Steve Reads

Via Slashdot: a man googled for information about himself, found “alarming, false, misleading and injurious results,” and promptly sued Google. Presumably to get around the defense that Google has no control over the information it indexes,

Girardi said the problem lies with Google’s patented PageRank algorithm search system.

According to the suit, PageRank, created by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, “reformats information obtained from accurate sources, resulting in changing of the context in which information is presented.”

He said PageRank “scans the source, but in doing so, it’s not a literal transmission. A literal transmission would be fine.”

Girardi wants a court order to prevent Google from using PageRank. He said members of a class action could include anyone also allegedly libeled by the search engine.

He also seeks unspecified monetary damages.

This is obviously nonsense. But it does bring up some interesting questions. First among them for me might be: what happens if I link some fiery phrase, like pigfucker or intellectual dwarf or symbol of all that is wrong with the world, to someone’s ethically bankrupt accountancy? Let’s assume lots of other people follow my lead. Am I now guilty of anything? If I’m not, why is Google?

The guilty party here (to the extent that there is one) seems to be PageRank, not Google. If the algorithm operates on page-neutral properties (like the number of links to a given page, or the page’s age), then it hardly seems reasonable to sue Google, and the algorithm doesn’t seem at fault.

Then again, Google isn’t entirely automated: I believe humans can come in to remove objectionable material or to keep items out of the Google Cache. I suppose the tiniest bit of human intervention opens them up to a lawsuit. So: would a completely distributed, completely automated search engine be vulnerable to lawsuits?