Search Engine Operators Research Articles

Freedom of Expression and ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Cases in the Netherlands After Google Spain

Since the Google Spain judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union, Europeans have, under certain conditions, the right to have search results for their name delisted. This paper examines how the Google Spain judgment has been applied in the Netherlands. Since the Google Spain judgment, Dutch courts have decided on two cases regarding delisting requests. In both cases, the Dutch courts considered freedom of expression aspects of delisting more thoroughly than the Court of Justice. However, the effect of the Google Spain judgment on freedom of expression is difficult to assess, as search engine operators decide about most delisting requests without disclosing much about their decisions.

A right to be forgotten?

Searching for an answer to the question of how much responsibility search engine operators should bear for privacy-related issues connected to search engine results.

Data protection and the internet: irreconcilable opposites? The EU Data Protection Reform Package and CJEU case law

The decision came unexpectedly and dropped like a bomb. After data protection experts had spent years in a mostly futile battle for improvements in data protection at internet giants such as Google and Facebook, aid has now come from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). In Google Spain and Google v AEPD the CJEU for the first time affirmed that search engine operators are obliged to remove links to websites with contents that violate data privacy rights. The case referred for a preliminary ruling concerned links to online pages of a daily newspaper published 16 years ago and containing classified adverts which, while mentioning the name of the person concerned, related to the auction of a plot of land in connection with attachment proceedings relating to social security debts. The CJEU proceeded on the assumption that, as a matter of principle, owing to the ubiquitous nature of the internet and the potential for compiling detailed personal profiles via search engine queries, the fundamental rights to respect for personal privacy and the protection of personal data take priority over the financial interests of the search engine provider as well as the interest of the general public in finding the information in a search conducted on the basis of the name of the person concerned. The decision suddenly moved the problems of data privacy protection and search engine operation into the public eye. Whereas search engines were long considered to be access providers within the context of liability, merely arranging for access to contents, the CJEU emphasized the freedom enjoyed by search engines and, contrary to the opinion of the Advocate General, assumed the capacity as “data controller” instead of a mere “data processor”. Similarly, in its “Autocomplete” decision the German Federal Court of Justice considered search engines to be providers of their own information (s 7, German Telemedia Act (TMG)) and affirmed a verification obligation of the search engine operator in a specific case within the context of the principles of duties of care (Storerhaftung). In the field of information science the independent role of search engines has long since been discussed under the catchword “gatekeeper”. It now appears that the courts increasingly impose obligations on search engines in view of their pivotal function in searching for information on the internet. Criticism has already been voiced that the CJEU—diverging from the earlier Lindqvist decision—has principally established the priority of data privacy rights over the interest of the general public in obtaining information, priority which gives rise to different legal situations in the online world vis-a-vis the offline world as regards the right to be forgotten.

Google liability for misleading or deceptive conduct: Australian perspective

On 6 of February 2013, the Australian High Court handed down an important decision in respect of the Google Inc's (Google) appeal against the decision of the Full Federal Court of Australia, holding that Google a search engine operator was not liable under s 52 of the Trade Practices Act (TPA) 1974 (Cth) for misleading or deceptive conduct (in respect of misleading advertisements published using Google's online ‘AdWords program’). The decision of the High Court is of great significance for jurisprudence on misleading and deceptive conduct with its broad implications for search engine providers such as Google, advertisers and trademark owners.

Recent Case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union Regarding the Fundamental Rights to Respect for Private and Family Life and to Protection of Personal Data

The article contains the analysis of several aspects of recent caselaw of the Court of Justice of the European Union concerning the protection of the fundamental rights to private and family life and to protection of personal data. The case-law analysed in this article is of great significance to the interpretation and application of the EU and national legislation and has drawn a lot of attention of legal practitioners and theorists and public media.In the first section of the article, the author focuses on the interpretation of certain notions by this court, such as the notion of personal data, processing of such data and its controller, given by the Court of Justice in its judgements in the cases C-293/12 and C-594/12 Digital Rights Ireland and Others, C-131/12 Google Spain and Google, and C-141/12 and C-372/12 YS and Others. The Court of Justice finds that those operations, which are referred to expressly and unconditionally in Directive 95/46/EC, must be classified as ‘processing’ of personal data. The operations referred to by Directive 95/46 must be classified as ‘processing’ even where they exclusively concern material that has already been published as it stands in the media. The Court holds that the notion of ‘controller’ in terms of Article 2(d) of the Directive 95/46 includes search engine operator, as the operator determines the purposes and means of the personal data processing activity.In the second section of this article, the rulings of the Court of Justice regarding the issues of interference with fundamental rights to private and family life and to protection of personal data, as well as the issues related to the justification of such interference, are analysed. In the judgement Google Spain and Google, the Court of Justice holds that by processing personal data the search engine operator interferes with the person’s rights and that the effect of such interference is heightened on account of the important role played by the internet and search engines in modern society. However, a fair balance should be sought between the legitimate interest of internet users to have access to the information containing personal data and the data subject’s fundamental rights. In the judgement Digital Rights Ireland and Others, the court ruled that Directive 2006/24/ EC was invalid, as it did not lay down any objective criterion of the access to and the use of the data of the electronic communications users, and the interference with the fundamental rights of these users could not be justified.The third section of the article concentrates on the independence of the supervisory authority for the personal data protection. In this section, the author analyses the judgement of the Court of Justice in the case C-288/12 Commission v Hungary, in which the Court declared that, by prematurely bringing to an end the term served by the supervisory authority for the protection of personal data, Hungary has failed to fulfil its obligations under Directive 95/46.

