A California judge is considering whether to grant class-action status to a suit charging that Google unfairly lowered the search ranking of a Web site. The parties in the suit, including Google and KinderStart, a Norwalk CA-based parenting content site, argued their cases in a U.S. district court hearing on Friday in San Jose.
At the conclusion of the hearing, Judge Jeremy Fogel scheduled additional hearings for September.
KinderStart alleges that Google reduced the Google PageRank rating of its Web site to zero—effectively lowering its prominence on relevant search results pages—because the site offers its own search function. KinderStart attorneys claimed that downgrade violated the company’s freedom of expression in a public forum and violated the site’s contract with the Google AdSense publisher network.
Google attorneys argued at the hearing that the search engine has the right to use any criteria of its choosing to rank Web sites in its results, including competing search engines.
KinderStart filed its suit in March, claiming that being downgraded in “organic” search rankings caused the site’s traffic to fall off from 10 million visitors a month to 3 million.
