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THE HIGH COURT has been told that a defamation case taken by the owners of a Co Louth hotel – who claimed Google had allowed the hotel to be defamed in its ‘auto-complete’ tool – has been withdrawn.
Oliver Quinn Sr, Oliver Quinn Jr and Niall Quinn, and Ballymascanlon Holdings Ltd – all representing the Ballymascanlon House Hotel in Co Louth – had initiated defamation proceedings against the search engine over the appearance of the word ‘receivership’ as a suggested search query.
They claimed that Google had defamed the business by allowing the word to appear as a suggested term – saying the business would appear to be in some kind of financial trouble, when no such problems had arisen.
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The action had originally been taken against Google’s Irish holding company, Google Ireland Ltd, with the Californian-based Google Inc – which actually runs and manages the search function on the site – later added as a co-defendant.
Yesterday, when the High Court was to decide on whether to transfer the case to the Commercial Court, Justice Peter Kelly was told the case had been resolved.
While no terms of settlement were disclosed, TheJournal.ie understands that a payment was not agreed, nor did Google agreed to remove any of the terms mentioned in the case.
In a statement, Google said it was “pleased this case has been withdrawn”, and that the auto-complete suggestions were produced and updated through objective factors including the popularity of search terms.
“Google does not manually select these terms, and all of the millions of queries shown in Autocomplete have been typed previously by other Google users,” it said.
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This has happened and failed before. It’s my personal opinion that the housing system was flawed. People were permitted to make homes here for decades. They should only have ever been temporary accomodation with a maximum 2 year occupancy. The dept allowed this to get out of hand and now their only solution is to boot people out on their ears. There are hardship cases here and elderly people who don’t want to leave the only home they have ever know for decades. The dept have no comprehension of peoples attachment to their homes. While not every case may be genuine there are elderly widows who have been living there for decades and this crass scaremongering public eviction statements from the dept quite frankly sicken me. There are better ways to approach this.
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