A federal judge in California hinted that a parenting Web site that’s suing Google over a poor ranking in the search giant’s massive index would be able to proceed with its lawsuit.
KinderStart.com alleges that its parenting search engine site suffered an approximate 70 percent drop in monthly traffic in March last year after Google buried its visibility in search results. KinderStart, which claims to have originally been in the first 10 results when Web users scoured the Internet for KinderStart, also saw an 80 percent drop in AdSense revenue.
While Google and other search engines have been sued over rankings before, no lawsuit of this type appears to have succeeded. That’s in part because search engines can claim to have a First Amendment right to rank Web sites as they see fit – much like a restaurant reviewer or book reviewer has a right to publish its own rankings.
You can read the full story at News.com. My throught on this is simple – Live by the Google, die by the Google!