Recht auf Vergessen und piercing the corporate veil zugleich Anmerkungen zur Google-Entscheidung des EuGH, Rs. C-131/12 Google Spain SL und Google Inc.

AbstractWith its decision in the Google-case, the Court has put essential ground rules of EU data protection law in concrete terms. It has thereby deviated in several ways from leading opinions in legal writing which may partly be due to the fact that these are not free of personal involvement. More importantly though seems the conclusion that this decision underlines in many respects that theoretical patterns of EU private law are different from those of the traditional national law - and this divergence also holds true for major parts of the public law and, of course, data protection law. The Court has interpreted the responsibility with regard to data protection law and also the criteria in Art. 4 of the Directive very broadly, which has not met with general approval before. The ECJ strictly orientated itself by the general concept that even the search engine operator requires a permit for the processing of data. This in mind, it has given the fundamental right of data protection an important role in its considering in contrast to the user’s interest in respect of use of the service and the economic interests of the operator

Liability of search engine operator for autocomplete suggestions that infringe rights of privacy - "Autocomplete" function

A search engine operator has to take adequate precautions in order to prevent the so-called predictions generated by autocomplete function of the search engine from infringing others' rights of privacy. Failure by the search engine operator to take such precautions despite knowledge of the situation will result in liability for damages. ... [1] Plaintiff No 1, a stock corporation that sells food supplements and cosmetics on the internet via a network marketing system, and plaintiff No 2, its founder and chairman of the board, sued the defendant, which has its registered office in the USA and operates an internet search engine under the internet address “www.google.de”, for injunctive relief and monetary compensation. By entering search terms into the search engine of the defendant, users can access a hit list of contents that were placed on the internet by third parties. In April 2009 the defendant integrated an autocomplete function into its search engine so that various “predictions” are automatically displayed to the internet users in the form of combinations of terms in a separate window that opens while the search terms are typed, varying on the basis of the sequence of letters typed. The predictions displayed within the context of the autocomplete function are determined on the basis of an algorithm which, among other things, takes the number of queries typed by other users into account.

A Critical Review of K Means Text Clustering Algorithms

Text clustering is a text mining technique used to group text documents into groups (or clusters) based on similarity of content. This organization (i.e. clustering) is so as to make documents more understandable and easier to search the relevant information, easier to process, and even more efficient in utilizing communication bandwidth and storage space. An example is clustering results of a web search engine operation into groups of similar documents. Many text clustering algorithms have been developed using different approaches, but none can be said to be the best. The choice of a particular algorithm is a big issue to text clustering system developers. K Means is arguably the most popular text clustering algorithm. However, just like the others, it must be having its own weaknesses. In this paper, we explore the K Means algorithm as well as its variants and discuss their appropriateness in text clustering. We describe the characteristics of the algorithms accompanied by some examples and illustrations in an attempt to discover the strengths and weaknesses. The paper thus gives an in depth view of the K Means algorithms, discusses the appropriateness of the algorithms, and also gives guidance to researchers of text mining concerning the choice of K Means for text clustering. Keywords: text mining, text clustering, clusters, and K Means.

Search Engines Searching for Trouble? Comparing Search Engine Operator Responsibility for Competitive Keyword Advertising Under EU and US Trademark Law

In both the EU and the US, trademark owners have sued search engine operators for using their trademarks as triggers in competitive keyword advertising. EU and US courts have taken a different approach to search engine operator liability for such invisible keyword use. The article outlines these different approaches and argues that the ECJ made the right decision when it pushed search engine operator liability outside the realm of trademark law in Google v. Louis Vuitton. However, after this decision, search engine operator liability in the EU is all but clear.

Liability of search engines for sponsored and natural results – the case of Google

The latest opinion of European Court of Justice (ECJ) Advocate General Poiares Maduro acknowledged the legality of the AdWords service offered by the Google search engine. If this conclusion is accepted by the ECJ, then search engines such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN will not have to change their current keyword selection practices. This does not mean, though, that location tool providers will definitely be exempted from liability for trademark infringements. The advocate general made it clear that search engine operators may be liable under national law for trademark infringement, and will not be able to rely on the limitation of liability for hosting services in Directive 2000/31/EC on electronic commerce. The situation might be different with respect to natural search services, which may fall under the application of liability exemptions in Directive 2000/31/EC. The present contribution will analyse the consequences of this interpretation for information society service providers in the European Union (EU).

