GOOGLE HAS said it will appeal a French court’s decision to award damages to a man who claimed he was defamed by harmful online search results attached to his name.
The man, whose name has not been released for legal reasons, said the suggested terms that came up when typing his name into Google’s search engine included “rapist”, “satanist” and “prison”.
He had previously been given a suspended sentence on charges of corrupting a minor, court documents showed, although the conviction was not as yet definitive.
The court ruled that the search engine’s linking his name to such damaging terms was defamatory. It ordered the company to pay €5,000 towards the plaintiffs costs and awarded him symbolic damages of €1.
“It is without doubt that the association of the applicant’s family name with the following words or qualifiers – ‘rape’, ‘convicted’, ‘satanist’, ‘prison’ and ‘rapist’ – is anything but devoid of significance,” the court’s ruling stated.
Google said it would appeal the ruling. In a statement, the company said its “Google Suggest” function – which offers users suggestions on how to complete search strings – simply reflected the most common sequences of words used in the past, and that it was not Google itself that was making the suggestions.
“It is important to point out that Google Suggest is an aggregate of the most popular searches based on past requests from users. Google does not suggest these terms,” the company said.
The ruling comes as the Californian firm continues to encounter resistance in Europe over its expanding services. Germany’s government has called for Google to come up with privacy guidelines amid controversy over its Street View service, a virtual tour of cities based on photographs taken on street level.
In France, its book digitisation project has provoked anger from government ministers and resulted in President Nicolas Sarkozy pledging to increase funding for France’s own digitisation project, known as Gallica, with the injection of €750 million. “We won’t let ourselves be stripped of our heritage for the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is,” Mr Sarkozy said at the time of the announcement.
Hoping to put its strained relationship with French authorities behind it, Google began a charm offensive here this month by announcing the creation of a “European cultural institute” in Paris and major investment in French education.