A federal judge threw out KinderStart’s sweeping lawsuit against Google yesterday, but left the door open for the whole thing to start again. The key thing here, I think, is the concept of “objectivity”. From ZDNet coverage:
(Judge) Fogel wrote that a PageRank score reflects Google’s opinions, and suggested that a score generated by a computer algorithm is likely not defamatory. But if KinderStart can prove a case of “manual intervention” by Google, Fogel wrote, the outcome might be different.