|
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
|
|
Google Sued Over Search Rankings. Posted January 14, 2003 EST 11:43PM by Occupant
The order in which web pages are sorted is very important to a companies traffic, and sales.
According to documents filed Dec. 30 with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, Google is asking the court to deny a request for a preliminary injunction from Oklahoma-based Search King, which sued the search giant last October claiming that it unfairly bumped the rankings of its Web sites, leading to financial losses.
In its response, Google says that Search King's motion "contains only bare and conclusory allegations." Furthermore, Google contended that its rankings are simply the company's "view or opinion of the importance of a Web page" and are therefore protected as free speech under the First Amendment.
In its suit, Search King alleged that Google "arbitrarily and purposefully" devalued its rankings when it discovered that the company's advertising sales branch PR Ad Network was placing text ads on Web sites with a high "PageRank" from Google, therefore making it one of the few competitors to Google's advertising service.
I hope the lawsuit does get thrown out, it would make google useless, if interest groups can demand placements in a search.
Source: Info World
| Name: Agi |
| E-mail: agi@d-silence.com |
| Date: January 15, 2003 EST 12:25PM |
|
|
| Comment: We've done better with Google than Mister-X. So far this month, we've managed 219 hits from Google. It's probably because we use them as our site search engine. |
| Name: Occupant |
| E-mail: N/A |
| Date: January 15, 2003 EST 11:40AM |
|
|
| Comment: A friend of mine does a 'google bomb', he designed his web page to show up first on his search topic (very narrowly defined) without paying a fee to google. |
| Name: Mister-X |
| E-mail: N/A |
| Date: January 15, 2003 EST 8:07AM |
|
|
Comment: Actually, I must admit to get my website higher up the rankings on google, I wasn't prepared to shell out £150. So whilst my website "ebuyerdotcon" has been live since the end of october and google have known about it that long, the lack of a £150 payment has meant my site is so far down their list under certain queries that I`ve only managed to attract 44 hits from them.
Fortunately I've managed to gain over 10,000 hits from a mixture of "word of mouth" and emailing people directly without googles help.
So if big companies are willing to throw money at google, you can be assured they will get a higher ranking. |
| Name: |
| E-mail: N/A |
| Date: January 15, 2003 EST 5:09AM |
|
|
| Comment: I remember a similar case last year where couple of other big search engines got sued for the same reason. At the time, Google commented they weren't doing that. :) |
|
|
