While another one ruled that it couldn't be held responsible

Jul 25, 2009 10:06 GMT  ·  By

When you're a company the size of Google getting sued isn't exactly news anymore. The Internet giant is taken to court by a wide range of people and organizations with claims going from ridiculous to deeply concerning, like the recent anti-trust investigation in the Google books settlement. A couple of recent lawsuits in France fall somewhere in the middle. Two companies, Direct Energie and CNFDI, filed two separate suits concerning Google's Suggest feature, which has seen its fair share of controversy.

The claims were very similar as in both cases the first suggestion when users started typing the companies' names was "arnaque," which means “scam” in French. The companies, as you would imagine, weren't happy about it. Google Suggest can be a very useful feature and works by suggesting queries when a user starts typing based on the most popular searches made by other Google users containing the word or words being typed. In this case the most popular queries were obviously the ones that contained the word "scam" indicating that many people were trying to find if the two companies could be trusted.

Common sense would dictate that Google isn't responsible for what people are searching or for displaying the potentially libelous phrases as they were the automated response of its algorithm. The courts though had a slightly different opinion. The two lawsuits were also different in nature as Direct Energie sued in a civil court while CNFDI claimed libel, which is a criminal offense in France.

In the first case, involving Direct Energie, the judge was rather confused about how the feature worked and claimed that, because the search “direct energie arnaque” wasn't the first alphabetically or had the biggest number of results, Google was liable and ordered the company to remove the suggestion but awarded no damages to Direct Energie.

The second case however made more sense as the judge ruled that, because Google was merely a provider of the information, it wasn't responsible for what its users did. Furthermore, he believed that because so many people were in fact looking for the particular phrase meant that a lot of them were interested in the matter and that it could provide valuable information to other users.