Pages

Thursday, January 06, 2005

Impact of search engines no privacy

Findlaw have another interestnig piece on "The Impact of Search Engines on Private Citizen Litigation"

"The problem addressed here is not the necessarily the existence of litigation information within an individual's search results, but rather, the prominent positioning of the information within the results. A logical question arises, "Why would a court opinion show up prominently in an individual's search results?"

This "prominent placement" phenomenon occurs for a combination of reasons: 1) Judicial filings that contain individuals' names are public records that enjoy stringent Constitutional protection and are now published online; 2) Search engine technology has reached such an advanced level of sophistication that virtually all online content can be checked for query term matches; and 3) Secondary publishers of judicial information participate in the attention economy of the Internet and use search engine optimization techniques to appear at or near the top of search result rankings."

No comments:

Post a Comment