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>And I'm sure some people regularly contact Google asking for removal of "false" information about dinosaur fossils and the earth being more than a few thousand

>And I'm sure some people regularly contact Google asking for removal of "false" information about dinosaur fossils and the earth being more than a few thousand years old. Acting on any such request would be making a decision on the veracity of that information. Google already does this...they remove websites from their results and they make a decision on the veracity of the remaining information through their results. As to the dinosaur fossils...they don't have standing to sue over defamation, so Google is protected from making the hard decisions there. >The courts should have told the plaintiff to sue the site publishing the information... Where you find Google is just "a search engine linking to the information", according to the article, the court found Google was both publishing and promoting the defamation. I can see courts splitting on this issues for sure, so you might get your hope on appeal, but I don't think it is an intellectually dishonest conclusion to view search result/ads as more than "links" but impressions Google approves for publication in their search results. Traditionally, if someone were to publish something false in a newspaper the plaintiff could name the author, editor and newspaper publisher. I am not for limiting the rights of individuals over corporations. In fairness I recognize technology makes it easier than ever to publish/republish false statements, but I am more inclined to feel bad for the individual being defamed on a scale never seen before more than I am to feel bad for Google because the Court didn't buy their argument that they should not be liable because they are just a "search engine" and it would burden them to stop linking to false information about people.

JoshTriplett 11y ago
> they make a decision on the veracity of the remaining information through their results No, they don't. They attempt to figure out which site you might be looking for based on the terms you typed in; relevance to your search terms may or may not be correlated with veracity. > As to the dinosaur fossils...they don't have standing to sue over defamation, so Google is protected from making the hard decisions there. The comment I replied to said the plaintiff had "contacted" Google, and expected that to suffice. I gave an example of people who "contact" Google and should rightfully be ignored. Now you're saying that those people don't have standing to sue so it's OK. Truth is the ultimate defense against defamation. You seem to be arguing that Google is in a position to judge whether content is defamation (which necessarily involves a determination of truth), based on nothing but someone contacting them. How, precisely, would you propose they do that? This particular court certainly didn't offer any insights there. > I am not for limiting the rights of individuals over corporations. Judgments should not under any circumstances depend on who the plaintiff or defendant are. This judgment is precedent for a similar suit against a far smaller defendant. I'm not concerned that Google will be deeply hurt by a six-figure court judgment and hope they win on appeal because it'll help their bottom line; I think this sets a completely broken precedent and I hope Google wins on appeal to reverse that. > Traditionally, if someone were to publish something false in a newspaper the plaintiff could name the author, editor and newspaper publisher. Of course. But that doesn't mean the plaintiff should be able to name a third-party who provides a list of headlines found in newspapers, especially not if they haven't actually sued the newspaper and won.
- mentat 11y ago
  > No, they don't. They attempt to figure out which site you might be looking for based on the terms you typed in; relevance to your search terms may or may not be correlated with veracity. Can you give an example of a search where relevance doesn't correlate with a common cultural sense of veracity? I think they're more intertwined than you seem to be willing to concede.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    > Can you give an example of a search where relevance doesn't correlate with a common cultural sense of veracity? If I search for "Bob Smith", I'm not looking for "pages with exclusively true statements about Bob Smith"; I'm looking for 'pages that mention the phrase "Bob Smith"'. Perhaps someone mentioned a great story whose protagonist was named Bob Smith, and I wanted to find it. Perhaps someone wrote an article entitled 'Naming your programming language "Go" is like naming your kid "Bob Smith"'. Perhaps I'm trying to find a comment on a news site that used "Bob Smith" as an example name. If you run "grep" over a set of files, and one of the results makes you angry, do you blame grep, or whoever wrote the file grep found? Does the answer somehow change if you use a more sophisticated search algorithm (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tf–idf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tf–idf)?

JoshTriplett 11y ago

> they make a decision on the veracity of the remaining information through their results No, they don't. They attempt to figure out which site you might be looking for based on the terms you typed in; relevance to your search terms may or may not be correlated with veracity. > As to the dinosaur fossils...they don't have standing to sue over defamation, so Google is protected from making the hard decisions there. The comment I replied to said the plaintiff had "contacted" Google, and expected that to suffice. I gave an example of people who "contact" Google and should rightfully be ignored. Now you're saying that those people don't have standing to sue so it's OK. Truth is the ultimate defense against defamation. You seem to be arguing that Google is in a position to judge whether content is defamation (which necessarily involves a determination of truth), based on nothing but someone contacting them. How, precisely, would you propose they do that? This particular court certainly didn't offer any insights there. > I am not for limiting the rights of individuals over corporations. Judgments should not under any circumstances depend on who the plaintiff or defendant are. This judgment is precedent for a similar suit against a far smaller defendant. I'm not concerned that Google will be deeply hurt by a six-figure court judgment and hope they win on appeal because it'll help their bottom line; I think this sets a completely broken precedent and I hope Google wins on appeal to reverse that. > Traditionally, if someone were to publish something false in a newspaper the plaintiff could name the author, editor and newspaper publisher. Of course. But that doesn't mean the plaintiff should be able to name a third-party who provides a list of headlines found in newspapers, especially not if they haven't actually sued the newspaper and won.

mentat 11y ago
> No, they don't. They attempt to figure out which site you might be looking for based on the terms you typed in; relevance to your search terms may or may not be correlated with veracity. Can you give an example of a search where relevance doesn't correlate with a common cultural sense of veracity? I think they're more intertwined than you seem to be willing to concede.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  > Can you give an example of a search where relevance doesn't correlate with a common cultural sense of veracity? If I search for "Bob Smith", I'm not looking for "pages with exclusively true statements about Bob Smith"; I'm looking for 'pages that mention the phrase "Bob Smith"'. Perhaps someone mentioned a great story whose protagonist was named Bob Smith, and I wanted to find it. Perhaps someone wrote an article entitled 'Naming your programming language "Go" is like naming your kid "Bob Smith"'. Perhaps I'm trying to find a comment on a news site that used "Bob Smith" as an example name. If you run "grep" over a set of files, and one of the results makes you angry, do you blame grep, or whoever wrote the file grep found? Does the answer somehow change if you use a more sophisticated search algorithm (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tf–idf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tf–idf)?