trying to track down the thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? millions?) of sites that try to do this crap than they would collect in damages. But personally I hope they turn around and grind Kinderstart.com into the dust.
BTW, the first search result that comes up on Google when you search for "Kinderstart" now is this [kinderstart.co.uk], which seems like a legitimate business rather than a badly designed wannabe portal. How is this a bad thing?
Re:fp (Score:3, Interesting)
"Google does not generally inform Web sites that they have been penalized nor does it explain in detail why the Web site was penalized,"
Sometimes they do [slashdot.org] and sometimes then dont [slashdot.org]
whinny babies (Score:3, Interesting)
Isnt it their page? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why are they going after google? This seems more like the web designers fault, and not google's problem.
Being as vague as possible, I once did some work for a company who loved the results I was getting them in their page ranking. Then, one of the 'managers' came up and said that one person was complaining about the design of the site. I tried for a week to explain that any changes would result in a drastic drop in our page rank. I've actually studied the google patent filing, and was able to learn some important details that were used in the site constructively to help the ranking.
Since it wasnt my company, all I could do was explain what I thought the results of this decision would be. I ended up 'changing' the page layout to satisfy the clueless management, onlt to see a 15% drop in traffic and a fall from 6/10 to 4/10 in page ranking on google. Did I try to say it was google's fault? Hell no! I knew exactly where the blame was to be placed, and I vocally explained what was going on, why it was going on, and whos decision it was to make this change.
Suprisingly, they no longer question my ability to do my job. And that was shortly followed by a raise after I pointed out that I was very disapointed that I had to associate my name with such crappy performance, that was a result of poor decisions I warned against. And yes, it is VERY difficult to regain page ranking. But not impossible, unless of course your page uses every nasty trick in the book for optimization.
But the part about this company filing a lawsuit against google based on free speech? Is that a joke? It sounds like the lawyers this company hired are about as incompetent as their web designers.
This site deserves it (Score:3, Interesting)
The site looks like the last time it was updated was 2000, the year on their site copyright. Most of the links don't even work.
I've built sites for these types of companies (back when I was starting out). Its probably just one or two people working out of their garage, fully expecting that the 10,000 domain names they purchased entitle them to millions of dollars. Quite sad, really.
Google has no obligation to pay their rent, and the Internet has no use for this trash. Get a real fucking job.
Re:Give me a break (Score:2, Interesting)
However, I find it ironic that when Google is involved, Slashdotters seem to subscribe to the "private companies should be allowed to do as they please" ideology, but when say Microsoft is involved, Slashdotters everywhere scream "MONOPOLY! DOWN WITH CORPORATE AMERICA!" and the like. Microsoft CANNOT legally break compatibility with competing software vendors' products, for example making Firefox not work on Windows because it competes with Internet Explorer, or making OpenOffice not work because it competes with MS Office. This is ILLEGAL and the fact that it is illegal is a good thing, I think we all agree.
Likewise, IF Google is determined to have a monopoly on the search engine market, some restrictions should be placed on how they index pages on their site. Now some will say that "no one is forcing you to use Google" but likewise no one is forcing you to use MS products. However, 95% of people do whether or not they are forced and Google can have a monopoly even though other search engines exist. For example, if Google suddenly decided to require companies pay for their page ranking, many lawsuits would follow, justifiable lawsuits, in my opinion.
All I'm saying is that private companies CANNOT do whatever they want just because they are private. There are some restrictions. I will admit that this is a losing if not a frivolous lawsuit, but simply because it is Google instead of MS does not make the suit evil.
Publicity stunt (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You reap what you sow (Score:2, Interesting)
I was curious to see, so I went to archive.org and looked for stuff like that. I couldn't find any. Would you mind digging up a link or two?
Boo Hoo! (Score:3, Interesting)
Do they have any actual evidence Google maliciously lowered the site's listing in search results?
Google is not necessarily directly responsible for every downgrade of a Pagerank. The system is supposed to work based on how many people choose to link to a site. Therefore, falling Pagerank is simply a symptom of falling site popularity, although this would be a circular effect (the lower you are in the results display the fewer people will click you anyway). But that's not Google's fault. It's simply that most consumers are too lazy to read all results throughly before clicking one.
Given that it's just an advertising trap, the problem could be that (gasp!) consumers have figured out this site simply has no real information, and it's falling in popularity becuase there aren't as many suckers to reel in at this point. In other words, the whole site's business model has gone through it's half-life, they're on the downward slope of their cash-cow.
"Google does not generally inform Web sites that they have been penalized nor does it explain in detail why the Web site was penalized," the lawsuit said.
So?
Who said they have to?
Google's not a public utility or branch of the government last time I checked. If you don't like where you fall in search results, market yourself, improve your site, or go home crying to mommy.
The suit was filed the same day a federal judge denied a U.S. government request that Google be ordered to hand over a sample of keywords customers use to search the Internet while requiring the company to produce some Web addresses indexed in its system.
I don't see any relation between these two events. But if the editor wanted a couple more inches of article...
Interesting side note: When I worked in dial-up tech support I got a call from a customer who had a page up in their personal webspace. The page was about childhood abuse (or maybe eduaction, I can't remember) anyway. This person was an author of a couple books and her site was in the top ten results for this topic on Google for awhile. It had recently fallen to the second page I believe. They were calling us because they somehow thought we were responsible and wanted us to put the customers page back up to the third result when searching Google for the topic of the customer's expertise. Also, the site was not coming up when clicking the page link in Google.
The reason the site didn't come up anymore was the customer had their page up on a personal webspace (so the URL was htt p://home.isp.com/~username) but the customer had set up the page before her ISP had been bought out by us. So the google search result had the old ISP's domain (and we'd stopped forwarding from that domain to ours after a few years). I had to talk with them for a very long time about how the order of results are decided on Google (even showing them the "miserable failure" googlebomb to illustrate how results can be tampered with). My recommndations in the end were to get a proper domain name for their site and try to contact google to get the exiting result's URL corrected.
If Google made it a little more clear about how Pagerank works (without disclosing all their proprietary info, just a survey of information) to the public lawsuits like this wouldn't be possible, and they would get less hatemail from political parties/celebrities taking things personally.
Re:Worst thing? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's bad for your blood pressure.
>> Does the war in Iraq not annoy you?
Referring to war as 'annoying' is glib and tasteless.
>> Does "third-world" poverty not annoy you?
I live in the third world (I'm an American living in the Philippines). Yes, actually it does. However the topic was not about third world poverty.
>> Is this really the most annoying thing in the world?
No, its not. You have a point and I'll happily rephrase my post.
"Click traps are one of the most annoying things one can find while using a search engine, in my opinion."
I'm very sorry that my rather quick (and late night reply) bothered you so. So I will set an ego-less example (In accordance with my simple life) and hope that you see the value of it
>> What a simple life. I envy your clarity of thought.
Envy only leads to emotional distress (that blood pressure thing
But I also don't recommend dwelling on war and poverty either. Perhaps you could Google Buddhism , but beware the clicktraps
Hope you have a better day