IanKelley - 2:28 am on Nov 30, 2012 (gmt 0)

Google isn't a search engine any more. It's an advertising agency/knowledge centre.

Whatever you call the model, it's the result of a natural evolution in response to the problem (making the internet available to the average person). It's not just Google, it's all of their competition as well. Algorithmic ranking is the only general solution that works and you have to pay for the engineers and the server farms somehow, PPC was the natural answer.

When people talk about search engines really being advertising agencies they forget how much manpower and money goes into organic search results.

If Google were to claim this is a libelous statement and demand WW take it down what do you think WW should do?

Indeed... And taking it to a more realistic level (in terms of what could happen if this ruling were to start a trend), what if Google were to claim that every post mentioning Google on WW was libelous?

All of those posts would need to be hand reviewed in order to decide if any of them were indeed a potential legal problem.

Suddenly WW has a hard choice. Hire people and review the posts or just remove all of them? Suppose they decide to leave some of those posts up? Google could then file lawsuits about the remaining posts. Regardless of who wins the drain in time and money could be crippling for WW.

So the best course of action starts to look like removal of all posts mentioning Google, leaving a gaping hole in WW content, much like similar claims would leave huge holes in search engine indexes.

And of course WW is too small an example to really compare... As mentioned the number of claims coming in at a major search engine would be too large for any size team of human reviewers to keep up with.