A U.S. District Court judge has dismissed a lawsuit that charged Google with giving favorable search rankings to companies that have a financial relationship with the search engine.
Judge Jeremy Fogel said that Web site KinderStart had “overreached” in its allegations that Google sold search ranking and practiced religious and political discrimination in its rankings.
The decision dismissed a lawsuit re-filed by KinderStart last September, after Judge Fogel threw out an earlier case filed in March 2006. That first case complained that KinderStart had been “blacklisted” by Google by having its PageRank lowered to zero. PageRank is a system Google uses for evaluating the relative authority of a Web page and serves as a rough guide to where a page appears in search results.
In arguing that first filing, KinderStart said Google’s practices were anti-competitive and violated the free speech of the company and other publishers whose pages received low PageRanks. Google maintained that it had a right to have its search results reflect its editorial opinion about the value of specific pages.
Dismissing KinderStart’s second lawsuit, Judge Fogel said that he would consider whether to allow the company to file a third suit against Google, since the company had failed to follow the direction he gave after the first suit failed.
He also reprimanded KinderStart attorney Gregory Yu for bringing what he said were largely unsupported claims that other companies had suffered from Google’s PageRank. He ruled that Google can now seek compensation from Yu for having to defend against baseless and inadequately supported claims.
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