Yesterday Oracle announced in an exceptionally brief and direct press release that it had filed a lawsuit against Google. The statement issued by Oracle spokesperson Karen Tillman simply said: “In developing Android, Google knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle’s Java-related intellectual property. This lawsuit seeks appropriate remedies for their infringement.”
UPDATE: It could be a HOAX! See below!
But someone at Google didn’t find this amusing and seemingly tampered with Google’s search algorithm and database by eliminating Oracle altogether.
See what the search revealed below at approximately 3:00pm Eastern Time.:
By approximately 6:00 pm Eastern Time things seemed back to normal with Google search, someone apparently getting wind that some intentionally harmful and malicious behavior was engaged in by someone somewhere.
See image below, which was captured at approximately 8:00 pm Eastern Time:
“It seems that removing Oracle from the Google search database would be an intentional tort and actionable under a variety of unfair business practice theories. Whether Google wants to admit it or not their search engine has become something of a public facility. As a result, arbitrarily and capriciously denying any individual or company access smacks of censorship and a high handedness that would result in the unilateral selection of winners and losers. With the power of Google they cannot be allowed to do something like this because if they can do it to Oracle they could do it to me or you or many others who would have little recourse,” says this report at IPWatchDog.
UPDATE: The comments at the end of that thread make an interesting read. Says a reader Benjamin:
Did you actually type “oracle” in to the search engine and hit submit, or just follow somebody’s link? Because I can recreate your first screenshot with a simple encoding trick. I would believe that you’ve simply been tricked, but given that your screenshot is conveniently cropped I can’t dismiss the possibility that you already knew about this…
