Klup.nl is a Dutch web site for people looking for a house. It apparently once posted some text about a car dealer named Zwartepoorte, and somewhere on the same page, another text about the bankruptcy of a totally different company. The two texts had nothing to do with each other, nor did it appear that way on the web site.

Google, in their everlasting effort to index everything, crawled the page with the mentioned texts, and generated an unfortunate summary for the page that suggested that the car dealer was bankrupt. This summary was shown when searching for “Zwartepoorte failliet” (failliet meaning bankrupt in Dutch). It appeared beneath the link to to said page on Klup.nl in the search results (you know, those grey summaries we all see every day). The summary goes as follows:

volledige naam: Zwartepoorte specialiteit BMW…Dit bedrijf is failliet verklaard, het is overgenomen door het motorhuis (…)

Literally translated: “full name: Zwartepoorte specialty BMW…This company has been declared bankrupt, it has been acquired by the motor house (…)”.

So far, there’s nothing wrong. Until John Zwartepoorte, CEO of the car dealer, used the query mentioned above on Google, and found the summary suggesting his company was bankrupt. So he sued Klup.nl, the site that originally posted both texts.

Weird, you think? Well, not according to the judge. He made a consideration between the right of free speech (don’t ask me what free speech has to do with Google botching up some text) and the interests of Zwartepoorte, and ruled ¹ that Klup.nl was indeed responsible for Google’s summary.

That’s not all, though. Free speech is a constitutional right in the Netherlands, and it has always been very liberal, there weren’t many things one couldn’t say. Discrimination and slander are some of the few things that do not fall under free speech. This judge now added to that, than whenever Google pulls things out of context, the original text must be adjusted. Rather futile, I might add, because there’s no knowing what kind of summary Google will generate for the new text on its next crawl.

Well, luckily there’s the possibility of appeal, which the owner of Klup.nl is of course pursuing. But as it is, until the appeal has been treated in court, this verdict stands. Let’s just hope Google doesn’t generate any “unfortunate” summaries of my site…

1. This page is in Dutch, here’s a translation by Google.