Internet search engines go on trial

“THESE search engines think they are private companies, but they’re not. How many times a day do you search using one of these engines? They’re everywhere, and it’s disingenuous of them to act as if they’re not public.” So says attorney Tim Hanigan of Lang, Hanigan & Carvalho in Los Angeles. Hanigan is representing Avi Datner, founder of party supply website Partypop.com, who last month filed a lawsuit against the search engine Yahoo. Datner claims that last year his website was suddenly removed from Yahoo’s search results. When he complained, the site allegedly reappeared for about a month and then mysteriously vanished again. Datner and Hanigan allege that Yahoo is manually altering…