SearchKing vs Google round 12

The SearchKing vs Google lawsuit has entered a more public phase of served documents.

SearchKing go on to enhance their reputation by wanting to charge $20 dollars for access to the documents, whilst Google has placed the same documents in the public domain for free via lawmeme. There is also some legal analysis of the case.

One of Google's fundamental points is summed up thus:

'The PageRank values assigned by Google are not susceptible to being proved true or false by objective evidence. How could SearchKing ever "prove" that its ranking should "truly" be a 4 or a 6 or a 8? Certainly, SearchKing is not suggesting that each one of the billions of web pages ranked by Google are subject to another "truer" evaluation? If it believes so, it is certainly free to develop its own search services using the criteria it deems most appropriate.'

The SearchKing arguments essentially boil down to search engines cost businesses money (through the use of bandwidth when spidering) or through paid inclusion programs, and webmasters get nothing in return:

Case in point. Yahoo just bought Inktomi for close to a quarter of a BILLION dollars. Was that for technology or for the content or for both. If it was either for the content or for both, then where is your percentage? Are you going to be getting a check [sic - US spelling] for your part of that content?

Apart from the traffic they drive to sites of course, or in SearchKing's case, the revenue it was attempting to derive by selling PageRank.