War On Google

Google is currently being sued for approximately $75,000 American in damages for lowering the ranking of one of it's indexed sites. 'Search King' found that it had been lowered and decided to file a suit against Google, on the grounds that it was an unfair degradation based on false suspicions. Google has long been the target of attempted lawsuits from jealous competitors so none of this is new territory.

The facts:

- Google's page rank algorithm dictates the relative position of a web site among others in search results.

- This page rank is based on the 'popularity' of the website in question by assessing the number of links directed towards the site.

- Spammers have created a process known as 'link farming' where they built elaborate infrastructures of links to boost rankings.

- This violates Google's terms of use and warrants a page being removed from the database.

- Suspected spammers may have their page rank lowered.

The Questions:

- Does Google have the right to dictate a web page's rankings?

- Google allow paid advertising, so wouldn't it make more sense to pay to get a higher ranking, rather than risk major legal fees on suing them?

Search King have their own breaking news section at the top of their page with the current headline of Google Confesses! Clicking on that link takes one to a brief summary of the case, how Google is an evil corporate entity spoiled by greed for money, and how it is exercising its apparent monopoly on the search engine market by unmercifully hacking away at the small guys. Search King then claims that they are happy to provide you with all their carefully documented evidence surrounding the case. Unfortunately, you have to pay $20 to access this material, to help with their "legal fees".

Google is primarily a free listed site aimed at small to moderate sized businesses and personal websites. It is designed to be user friendly, and to do so they have carefully designed algorithms to weed out unwanted garbage, such as link farms. Inevitably, legitimate sites will every once in a while be mistaken for a spammer and be devalued. Search king claims this is what happened to them, resulting in a loss of website traffic, resulting in a loss of revenue for them. So it all comes down to money. Presumably, Search King have somebody sitting their hacking away at all the search engine rankings, waiting for one to slip that coincides with a loss of revenue. This time it happened to be Google. In this authors opinion, Google are the victims here. In an age where it is normal to sue and get sued, the lawsuits are getting more and more trivial.

"This suit has never been about the priority we were given in a search or even our PageRank," said Bob Massa, president of SearchKing., Inc. and PR Ad Network. "The case is about Google's attempt to squelch competition by targeting businesses and arbitrarily reducing their PageRank or search status. So they've restored it for now. Next month, what's to stop them from reducing my ranking again?"

(To make an attempt at paraphrasing the above passage: "This has never been about OUR page ranking. This is about EVERYONE'S page ranking. So really we are fighting in the guise of a champion of the people, but all the rewards go to us" Careful with your use of semantics there, Bob.)

In other words, you want your site to remain at the top forever, regardless of how amazingly good, or how utterly pathetic, your site may be. Hmmm. If they do this for you won't they then have to do it for everyone? And won't that make everyone's page ranking 10? And won't that then make page rank totally invalid? So, please explain what Google is to do then- go and purchase Search King's search engine technology? Methinks I smells a rat