Google sued by hotel over word “receivership” appearing in auto-fill results

An Irish hotel is suing internet search giant Google after the word “receivership” appeared in the auto-fill results that suggests phrases to users, with the company saying it fielded calls from concerned guests who believed the company was shutting down.

The incident has prompted some SEO experts to warn businesses they should be regularly checking their own company on Google results to ensure they aren’t being associated with negative topics or are being ranked lower than they should be.

“One of the things I highlighted recently at my talk at CeBIT was that every marketing manager should be doing the search for their company name and knowing search results are coming up,” Arrow Marketing chief executive Jasmin Batra says.

“That’s the same for key personnel as well. It’s a simple thing, but you must do it because you need to know if there are other brands ranking higher than you or other things being associated with your brand.”

The Ballymascanlon House Hotel, which dates back several hundred years, is now suing Google over the fact it appeared next to the word “receivership” in Google’s auto-fill feature.

According to Silicon Republic, the hotel has even fielded calls from people who think the hotel is shutting down.

“We would have brides looking to book 2013 weddings and it’s very hard for them to decide to pay a deposit in confidence when they see that we’re possibly in receivership and we’re not,” the hotel’s general manager, Chris Brayden, says.

“The company’s sound, we’ve been trading for 60 years. We couldn’t ignore it anymore.”

The report claims the company then sent various legal notices to Google, but threatened action after receiving no reply. Google has reportedly responded, saying “autocomplete is a feature of Google search that offers predicted searches to help you find what you’re looking for more quickly”.

“Google does not manually select these terms – all of the millions of queries shown in autocomplete have been typed previously by other Google users.”

This isn’t the first time Google has been hit with threats of legal action after users have been associated with disparaging or negative terms in search results.

In fact, the search giant was even successfully sued after an Italian man found that his name was being associated with the words “con” and “fraud” in autocomplete boxes. Damages were awarded, and at the time Google said it doesn’t think it should be responsible for autocomplete terms as they are “predicted by computer algorithms”.

At the time, the man’s lawyer explained the verdict on his personal blog. And law firm Clayton Utz even published an article explaining why such an incident could happen in Australia.

However, Batra says there could be at least some human element involved with auto-fill, as the results change depending on location and other elements.

“Logic would of course dictate that auto-fill gives results based on what people are searching for and gather all that data. But Google does know what’s going in, and there could be some human intervention in terms of what pops up.”

Either way, Batra says these types of cases indicate why companies need to be vigilant in examining how they rank on Google.

“Especially for businesses like hotels, this is important. If you want to book at a specific hotel and you find your ranking is below resellers like Wotif, then you’re not doing something right with SEO. It requires attention.”