Suit Over Poor Google Ranking May Go Forward

SAN JOSE, Calif.--A federal judge in California hinted that a parenting Web site that's suing Google over a poor ranking in the search giant's massive index would be able to proceed with its lawsuit. During a hearing here Friday, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel said he's considering issuing an order that would allow KinderStart.com to amend its lawsuit against Google to add more specifics. The parent-focused directory and search engine site claims Google violated antitrust and other laws by handing KinderStart low rankings. Read the entire article here.

 

Kinderstart has no case. I'm amazed the litigation is going ahead, but I guess they're allowed to have their day in court :/

 

Oh Christ not this again. I'm getting pretty fed up with people suing Google for not having theim on their website. I'm sure they don't have a link to Google on theirs, perhaps Google could counter sue?

It's Google's website, it's up to them who they put on it.

 

Time for jumping on the bandwagon! How about suing Google for not enough fibre in one's diet?

 

more and more are turning anti Google these days. This would open the door to so many webmasters to seek compensation for not being ranked and would force Google to reveal more and more of their algorithm to the public.

 

You can't rank everybody at the top.

 

No more milk ? Sue google. Giish now everyone sues google for anything. It's getting annoying, i wounder how many summons is google receiving every day. kinderstart.com with this thing just made a huge advertising campaing for free.

 

First of all, kinderstart's home page has a page rank of 7 which I can only dream of (we have 2 after 3 months) - maybe I should take some pointers from them!

Secondly, it's just a flipping link farm with no content to speak of! I think they have a lot of nerve suing Google.

 

page rank of 7 ... ok ... but how about ranking for valuable keywords?

 

It's all part of the price of being a multi-billion dollar corporation. Wal-Mart (for example) fights hundreds of new lawsuits every month. I'm sure google, by now anyway, has a building full of nothing but lawyers and legal teams. That's just how it is.

 

Thats the best point. Somebody must have told them that a PR7 would get good rankings. Once they didn't get the rankings they thought they deserved the obvious thing was to sue google.

 

It seems to me that the judge is pretty ignorant when it comes to internet stuff ... or maybe he just hates Google

 

This is stupid (lawsuit). If they win, we can sday goodbye to searchengines

 

I agree with the consensus here, but (just to play devil's advocate) there is yet a case to be made for local bricks-and-mortar businesses.

Kinderstart.com is a directory, a totally web-based business. What makes it worse is, they seem to be a beneficiary of "owning the dot-com" of a popular .co.uk which happens to be a real bricks-and-mortar business. Perhaps the greatest offense against judicial intelligence is that kinderstart.com uses AdSense to monetize the site!

Conversely, if it were kinderstart.co.uk that were getting buried in the SERPs, with no AdSense and a real service to offer parents (not just a virtual service or a directory), there might be a case here, considering Google's marketshare when it comes to search.

Just my humble opinion.

 

I think there is validity to this statement. Rather: search engines as we know it. If you can get sued over the free listings, chances are, less and less opportunity for free traffic will exist in the future. (feel free to prove me wrong )

 

This made me laugh - so basically they are suing Google I guess if they lose, Adsense income will be paying for there legal fees

 

Google should just ban them from Adsense, that would shut them up.

 

No doubt KinderStart will lose and owe all the fees associated with the court case and possibly even be fined for bringing a frivilous lawsuit.

In which case it's worth Google's time to do this. It'll set precedent. If this case doesn't go foward, other cases like it will resulting in a lot more wasted time and money.

 

That how it works when you dominate a market.

If you dont like it - dont dominate the market.

 

Isn't the very nature of a ranking algo to sort sites from the best to lowest?

With every winner, there's a loser, how can Google keep everyone happy in relation to this? They have no case.

I wonder if the owners of KinderStart eventually get that ubiquitous "banned due to invalid clicks" email as well...