A court agreed that Google can arrange its search results pages as it sees fit, after a site sued the company

Nov 18, 2014 08:23 GMT  ·  By

A new US court has agreed that Google’s search results are considered free speech, ruling in favor of Google and saying that the Internet giant has the right to order its search results as it sees fit.

Even though certain areas have tried to impose some regulations on how Google displays search results over the past decade or so, and Europe has managed to do a bit of that with the Right to Be Forgotten ruling handed out earlier this year, ArsTechnica reports.

This new case that landed on the desk of a San Francisco court was started by S. Louis Martin, the owner of a website called CoastNews, who argued that Google was unfairly placing the site’s links too far down in search results pages. By contrast, Bing and Yahoo were pushing CoastNews results at the top of the page.

The site felt like Google was violating antitrust laws by allowing this to happen. Furthermore, it was upset that Google refused to deliver ads to its site after CoastNews published some photographs from a nudist colony in the Santa Cruz mountains, which is generally the type of content that Google won’t associate ads with.

Google was having none of this, however, and filed an anti-SLAPP (Strategic lawsuit against public participation) motion, which allows courts to throw out lawsuits in their early stages if their intention is to stifle free speech rights.

The San Francisco judge agreed with Google and threw out the case, ruling that Google was permitted by the First Amendment to organize its search results as it sees fit.

“Defendant has met its burden by showing that the claims asserted against it arise from constitutionally protected activity,” reads the Judge’s order.

The rules are clear

The size of Google as a company and the popularity of its search engine has made many consider that the corporation could pose a threat to competition by controlling what sites get to the top in search results pages.

There have been several investigations into this particular issue over the years, with little results. The bottom line is that Google’s search engine algorithm keeps track of what feels like a million things. Google’s AdSense network is considered family-safe, which means that publishers aren’t permitted to place Google ads on sites which contain pornography, adult, or mature content.

In this particular case, the nudes posted by CoastNews might have gotten the site flagged and pushed down to the bottom of the search results pages, much like many other sites get for other type of content, too, such as online piracy.

Google's search results (4 Images)

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