Did Google kill Anna Nicole Smith?

February 21st, 2007

The bodyguard who tried to revive Anna Nicole Smith in her hotel room has spoken out for the first time, telling the New York Post that Smith was becoming extremely depressed during the last days of her life.

“She always had a laptop and she Googled her name, and she would read these articles that spoke badly about her,” said the bodyguard, who goes by the name of Big Moe. “She was just, was sad about that.”

Moe said he was especially worried about Smith during her final four days in Florida, because her baby daughter Dannielynn was in the Bahamas and not around to cheer her up.

Although I’d expect all of us have done a vanity search on Google at least once for our own name, how would you feel if all you could see on the front page was negative stories about yourself?

That brings me to thinking that what would happen if a top result from Google was a page slandering you - could Google be legally asked to remove that page from their results if you can’t get in contact with the original site? I’d doubt it, and don’t think that they *should* be held responsible for their search results (Come on Germany/China, stop trying to censor the net!), but can you imagine how frustrating and upsetting it would be to have untrue things said about you which are shown to anyone interested in searching for you?

I think that would help push any unstable person over the edge.