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When is a drop-down menu more dangerous than a search box? Now I bet that's not a question you've ever considered before. Sure you might have looked at a drop-down menu from a search engine optimization point of view and decided that drop-down menus were of little value ... but dangerous? Nah ... how could they be dangerous?

Well it seems that they can be very dangerous for webmasters and owners of websites that use them. The danger has absolutely nothing to do with search engines and the way the engines might view sites that use them, instead they have a lot to do with the way the courts in the United States may view drop down menus.

A recent finding by a court after hearing a Fair Housing dispute has the potential to cause lots of problems for web sites if they use drop-down menus. After the hearing a drop-down menu is now seen as the difference between whether information contained on a website is third-party content or not.

The case in question involved Roommate.com, a site that describes itself as a roommate finder and roommate search service. This is a site that allows people to register their details so that others might find them when they're looking for a roommate and it allows those others to search for roommates on the site.

Roommate.com relies on those who are listing their details to provide genuine details on about themselves so that those who are searching for a roommate can assess whether the person who has registered would be a good fit for them.

It all sounds pretty simple but there is a legal angle to all of this. A website that provides that type of information comes under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and, up until now, has been protected because they were described as interactive computer services. But now it seems that the simple drop-down menu has changed all that.

Under the ruling handed down in the case against Roommate.com the court has decided that the drop-down menus used by the website do not fall within the meaning of Section 230. Instead of being an interactive computer service those drop-down menus now mean that Roommate.com is deemed to be an Internet content provider and so is now liable for the information that appears when a person uses those drop-down menus.

It even seems that filling in online questionnaires can also move a website from the protection of being an interactive computer service to the more exposed position of being an Internet content provider. Stop and think about the ramifications of all that for a few minutes and you'll see that things are definitely beginning to get rather scary.

Think about it for a bit longer and widen your vision to include some of your sites and the information that you have on those sites and things begin to get very scary.

Of course that initial finding is going to appeal so it may not be allowed to stand but if it does then some big names are going to start getting worried. Craigslist has already been hit with several lawsuits over very similar situations and their situation could be a little worse already because in their jurisdiction there's some case law that is not in their favor.

Some experts suggest that even Google will be affected if the ruling in the Roommate.com case is allowed to stand and then there's Adult Friend Finder. Now there is a site that would be wide open to prosecution if the Roommate.com finding isn't overturned on appeal. And sooner or later it could start to filter down to much smaller sites.

It's definitely a very interesting situation and one that we shouldn't ignore. While you and I might look at the situation here and think that it would be common sense to overturn the finding against Roommate.com the law can, and quite often does, see things in a totally different light.

Quite often common sense and what's right at law are two totally different things with absolutely no common ground whatsoever. So don't dismiss this as something that will be fixed at the appeal level. There are no guarantees that it will and even on the balance of probabilities I would suggest the odds may be against us.

But whatever the outcome, the twists and turns that the courts will go through as they try to match the law with the Internet will certainly be interesting to watch. If you want to read more about the situation as it stands at the moment then check out Webpronews.com where you will find quite a comprehensive report.

And why is a search box safer than a drop-down menu? It seems that the court may view a search box as genuinely interactive while a drop-down menu is ... well ... not so interactive ... if that makes any sense.