Comments on: When grown adults act like children.

When grown adults act like children.

insomnia_lj — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 15:51:48 -0800

Kinderstart sues Google to get a higher page ranking. Why on earth should Google be obligated to give another search engine access to their proprietary page ranking methods, unless the goal is for Kinderstart to either steal or play games with Google's ranking methods... again?

By: delmoi

delmoi — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 16:01:52 -0800

Seriously though, who cares? If Kinderstart wins this, it would be a big deal, but they'll almost certanly lose, just like Search King.

By: mr.curmudgeon

mr.curmudgeon — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 16:12:30 -0800

So is Kinderstart, like, the bastard child of Head Start and KinderCare? Original name.

By: drstein

drstein — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 16:16:09 -0800

Well, if their plan was to get the blogosphere's panties all knotted up, they succeeded quite well. I'd imagine that Kinderstart's Google ranking will climb quite a bit, and traffic to their website has probably gone up a lot as well.

By: Malor

Malor — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 16:21:36 -0800

That'd be a great business model for Google... rate highest whoever sued them last. </sarcasm> More seriously, they so dominate the search space that they could easily run into monopoly problems. They will have to be most careful when indexing pages of organizations/products that compete with their own.

By: swell

swell — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 16:32:49 -0800

From the main link, it doesn't seem as if they just want a higher ranking - they gamed the system, google caught 'em and penalized 'em. Now their rank is lower than it would have been without the link farming, since Google wants to discourage that sort of thing. This, on the other hand, is complete crap.

The complaint accuses Google, as the dominant provider of Web searches, of violating KinderStart's constitutional right to free speech by blocking search engine results showing Web site content and other communications.

Also, glueschk is right about the attempted gbomb. Sure, you've increased the likelihood of somebody searching for "immature" to get the target, but you've also helped their general page rank, so somebody searching for "kinderstart" will also be more likely to get the target. And those people won't hear about your "cause".

By: monju_bosatsu

monju_bosatsu — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 17:08:51 -0800

MeTa.

By: Rhomboid

Rhomboid — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 17:19:43 -0800

Their legal strategy in this case is a little different than the "Search King" case which tried to argue just based on the ridiculous basis of free speech.

Yu hopes to prove Google has become an "essential facility" that should be required to warn Web sites before dropping them from the index. "We don't really feel there is enough transparency and openness in a service that has become so important," Yu said. [article]

This time their claim is this "essential facilty" business. So although they're attacking this from a different angle it's still a ridiculous and impossible to prove claim.

By: Zinger

Zinger — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 18:20:07 -0800

I'd give this lawsuit a lot more credence if it said that ... Kinderstart had tried everything to find out from Google exactly what had caused Google to cut their page rank so Kinderstart could fix the situation, but that Google had not cooperated.

By: bragadocchio

bragadocchio — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 19:49:15 -0800

I doubt that Google handpicked this site to make an example of them. But I do see some issues that may be harming the site, and the way that it might rank in Google. There are three types of pages that make up about 98% of the kinderstart site, and none of those are doing the site any favors when it comes to ranking in the search engines. Those are (1) the URLs which frame the pages listed in their directories, (2) the comments pages, and (3) the ratings pages. If those many thousands of pages were disallowed in a robots.txt file, the remaining 2,000 pages might stand a much better chance ranking in Google. I can't say I care too much for the way that kinderstart frames the pages that they link to, especially since they don't have a way for people to break out of those frames. I also suspect that those URLs are seen by Google as duplicates of the originals, which harms the site. The comments pages are filled with "viagra online" type spam and were showing errors like this:

Warning: pg_fetch_object() unable to jump to row 0 on PostgreSQL result index 5 in /home/httpd/html/kinderstart.com/comments.php on line 107

The ratings pages have no links from them, and are probably treated as dangling nodes by the pagerank algorithm, which could impact the site negatively. Chances are good that disallowing those three types of pages in a robots.txt file wouldn't harm them, and may allow for a much better internal distribution of link popularity/pagerank, which could lead to better rankings. I also find myself wondering what impact the URL for this page from kinderstart has on the way that their site is treated by Google: http://www.kinderstart.com:8080/kindertoday/ It may not be part of the problem, but I wouldn't use an URL like without knowing for certain that Google would treat http://www.kinderstart.com:8080/ and http://www.kinderstart.com as if they were different pages. There are other technical issues, and they should probably be explored.

By: five fresh fish

five fresh fish — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 20:13:05 -0800

Wow. Awesome analysis, bragadocchio. Are the deficits you mention the result of techniques SEOers use(d) to increase page ranking?

By: bragadocchio

bragadocchio — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 21:07:32 -0800

Thanks, five fresh fish. They are considerations that someone, whether SEO, developer, designer, etc., who learns something about how search engines crawl and index sites could use to make sure that the pages of their sites that have content worth spidering show up in search engines.

By: Dantien

Dantien — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 07:30:12 -0800

Malor, Google only dominates the search space in regards to their mastery of marketing. Yahoo still delivers more impressions. I see only 50% of my traffic from Google. FYI. Brag, great analysis! Frames seriously hamper success in search engines. In my experience, kinderstart seems to think that they can continue to control search and the search marketing channel (much like you can other traditional channels). This should be an interesting wake-up call to them! Welcome to the 21st century kiddies!

By: Mr_Zero

Mr_Zero — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 08:04:15 -0800

Their home page doesn't even validate. What do they expect? They should have spent the money on SEO help instead of blowing it on attorneys.