When you search for Cherie Davis on Google, the first result is a link to a Feb. 26, 2006 post in Sean Healy's sports blog Unknown Column.
That post, in the form of a letter to Davis --
mother of speedskating champion Shani Davis -- repeats allegations that she has accused members of the speedskating federation of being white supremacists and neo-Nazi genetic mutations.
Healy
wasn't the only one to level such allegations. The Australian paper The Age also attributed similar statements to Cherie Davis, while the Associated Press, Chicago Tribune and others
wrote that she had accused the speedskating federation of racism.
But none of those outlets appear at the top of the search results pages for Google queries on Cherie Davis. Healy's blog does
-- and Davis feels aggrieved enough to file suit for libel.
The case shouldn't get far for many
reasons. Google is immune from libel suits based on material created by users. Also, the statute of limitations for libel in Illinois expired in February 2007, one year after the post was made.
Additionally, the statements wouldn't be libelous unless Healy acted in reckless disregard of their truth -- which could be hard to prove given that The Age made similar statements.
But
leaving aside the merits of the libel claim, Davis's complaint clearly reflects a concern that Google is returning a page that she doesn't like high in the search results. And, in that sense, her
complaint reflects the same concern that the Associated Press raised last week.
That organization also doesn't like the way Google returns search results. Last week, AP chief Tom Curley told
Business Week that Google "has a wacky algorithm" for
news stories. "It does not lead people to authoritative sources," he said.
The AP frames its concerns in terms of copyright infringement and misappropriation of "hot news," but it's hard to
imagine how the organization would attempt to enforce that in court, where fair use determinations vary from case to case and judges haven't yet determined what constitutes "hot news" in the Internet
era.
On Monday, the AP released an FAQ about its view of intellectual property that gripes about search engines' role in distributing
the news. "When consumers look for news today on search engines, they often get directed in a random fashion to a wide variety of news sources, blogs and other Web pages. Searches on breaking news
topics such as floods, earthquakes and shootings don't dependably produce results from authoritative local news sources, and often not even to those media responsible for producing the news stories,"
the company writes.
That document says that the AP will work with the media to "create a set of search-optimized pages that will guide users to the most timely, authoritative coverage related
to their searches."
If this means that the AP will work with search optimization companies in lieu of filing misguided copyright infringement lawsuits, that's probably a good result. Cherie
Davis, also, could have worked with a search engine optimization firm to create a Web page that would appear high in Google's search results. Or, as Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law
Institute at Santa Clara University, suggested, she could have hired a reputation management service "to obscure several
year old content that hasn't been recently refreshed."
In the meantime, it's not likely that Google is going to change its Page Rank system simply because some people aren't happy with how
they appear in the search results.