KinderStart Sues Google Over Drop in PageRank

[mandy]

A California judge on Thursday dismissed a Web site's lawsuit against Google over its fall in the Google search index, but left the door open for the lawsuit to be amended and refiled...

U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel for the Northern District in San Jose dismissed all nine claims, saying that KinderStart's claims were insufficient or failed to allege facts or conduct to support that the claims or were too vague.

Fogel specifically dismissed some of the claims against Google "with leave to amend," meaning that KinderStart can modify and refile the complaint...

Fogel wrote that a PageRank score reflects Google's opinions, and suggested that a score generated by a computer algorithm is likely not defamatory. But if KinderStart can prove a case of "manual intervention" by Google, Fogel wrote, the outcome might be different...

full article: http://news.com.com/2100-1030_3-6094132.html?part=rss&tag=6094132&subj=news

[mandy]

Update: thrown out of court again

Matt Cutts noted briefly at his blog that Google’s motions to dismiss the 2nd amended complaint case without leave to amend and for sanctions against the plaintiff Kinderstart.com LLC and it’s attorney were granted by the court...

full article: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/googl...tart/4553/

[jezebel]

Idiotic frigging lawsuit  :

[BellisimaJ.]

[quote author=jezebel link=topic=3075.msg47770#msg47770 date=1174598400]
Idiotic frigging lawsuit  :
[/quote]

Ditto!! :

[rose]

http://www.browsermedia.co.uk/2007/03/23...dismissed/

The judge stated that:

“KinderStart had failed to explain how Google caused injury to it by a provably false statement … as distinguished from an unfavourable opinion about KinderStart.com’s importance.”

The judge also upheld Google’s right to modify or change its search ranking algorithm at any point:

“PageRank is a creature of Google’s invention and does not constitute an independently-discoverable value. In fact, Google might choose to assign PageRanks randomly, whether as whole numbers or with many decimal places, but this would not create “incorrect” PageRanks.”