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Google: Sued Again Over “Bad” Listing

Barry Schwartz on April 25, 2007 at 11:18 am

Building Contractor Sues Google for Indexing Consumer Complaint from Wired
highlights yet another case where a someone wants to sue Google over how they
are listed. Cases like these have lost in the past, but people keep trying.

In this case, New Jersey building contractor
RSA Homes is upset that a
search for
"RSA Homes" returns a
page from Rip
Off Report that is critical of RSA Homes in bold. The result looks like this:

RSA Homes demanding that Google remove the page. It remained up.

Back in October of last year, Eric Goldman

reported how Google won a similar suit filed by Mark Maughan. He was upset
that searches relating to his business came back with listings suggesting he was
disciplined by the California Board of Accountancy for negligence.

Beyond that, a ruling
recently found Google and search engines in general have a protected First
Amendment right to carry ads — or not — that are critical of others.

In March, Google also won the
case versus KinderStart,
where KinderStart argued that not ranking well in Google was harmful and should
be corrected. Coincidentally, today
KinderStart
appealed this decision.

Back to the RSA Homes case, it’s interesting that one reason the company is
concerned is that a lender saw the listing when doing a search on the company as
part of considering a funding request. The bad PR from the listing is said to
have "interfered" with the ability to secure the money. This is also said to
have happened with other financial institutions, too.

Yesterday, New US
Border Check Tool: Google covered how bad listings in Google and other
search engines could prevent you from entering the United States. Now add to the
list that bad listings might stop a loan from going through.

Finally, there are some times Google will indeed remove the content of
others. Danny’s Google
Releases Improved Content Removal Tools article from last week goes into
more depth about this.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.