Bad News for Page Rank Junkies: SearchKing Suit Dismissed
Freedom to Tinker: "Stefanie Olsen at CNet News.com reports that SearchKing's lawsuit against Google has been dismissed. The judge ruled, as expected, that Google's page rankings are opinions, and that Google has a First Amendment right to state its opinions."
Background: SearchKing sued over Google's altered page rank methodology, after their pagerank dropped significantly. It claimed that its diminished Google ranking "damaged its reputation" and "diminished the company's value." Searchking brought this upon himself. In an August 29th article in Salon Searchking's Bob Massa admitted that he was selling higher "Page Rank" scores. Massa charges customers for links based upon his sites PageRank scores (which can be determined via the Google toolbar). For example, a text ad on one of his sites that has a score of 8 is $199 a month. The article also discussed one anti-googlers hopes that Massa succeeded so that Google would bring an end to page rank. In this light, it's no surprise that Google altered its page rank methodology. For a longer analysis of the case, see James Grimmelmann's LawMeme posting.
Background: SearchKing sued over Google's altered page rank methodology, after their pagerank dropped significantly. It claimed that its diminished Google ranking "damaged its reputation" and "diminished the company's value." Searchking brought this upon himself. In an August 29th article in Salon Searchking's Bob Massa admitted that he was selling higher "Page Rank" scores. Massa charges customers for links based upon his sites PageRank scores (which can be determined via the Google toolbar). For example, a text ad on one of his sites that has a score of 8 is $199 a month. The article also discussed one anti-googlers hopes that Massa succeeded so that Google would bring an end to page rank. In this light, it's no surprise that Google altered its page rank methodology. For a longer analysis of the case, see James Grimmelmann's LawMeme posting.
