Stars fight search engines – who owns the SERPS?

Posted on December 9, 2008
Filed Under The WorldWideWeb | 1 Comment

The Financial Times has a piece on a ever occurring topic and question. Who is responsible for the content showing up in the SERPS of search engines.


by Balakov

And while immediately one would say the owner of the sites are responsible or in some cases the site contributors. There is a point in saying that without the search engines millions and millions of sites and trillions of pages of content would never be found and thus nasty surprises like the one for Isabel Macedo would be much more of an exception.

Argentine actress Isabel Macedo heard on the grapevine that her name was appearing on internet porn sites, so she sat down at her computer to Google herself.

She recalls feeling “ashamed and horrified” to find links to sex sites among the top 10 search results, especially as she was then working on a hit children’s TV show, Floricienta.

With the internet being such a global phenomenon and the law being such a local issue this is truly a hard nut to crack.

In the case of Diego Maradona the Argentinian soccer legend this led to a removal of the search results on the Argentinian Yahoo! search whilst the US search still shows results for the same query.

Maradona US SERP with results

Maradona Argentinian SERP with no results

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    • Comments

    One Response to “Stars fight search engines – who owns the SERPS?”

    1. KoulNo Gravatar on March 12th, 2009 5:20 am

      Wow! This is quiet interesting. I remember back in the days, Kazaa had a clone software called KazaaLite ( a ad-free / spyware free version of Kazza). Kazaa sued them and whenever you searched for Kaaza, Google would remove one result and display a warning note at the end of the page, linking to a document containing the court order.

      Just checked, its still there:
      http://www.google.ca/search?q=kazaa+lite

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