Implications on cerebellar function from information coding

One function of the cerebellar cortex is to process information. There are at least two types of information. Temporal information is encoded in the timing pattern of action and synaptic potentials, whereas structural information is encoded in the spatial pattern of the cerebellar synaptic circuitry. Intuitively, analysis of highly complex information in the time domain would require a cerebellar cortex with structural complexity to match. Information theory offers a way to estimate quantitatively both types of information and thereby helps to test hypotheses or advance theories of cerebellar neurobiology. These estimates suggest: (i) That the mossy-fiber-granule-cell system carries far more (temporal) information than the climbing fiber system, (ii) that Purkinje cells extract only a fraction of the (temporal) information from their afferents, and (iii) that the cerebellar cortex has a large (spatial) information coding capacity. Concerning information, one can argue that the cerebellar cortex analyzes temporal information in its afferents as a search engine, in search of coincidental mossy fiber events based on timing cues provided by climbing fiber events. Results of successive searches are continuously being converted into structural information encoded in the spatial distribution pattern of granule-cell-Purkinje-cell synapses along granule cell axons, thereby providing an adaptive and indeed self-correcting dimension to the structural information code. The search engine operation involves cellular mechanisms acting on temporal events and is part of an associative learning process. The conversion and generation of structural information involves neuroplasticity mechanisms acting at the synaptic level, with electrophysiological as well as structural consequences, and may be part of the short- and long-term memory process. These and other attributes qualify the cerebellar cortex as a dynamic information processing center, contributing to memory and learning while linking motor output with sensory events.

Liability for Adwords Services in France

The famous 2003 Google case raised for the first time the issue of Google's liability, not as a search engine operator but as a service provider offering paid positioning, namely the adwords services. Adwords services consist in key word rental services used to promote business activities by sponsored links. The key words are likely to increase the number of clicks on the advertiser's own websites since they correspond to the competitor's prior trademark rights. As Google gets paid on a payper-click basis for this service, it shares its clients' interest to get the promoted websites visited by more and more of the focussed users The Nanterre Court gave a decision in which Google was considered as trademark counterfeiter for not hav- ing checked third parties trademark rights regarding the keywords reserved by advertisers and by offering the purchase of keywords in its keyword suggestion tool without performing a preliminary trademark serious search. The purpose of the article is to present the line of French decisions that followed the 2003 Google case. The case law allowed the Paris and the Nanterre courts to express their position in relation to adwords services on different aspects. An examination of the case law leads to an overall updated evaluation of this topic.

Code of Conduct Transparency in the Net: Search Engines

1. The Search Engine operators inform the users about the way in which the Search Engine works; particularly the basic criteria of ranking are explained. Also, the Search Engine operators describe which ways of manipulating websites (spamming) lead to exclusion from the result lists in case of doubt. 2. The Search Engine operators design their sites in the most transparent way. Contents whose position on the result list is due to a commercial arrangement are clearly marked. 3. It is the intention of the Search Engine operators to protect children and youths from morally damaging contents. To this purpose, the operators provide family filters and point out to the fact that filters do not guarantee absolute protection for youths and that children should not

United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit: Milton D. Goldenberg and Immunomedics, Inc., v. Cytogen, Inc., and C.R. Bard, Inc. (03-1409)

Biotechnology Law ReportVol. 23, No. 5 TextsUnited States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit: Milton D. Goldenberg and Immunomedics, Inc., v. Cytogen, Inc., and C.R. Bard, Inc. (03-1409)Published Online:18 Oct 2004https://doi.org/10.1089/blr.2004.23.639AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited byContract Disputes: Using Survey Data to Reach a Fair, Comprehensive and Sensible SolutionSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 41Search Engines Searching for Trouble? Comparing Search Engine Operator Responsibility for Competitive Keyword Advertising Under EU and US Trademark LawSSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 33Contract Law TheorySSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. 44 Volume 23Issue 5Oct 2004 InformationCopyright 2004, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.To cite this article:United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit: Milton D. Goldenberg and Immunomedics, Inc., v. Cytogen, Inc., and C.R. Bard, Inc. (03-1409).Biotechnology Law Report.Oct 2004.639-648.http://doi.org/10.1089/blr.2004.23.639Published in Volume: 23 Issue 5: October 18, 2004PDF download

Moving e-commerce with PIVOTS: private information viewing offering total safety

We present a technology which enables wide-scale deployment of a unique and powerful data access and search tool. This tool makes it possible for content owners on the Internet to offer end-users the ability to search, assess, or otherwise examine their nondisclosable private data. The end-users may use arbitrary, distrusted assessment algorithms and receive the results which are produced. These results take the form of a meaningful digest, e.g., a useful statistic, a relevance assessment, etc. There exists some controllable danger of information theft which, however, is quantitatively dependent on system parameters and can be tuned accordingly. We consider a broad class of practical applications where brute force attacks exist which are easier and cheaper to implement than an attack through appropriately configured PIVOTS, making our system, effectively, very trustworthy. The actual creation of the search algorithm may be performed by the end-users themselves in specialized applications, or by third-party search-engine operators who offer their services to end-users. Sophisticated data mining technologies which are very often not directly available to content owners can thus be exploited to mine even private data collections. Users discovering interesting items in private data sets may purchase this specific data, but other desirable exploitation possibilities are also analyzed. A novel business model is presented and its potential for great impact on e-commerce is explored. Three diverse and important real-world applications are presented in conclusion.