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Actual headline reads: UK judge gives Google a choice: Either let SEO expert read your ranking algos or withdraw High Court evidence

Tough choice for adtech monolith in Foundem case

Lengthy El Reg headlines are a pain for posting.

Yeah, the court basically wants to have one of the biggest companies on the planet divulge a large part of their core IP (money maker) to a person who's interest align to game that IP.

I wouldn't be surprised if Google were to just flat out deny this and tell the country to pound sand at that point.

On the other hand, they disclosed those documents in the court proceeding (I'm assuming they didn't have to, if they can withdraw it now). So it seems the court is just asking them to follow normal discovery procedure, in allowing the other side to actually look at the facts. Google's barrister should've probably expected something like this.

This case is highly interesting though, and should give pause to any company operating off opaque algorithms it can't explain. Personally, I don't object to this, just like personal data, it isn't all upsides - if you're profiting of these things, you need to accept the downsides, too.

To be honest, I'm more surprised Google can't lay out why they were de-ranked in some other way. While it might give some insight, surely it's better than revealing the entire algo? (edit: I guess that might open the door to further, exploratory lawsuits)

> pound sand

High Court Judge : comply/co-operate or I will make an order to Nominet to suspend your domain at the DNS level until such time that you do.

I would be surprised if Google’s (presumably not cheap) UK legal reps would let them be so rash.

I’m sure you can’t just “read the algorithms”, they’re not all designed as a bunch of long human interpretable strings that get concatenated together like some massive regex.