Google about to get sued, this time a valid reason
January 9th, 2007
I’ve always liked techdirt for publishing interesting stuff. At least half of their articles are pretty poor, in my opinion, but enough gems make it through to be worth reading. Case in point: What To Do When Google Tells People Your Website Is Dangerous.
This story covers how Google is providing warnings to users - the search results can now display a “visiting this site may harm your computer” warning. I initially supported this when I first heard of it, thinking that it would stop more average-joe users from getting infected when they google ‘britney spears’ and so forth. I still do, in that respect. The less people who get attacked, the less zombie computers we’ll have sending spam!
However, it seems that Google really needs to fix their complaint system. Or perhaps its StopBadWare.com who need to fix it - whoever was at fault, techdirt reports that it took one anonymous complaint to get one site flagged as dangerous. This had the effect of killing traffic to the site, no doubt hurting their income significantly.
People often get upset with Google when their site drops in the SERPs, and some have sued over this in the past. Seems a little silly in that case. However this is different - this is Google actively saying “Hey, this site is dangerous”. If its not, I wonder what their liability is.
Of course, I’d rather see the system fixed, than see Google getting sued again. Its a great idea, if applied correctly.
February 27th, 2007 at 11:43 am
[...] A while back I wrote about a new system Google had, where a warning message would appear in the SERPS if Google thought the site was dangerous, and how easy it was to defraud that system. [...]