The country's first "brushing case" was pronounced Baidu was awarded 2.05 million yuan

Because it believed that the network company helped users create false click data and disrupt the sorting results by setting up advertising task release platforms and other acts, the plaintiff, Beijing Baidu Netcom Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Baidu"), sued the defendant Shenzhen I Love Network Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "I Love Network") to the court, demanding that the defendant be ordered to eliminate the impact and compensate for economic losses and reasonable expenses totaling 5 million yuan.

After trial, the Haidian court ruled in the first instance that I Love Network published the newspaper to eliminate the impact and compensate for economic losses of 2 million yuan and reasonable expenses of 50,000 yuan. This case is the first case in China involving an unfair competition dispute involving artificial brushing platform interfering with search engine algorithms.

Baidu I love the network to induce clicks to disturb objective sorting

The plaintiff, Baidu, claimed that the plaintiff invested huge costs every year to operate the Baidu search engine. The defendant is the main operator of the website "I Love Advertising Task Network". The plaintiff found that the defendant helped induce website users to set up and click search tasks by setting up an advertising task publishing platform, and took advantage of the objective situation in Baidu's search sorting algorithm that the user's click behavior occupied a certain proportion of the algorithm, helping users to create false click data and disrupt the original objective sorting results.

The defendant's actions pushed the wrongful website to a higher position in the search results, thereby harming the interests of consumers. In the act of unfair competition, the defendant sought improper benefits by extracting gold coins from users and realizing traffic. The defendant's conduct disrupted the order of competition and constituted unfair competition.

I love the network argues that it is equivalent to offline "center introduction" behavior

The defendant, I Love Network, argued that the defendant did not use any technical means to obstruct or destroy the plaintiff's network products.

The defendant did not violate the provisions of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law and generally accepted business ethics, nor did it harm the legitimate rights and interests of the plaintiff. The defendant introduced his users to the plaintiff's website through his own website, and completed the search operation on the plaintiff's website independently, which is equivalent to the offline "introduction in the middle" behavior, although it did not have the consent of the plaintiff, but it did not violate the subjective will of the user who carried out the act, nor did it cause losses to the plaintiff, and would not adversely affect the plaintiff's goodwill. The defendant has voluntarily terminated the conduct involved in the case.

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Court: "Doing a task" is fake traffic

After trial, the court held that the plaintiff had a legitimate commercial interest that could be protected. Baidu, which is operated by the plaintiff, provides search engine network services. The plaintiff was responsible for the true, clean and reliable data involved in its search engine services, had legitimate and legitimate business interests, and was protected by the Anti-Unfair Competition Law.

Regarding the nature of the conduct being prosecuted. I love network directly for Baidu search engine for customized operation. The defendant guided the user to carry out the operation service against the plaintiff's search rule when it was aware of the plaintiff's search rule. There are clear "task" setting guidelines and "doing tasks" guidelines on the website of I Love Network, which not only help the "send task" users to complete the settings of the task, but also help the "task" user to make the task and get the corresponding rewards, and finally help the "task" user to complete the purpose of brushing clicks to the target website to improve the ranking in the search engine results.

The defendant also set up a VIP model and a "bidding model" to expand the scale of brushing volume, so that the defendant could obtain higher economic benefits. The means of the alleged behavior is to help and guide the traffic demand side to publish the demand task, through the "profit" as bait, induce the "task" user disguised as a normal user to complete the brushing task, the purpose of which is to meet the brush volume needs of the "task" user, interfere with the search engine algorithm, and improve the search ranking, and its behavior is essentially the operation of the trading platform for the search engine to manually create false clicks.

The act complained of is improper. Baidu analyzes the data related to the results of the click search engine through algorithms, and if it is based on untrue access data, Baidu will make a wrong algorithmic judgment, so that the distance between users and the websites they need increases, and ultimately leads to the loss of competitive advantage in the search engine network service industry. The business model of I Love Network will generate invalid traffic, which cannot truly reflect the needs of users and the market, so that users spend more time and cost to search for their demand websites, or make wrong judgments based on false click data, thus making Baidu lose the trust of users and reduce its competitive advantage.

For network users who display search engine search results, the so-called "traffic" obtained through the "task" of I Love Network is itself unstable and unreal, and cannot make search result network users get real "traffic". For other search result network users, the traffic obtained by "doing tasks" also makes other network users rank low in the search results, reducing the relative position of users who do not get traffic through "doing tasks", so that they eventually lose their fair competitive position and competitive opportunities.

The defendant's business model allowed a large amount of false data to flow into the search logic of the search engine, resulting in errors in the transmission of market information and distorting the business model of the search engine. In the long run, if this model is not regulated, it will flood the search engine with false clicks, which will seriously interfere with the algorithm and logic of the search engine.

The defendant's act of inflating the number of clicks on the target website was essentially to create false user search needs, make the search results appear more compatible with the keywords, increase the weight of the target website in the search engine, and interfere with the ranking algorithm of the plaintiff's search engine, which not only increased the cost of Baidu Company's maintenance of normal search operation services, destroyed the normal service environment provided by the plaintiff, but also disrupted the order of market competition, constituting an act of unfair competition regulated in Article 2 of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law. In the end, the court considered that the defendant's subjective intent was obvious, the impact of the alleged act of unfair competition was relatively large, and the defendant did not truthfully present evidence in this case.

The case is currently pending appeal.

Source: Beijing Youth Daily