Altair - 10:19 pm on Apr 3, 2007 (gmt 0)

As I understand it (I am not a lawyer) newspapers and other publishers were getting constantly sued by people who didn't like what was published about them. Publishers successfully claimed that this legal harassment was interfering with their right to free speech. Courts then allowed publishers attacked by suits subsequently found to be frivolous to recover for their legal costs.

Google and other search engines have been legally determined to be "publishers" and therefore have complete editorial rights to manipulate search results in any manner including banning of sites they don't like or find competitive, or use of site-unique bias to suppress ranking of any individual site for any reason. The court reaffirms their right to do that and punishes Kinderstart for suggesting otherwise.

The Court's order is at: [claranet.scu.edu...]

However, I agree that something is wrong if it takes a court a year and beaucoup hearings just to determine that the suit is frivolous.

Kinderstart was making many claims against Google. One of the claims was that Google's PageRank as published in the Google ODP directory clone was a knowingly false derogatory statement about Kinderstart and other sites that were manually editorially selected for banning or suppression via site-unique bias. Such editorial selection reduced the PageRank that would have been displayed had the site not been manually selected for banning or suppression. Google tells search users that PageRank is an "honest" assessment of the site's value and strongly suggests it is entirely automatically developed. There is no suggestion that they arbitrarily, editorially fiddle with PageRank.

The Court seems to be saying that this particular claim was denied because of technical defects in the pleading that were not corrected even given a second opportunity. Subsequent valid claims could apparently be made by someone else.

Google seems to be gradually discontinuing their ODP directory clone, which has apparently not been updated since 2005 and is therefore very stale and essentially useless. The toolbar, used by a small number of users, is the only remaining place where PageRank is displayed to search users. Google could easily fix this problem by putting a note in the toolbar and directory documentation that says that PageRank is a partly editorial value judgement. Virtually nobody would read the note and everybody would be legally happy. At least for now.