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It could only happen in California I guess but a company called ‘Kinderstart’ (no, they’re not a German fertility clinic) have decided to launch a class action against Google over the PageRank zero score allocated to their website. Allegedly they’ve lost 70% of their traffic since this happened and they’re claiming Google have penalised them deliberately because they’re scared of the competition (they have a search box)… what does this mean for search engines?

Well it shouldn’t really mean much at all, the folks at Google are free to do what they like (it seems logical to surmise) because the website is their publication - it’s not a government owned amenity (yet) and we don’t liveby the doctrines of communist Russia. It would be like suing the yellow pages for removing your free listing. Did anybody ever enter into a contract with Google for free listings anyway?

Google’s defense is that its rankings are opinions and therefore protected by the US constitution’s first amendment - protecting freedom of speech. The judge in the case (Jeremy Fogel) has set a hearing date for September. According to IDG News Judge Fogel said “You can’t just file a blanket lawsuit and say, ‘We think we’re going to find some stuff’,” So don’t expect to see Google divulging the full details of its algorithmic decisions in the near future.

Call my cynical but if I lost 70% of my web traffic (with or without good reason) an interesting way to get it back would be to do something internationally newsworthy. I don’t know what it costs to launch a class action in California but I imagine the cost comes in lower than a global advertising campaign. How does the saying go? ‘Even bad press is good press’ - and somebody standing up for the little man (because we’ve all had PageRank problems at some point) might be viewed as good. One might even speculate that the folks doing the suing were being ‘kinder‘ to us all.

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