How Did She Not See This Coming?

At this point, most people have Googled themselves. Unfortunately, if you Google yourself, it's entirely possible (and dare I say likely?) that there's going to be at least on thing on the results you're not happy about. Now, most people either ignore the results or, if it really matters, start checking out all the blogs and websites dedicated to managing your online reputation and some go as far as to hire a company to fix their online reputation. If you haven't looked into this yet, online reputation management is pretty simple: If you don't like the Google results for your name, do things that will cause more favorable results to be ranked higher. Start a Twitter. Set up a Google profile. Blog.

Easy enough, right?

Well, not for Beverly Stayart. When she entered her name in Yahoo (and quite a few people would say that using Yahoo was mistake one), she didn't like the results. Apparently, her name was associated with, among other things, erectile dysfunction drugs. I'm still not entirely clear as to why this happened, since, according to the write-up in Lowering the Bar, her internet preference focused on "humanitarian efforts on behalf of baby seals, wolves, and wild horses; what she describes as 'scholarly posts' on a website; two poems that appear on a Danish website; and genealogy research." But, that's not important to the story. What's important to the story is that she decided that her best recourse was to sue Yahoo and Google. The court didn't find in her favor (at least in the Yahoo), so she was right back to where she started...except a little worse. Well, a lot worse.

Now, if you Google "Beverly Stayart," a lot of the results involve Stayart v. Yahoo! In fact, the top result is a Techdirt entry that documents another lawsuit she's filed against Yahoo. Turns out that Yahoo now autosuggests "bev stayart levitra" after entering "bev stayart." After a little digging a bit, Techdirt discovered the reason for this. In the dismissal, the judge wrote "Stayart alleges that Yahoo! and Overture knowingly connected and continues to connect her name (Bev Stayart) with sexual dysfunction drugs Cialis, Viagra and Levitra on its search engine results for her."

I'm still struggling to understand the logic behind this suit. Even if Stayart had succeeded, this is the sort of case that would get a lot of attention. Assuming that the judge had ordered Yahoo and Google to get rid original results, the new results would still feature some pretty unflattering stories about Stayart, in addition to describing the original results that led to the suit. To use a high school example, it would be like having a handful of students passing around an unflattering story about one of their classmates, Student A, and A demanding that the principal call an assembly and announce that the original unflattering story wasn't true to the entire student body. If that happened, not only would everyone (including people who would had never even heard of A) know the original rumor, but they would also know A as the person who overreacted and demanded that the principal drag them all to the gym for the assembly. As far as damage control goes, it pretty much misses the entire point.