KinderStart, a Silver Lake Ca., web company that provides parents with child care advice via their own search engine (www.kinderstart.com), is suing Google. The claim is that Google has punished KinderStart and dropped their rankings, enough so that traffic has been greatly reduced at this portal. This allegedly occurred in March 2005.
Currently KinderStart has no page ranking, and the complaint was not specific as to what keywords were vital to this business. Although a search for the word "Kinderstart" found one deep-link occurrence (ranked #4).
Unfortunately we do not know the details of this complaint. Was Kinderstart.com doing some "black-hat" SEO that put them into the sandbox or was it just poor technique? I doubt it was a personal vendetta.
I cannot see this being a very fruitful lawsuit. This suit follows the de-listing of BMW and others; a tough stance for rooting out black-hat gamers. And also a rash of bad news for the Googler's (fraudulent click payout, financial errors, a few extra PowerPoint slides in the deck, China, Privacy ...). No wonder Google's stock is now on taking the down elevator.
We'll watch the KinderCare suit with interest; but doubt we'll learn much from this legal course.
I think Kinderstart might have a good chance of winning on the grounds that Google provides an essential service (like a phone company) and is therefore a common carrier. BMW was engaging in "deceptive" practices and was promptly reinstated when they removed the offending feature. Kinderstart and many other sites have been blocked for no stated reason. We have developed lots of evidence that Google is arbitrarily blocking access to sites for essentially competitive reasons (e.g. sites that contain directories).
Posted by: vectorx | May 20, 2006 at 05:58 PM