In a first-of-its-kind case, Google has been sued by a California parenting website, www.kinderstart.com, because Google effectively dropped its Page Rank of that website to zero, wiping it off the "Google" map if you will. This, in turn, caused a loss of almost all traffic to KinderStart.com. In a rather bizarre twist of legal reasoning, KinderStart.com has argued that Google dropped its Page Rank on that website to quench competition, as KinderStart.com also features a search function that it claims (quite humorously) competes directly with Google. Hmm, shall I use Google, Yahoo! or KinderStart for my web searches today? Give me a break.

This appears to be a half-hearted attempt to sue Google over its practice of ranking websites however it wants to rank them. Is there any recourse from a site who may fall in Google's search rankings -- for any reason? Highly doubtful.

I agree with Google here -- it can rank websites any way it wants to and change its formula (as it does already) any way it sees fit, at any time. You may not agree with how Google ranks websites and how it changes that mix regularly, but if you have a site that depends that much on a single source of website traffic, you have other issues to deal with.

 I'm not saying that you should not court Google's Page Rank system for visibility to customers. Obviously millions of small websites do this. But be prepared in case your ranking falls for some reason. If I were Google, there would be no way I would reveal proprietary reasons for how websites are ranked. That would invite fraud on a monumental scale.

Google fends off lawsuit over "Page Rank" feature originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 05 Jul 2006 09:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.