Google Briefly Punishes Oracle by Removal from Google Search

Google Briefly Punishes Oracle by Removal from Google Search (ipwatchdog.com)

8 points by dnene 15 years ago | 5 comments

This article suddenly becomes relevant again: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/does-google-censor-tiananmen... :-)

And this guy falls for it, even though it's pretty much spelled out in the search results shown what is going on.

Even so, I found the following remark interesting:

"It seems to me that removing Oracle from the Google search database would be an intentional tort and actionable under a variety of unfair business practice theories. Whether Google wants to admit it or not their search engine has become something of a public facility. As a result, arbitrarily and capriciously denying any individual or company access smacks of censorship and a high handedness that would result in the unilateral selection of winners and losers. With the power of Google they cannot be allowed to do something like this because if they can do it to Oracle they could do it to me or you or many others who would have little recourse."

I wonder if that is true? If Google would actually decide to remove company X or word Y from their search results, would that be considered censorship under the law? Would it be illegal? One could argue that it's their data and they can show it, or not show it, whichever way they want.

aristus 15 years ago | |

I briefly had dealings with Google on a similar issue. There is a concept in US and perhaps other law, "tortuous interference" where a third party does wrong by interfering with business between two other parties. Think someone refusing to let you walk into a store because it sells meat or leather. It's possible that google could run afoul of these things. In practice I've yet to see any offensive use of delisting, aside from one case of a Belgian newspaper which I may well be recalling in correctly. They are very aware of their position and have not abused it.

edit: ah, this is the case:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/belgian-pape...

Google lost a copyright battle against some Belgian newspapers for news.google.be. So they delisted ALL pages from those papers.

"When Google lost the case, it not only pulled the stories from the News archive and stopped indexing them, but it yanked the papers from its main index. Apparently, this wasn't good for business, and the papers soon worked out a deal to get back in the index while remaining out of Google News."

An example to the others, indeed.

blueben 15 years ago |

Hey, I just removed Oracle from Google search too! All I did was craft a special encoded URL, take a screenshot, and conveniently crop out the URL bar.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%D0%BEr%D0%B0c%D0%86%D0%B5

Ardit20 15 years ago | |

Are you saying that IPwatchadog are defaming Google? Because if they are lying, it would lower the reputation of google in the eyes of right thinking men, thus it would be defamation.

jrockway 15 years ago |

Citation needed.

talonx 15 years ago |

This is ridiculous. And childish.