Right to Google search position?
Reuters reports:
A parental advice Internet site has sued Google Inc., charging it unfairly deprived the company of customers by downgrading its search-result ranking without reason or warning.
It’s possible that Google determined this company was gaming the system. It’s possible that someone at Google was punishing them for who knows what. But this doesn’t help:
KinderStart contends that once a company has been penalized, it is difficult to contact Google to regain good standing and impossible to get a report on whether or why the search leader took such action.
The technology area is unique in that a company can, on the strength of a great product like Google, rise out of nowhere to become a dominant power not only in its sector but across the entire economy. But the flip side is that while companies like Google and Microsoft can service millions, even billions of people, they can’t possibly keep up develop, nurture or respond to customer relationships the way brick and mortar companies must. Of course, Google could rebut this accusation; we have only one side talking here. We’ll be listening for the other.
UPDATE: A blogger (Blogger, that is) angle implicating more of the same — blowing off customers (yes, they’re customers even if they don’t pay) without explanation. Hat tip to Desert Light Journal.
UPDATE: Some interesting skepticism.
March 19th, 2006 at 10:23 pm
[...] We linked below to this item that has developed over the weekend — someone has swiped Betsy’s Page, one of the first blogs I advertised my law firm on when I first got involved in blogging. It’s just plain gone from Blogger, and no one — besides a few Internet worthies such as Glenn Reynolds and Michele Malkin — seems to care. That “no one” evidently includes Google, the owner of the Blogger service where Besty’s Page used to be hosted. A lot more noise needs to be made about this. If it’s a technical glitch, it’s been handled abominably. If it’s something else, all the more abominable! [...]
March 20th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
Shocker! Blatant PR Stunt Pose as Elaborate Google Lawsuit…
Parental advice site Kinderstart.com filed a lawsuit against Google earlier this week (coincidentally the same day of the US government vs. Google trial) on the background of their Google Pagerank having dropped unexpectedly and without warning. The re…
August 4th, 2006 at 1:07 am
[...] The Kinderstart lawsuit over Google search engine placement has been dismissed. [...]