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On 15 May 2014 07:41, Richard Brown <wildwoodslosty@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Would live to get others perspective on this. > > http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27407017 > > It seems to me that this is almost an impossible ask. Yes, that was my initial reaction too. Sympathy with Google and outrage on their behalf. What a tech-illiterate decision! But on second thought... The complainant's case does seem valid; the technicalities should not be, and according to the court are not, sufficient reason for his reputation to suffer damage, which it unarguably did. Google did not dispute that; they said it was neither their fault nor their responsibility to fix. That is true on a limited technical view, but it's baseless on the wide view of the effective meaning in the real world of a Google search results page. The court is instructing Google to do the same thing it already charges money for doing, only in the opposite direction: changing the priority of certain raw PageRank results for non-PageRank reasons. The results we see are already tainted. Google essentially makes its money from stuff it did nothing to create. Let them do some work. If it breaks their system and bankrupts them (it won't) then they never had a viable business model. The consequence is that Google search result pages will be tainted by third-party commercial and legal interventions and manipulations. Well guess what? They always were. How to deal with that, when, where, whether and what to disclose regarding interventions... interesting problems for Google to solve. -- Phil Hudson http://hudson-it.no-ip.biz @UWascalWabbit PGP/GnuPG ID: 0x887DCA63 -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq