A few days ago to my own blog, I linked to a California story about a fellow suing a local paper because they had referred to him as an “armed stalker” in a headline and this caused any Google searches on his name to be polluted by the accusation. He also feels this has hurt his business interests.

Clearly because he doesn’t understand how the Google cache works, the California man has expressed a willingness to settle, if the paper would just change their archived title. Unfortunately for him, though, the news articles and blogposts about his lawsuit has only increased the occurrence of the “armed stalker” label and now, thanks to his own lawsuit, it’ll take years for tie-in to work its way down the Google results.

Mr. Francis doesn’t appear to be a complete idiot. So, I can only assume that he’s filed this lawsuit in hopes of getting a payday, perhaps as some form of revenge or to get fifteen more minutes in the public eye. As Gaby said in response to the notice of suit, “Joe Francis” +rapist produces something like 165,000 Google hits (including his Wikipedia page) and because of the discussion surrounding the court action or the fact that “alleged” would have no bearing on search results, it’ll only go up exponentially over the course of this action, which may not bode well for Mr. Francis’s future endeavors.

I mean, what’s he going to do — Attach a court finding proclaiming him not a rapist to all business proposals?