Eric Goldman alerts us to the latest questionable lawsuit against a search engine — this time involving a woman suing Yahoo due to her unhappiness concerning search results on her own name. You have to read Goldman’s full description of the case — I can’t do it justice — but the woman appears to claim that she’s an important figure and the only one in the world with her name (Beverly Stayart or Bev Stayart), and was greatly upset to find that when she searched on her name, there were links to questionable sites — some of which showed adult videos or had her antivirus software warn her of malicious attacks. It’s unclear why the woman thinks she owns the rights to all search results on her name, but it seems quite likely that Section 230 safe harbors should protect Yahoo from any sort of liability. Of course, with articles like this one and Goldman’s, it seems likely that search results will show plenty of other links now as well.
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