I’ve personally bitched complained about pagerank myself, and my rationale was always “no sense in fighting it, Google’s too large, just play by their rules, suck it up and ask for more”. Well, it turns out I may have had the wrong idea after all.
Kinderstart, a site about parenting and childrearing is cracking the legal whip at Google for demoting it to a pagerank of zero, severely hampering its ability to garner search traffic (and one would presume, earning money). In fact, its launching a class action lawsuit on behalf of all pagerank zero heroes.
KinderStart argues the site’s sudden demotion in March 2005 to a “zero” ranking in Google’s search system has severely harmed its business. It seeks class action status on behalf of what is says are many other sites that have suffered the same fate as Google regularly fine-tunes its rankings.
“The fact that they (Google) have used a computer shouldn’t affect whether it is defamatory,” KinderStart counsel Gregory Yu said after the hearing … “Using a computer to do that is a smoke screen,” he said.
Now, of course I am not a lawyer, but i’m not sure how this suit has any merit. Google is still a private company not beholden to the whims of its search engine results (but probably, its shareholders). Is this another example of frivolity making a mockery of the American legal system — or setting a precedent for more Internet legal work in the future?
Man, maybe I should ask Rob Hyndman what he thinks;)
Dr. Tony Hung also blogs at DeepJiveInterests
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