Australian Estate Agents Throw A Defamation Suit On Google!

Two real estate agents in Victoria, Australia have launched a defamation case against search engine giant Google. In their filed case, they have claimed or rather blamed Google for directing the users to an article on a web site that defamed them.

According to ABC news, the counsel representing Mark Forytarz and Paul Castran had appeared in the Victorian Supreme Court for a directions hearing, where they filed the defamation suit stating that their clients had been defamed by articles found through Google internet searches.

The articles, the actual root cause of this case, claimed that Mark Forytarz had bullied a mentally challenged man into selling his home, so as to earn his commission. The article also stated that Paul Castran has used fake bidders to inflate the prices of properties that he was selling.

Thus Forytarz & Castran have suffered embarrassment & humiliation as a result of the article. So they had asked Google to remove the links to the article, but Google did not comply. Therefore, now they have sued Google for defamation.

However, in all this battle, Neil Jenman, on whose website the articles where featured still stands clean and unbruised. And it certainly raises a few questions like, Why aren't they suing the website which actually features the article? Or Can Google be held legally responsible for defamation for featuring the articles in its search results?

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!