March 23, 2007 | In Law, Technology | No Comments
A California judge dismissed an infamous lawsuit against Google last week, ruling that a parenting website called Kinderstart could not seek damages after the search giant downgraded its rankings for certain keywords.
Kinderstart filed the case back in March 2006, claiming that Google had punished its website without reason, adversely affecting its revenues and violating “libel” and “defamation” laws.
Judge, Jeremy Fogel, however, ruled that KinderStart had failed to explain how Google caused injury to it by a provably false statement, as opposed to an unfavourable opinion about KinderStart.com’s importance.
“PageRank is a creature of Google’s invention and does not constitute an independently-discoverable value,” Fogel explained. “In fact, Google might choose to assign PageRanks randomly, whether as whole numbers or with many decimal places, but this would not create ‘incorrect’ PageRanks.”
Although this is an important victory for free enterprise on the internet, the outcome was never really in doubt. No webmaster likes to see his site drop in the search engine rankings, but it’s important to remember that without the ability to maintain a fluid, ever-changing ranking system, search engines simply wouldn’t work.
As I stated last year on SitePoint Forums, dismissing this case was the only decision that would have made sense to maintain the integrity internet search technology. With this verdict on the books, and Google expected to go after Kinderstart for legal fees, I don’t imagine that any more internet companies will try pulling this stunt anytime soon.
