Google forced to remove links

(April 18 2002, update April 19) The German railway operator Deutsche Bahn has filed a lawsuit against Google forcing the company to remove links to online articles published by German-language publication Radikal.

The articles apparently include information on how to disable parts of its railway system.

AltaVista and Yahoo! have been threatened with similar lawsuits.

Deutsche Bahn has already forced the Internet service provider XS4ALL Internet BV of Diemen, Netherlands, to block access to the articles hosted on its servers.

The fact that the search engine still presents a title and a site description may lead searchers to look for this information elsewhere, however. Hence the demand for the removal of the links.

We have no sympathy with people publishing terrorist techniques on the Internet, but this lawsuit may lead to serious problems for the search engine industry as well as the concept of free speech on the Web.

If anyone not liking an article or site may sue the search engine companies for providing a link to them, the very concept of automatic Web crawling may be under siege. The search engine companies cannot be expected to control the content of the hundreds of millions of pages included in their indexes, nor is it their job to be global censorship policemen.

In this case Deutsche Bahn should have been content with having shut down the website in question. Unfortunately, it seems that Google is going to give in to the demands of Deutsche Bahn. Google spokesperson Cindy McCaffrey has told InternetNews the issue will be comfortably resolved outside of the courtroom. "We are in the process of removing pages or have already removed some of the links in question," she said. A

pparently Google argues that it is OK to remove the links as the webpages are no longer available, i.e. they do not necessarily accept that other parties have the right to ask them to remove links to existing pages.

A spokesman for AltaVista has said that the pages in question will be put on the search engine's "banned list", a list normally reserved for paged with spam (i.e. pages that tries to trick the engine into giving them a top position in the result listings).

It is interesting to note that DB filed the lawsuit in Germany as it expected to loose such a case in the US. "There is no chance to sue them in the U.S. You are really allowed to put anything on the Internet there," a company spokesman told Computerworld.

Google is especially vulnerable to such lawsuits as the search engine keeps a "cached" copy of the websites visited on its own servers. This means that Google, in fact, is publishing the same content on its own website -- in violation of the spirit of accepted copyright principles, by the way.

It would probably be a wise move of Google to remove this feature as soon as possible.

Internet News, CW360 and Computerworld has more. See also Webmaster World discussion.

More search engine news...

The Pandia Post is our free bimonthly newsletter on Internet searching, search engines and directories.

We will give you the latest news from the world of Internet exploring, useful tips on how to improve your searching skills or search engine ranking, as well as information on the development of the Pandia Search Central.

We will never give your address to any other company or organization.