Kinderstart.com has sued Google, trying to break through the walls of the castle high on the mountain over the Internet. The suit seeks damages for the loss in visitors, but pushes for even more � disclosure of Google's methods of ranking websites.

In the hunt for website traffic, page ranking is everything. The steady group of regular visitors is rarely sufficient to generate the numbers that generate revenue. Sites depend on visitors who find them on yahoo, MSNsearch, Ask, and the 800-pound gorilla, Google.

An entirely new industry has developed - search engine optimization - aimed at not just getting your site into the search engines, but to improve your "page ranking". The holy grail is to have your site turn up on the first page of results on a Google search. You can check the ranking of a site at sites like Googlerankings.com.

How Google ranks pages is a closely guarded secret. Google calls it an algorithm but one blogger calls it a "smoky back room." Requests to Google for information on why a site has dropped in its rankings will get responses worthy of Kafka. If you get more than a form letter, it will sound as if the Wizard of Oz himself is running the show. There are references to the nameless faceless algorithm that sees all, does all. Google's official description of its pagerank system says only that "Google's complex, automated methods make human tampering with our results extremely difficult."

Kinderstart got caught in the algorithmic storm. With its traffic buzzing along at a rate of 10 million a month, something caused its ranking to drop. Traffic dropped 70 percent and revenue dropped 80 percent.

After unsuccessfully facing the Google monolithic bureaucracy, it turned to another monolithic bureaucracy � the California court system. The suit seeks damages, information, and asks to be certified a class action. A class action would entitle every site that claims to have been dropped by Google to seek damages. It would also entitle Kinderstart's lawyer to large fees, which may be deserved if he could actually get Google to disclose their algorithm.

Complete article: http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/03/19/124124.php