Yahoo! faces lawsuit for spam

A woman has filed a lawsuit against Yahoo! over allegations that search engine optimisation led her to a spam site with her name on it.

Reported in Eric Goldman's blog, he explains that Bev Stayart claims to be the only person with that name on the internet and therefore any reference to this name must be a reference to her.

Mr Goldman noted that if this were true it would give her "exclusionary power over every internet reference containing those names", but that he would be shocked if this were the case.

And Search Engine Land's Barry Schwartz states that he finds details of the case "pretty humorous".

He notes that Ms Stayart ran a search for her name through Yahoo! which came up with seven results and she clicked on one which redirected her to mysharedvideo.com, where an adult movie was played.

At this point her anti-virus and malware tools detected malware and viruses, but she searched for "her name plus an erectile dysfunction drug's brand name", Mr Goldman said, which leads her Norton anti-virus tool to display another warning.

Mr Goldman concluded: "It would be ridiculous for her to argue that her name is so well-recognised that readers would assume that the references were to her."

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