I’ve had enough of the anti-Google hysteria
Newspaper CEOs and publishers are in San Diego this week, rattling cages and making threats about aggregated news “misappropriating” their news.
Meanwhile, their techies — back home in their newsrooms — are madly tweaking the settings and design of their home pages in hopes of attracting more aggregating search-engine robots. Because despite the hot air billowing out of San Diego, Google drives traffic to news sites. A lot of traffic.
Did you know that newspapers have the power — right now, this instant — to stop Google News from “stealing” their content?
I didn’t until yesterday. Danny Sullivan, formerly of the Orange County Register, set us straight in this post.
Danny writes:
Let’s go on up to Rupert Murdoch, who says Google’s stealing his copyright in a recent Forbes article:
“Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?” asked the News Corp. chief at a cable industry confab in Washington, D.C., Thursday. The answer, said Murdoch, should be, ” ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ “
Let me help you with that, Rupert. I’m going to save you all those potential legal fees plus needing to even speak further about the evil of the Big G with two simple lines. Get your tech person to change your robots.txt file to say this:
Done. Do that, you’re outta Google. All your pages will be removed, and you needn’t worry about Google listing the Wall Street Journal at all.
Interesting, huh? It’s another must-read. Find it here.
So enough of the Google News-threatening bullshit, please, AP. If your members don’t want unpaid internet traffic to their sites, cut Google off. Google won’t mind; it has plenty of other stuff to aggregate.
It’s not the aggregators that are ruining the news business. It’s the business people who are ruining the news business.
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NOTE:
Please take note — We took a screen snapshot of that sample code and placed it here in the blog as a jpeg. In theory, we shouldn’t have to do that. but we’re taking no chances. We here at the blog love our search-engine traffic.
April 8th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Didn’t anyone learn any lessons from the fights against Napster and YouTube? Clamping down your content and suing people doesn’t work.
April 8th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
I have too. The people talking about this are freaking idiots who do not understand how the Internet works. If anything, Google is protecting them from their own lack of understanding of the viral nature of content.
Google’s been saying for years that they want newspapers to do well. Why aren’t these idiots listening?
April 8th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
I agree. News will be gotten by users one way or another, and closing your links off to the biggest aggregator of information on the Internet won’t bring you any more users (surprising, I know).
The internet is all about free flow of information and history (while short) has shown that those who oppose this principle fail. Newspapers should be making themselves more relevant on the Internet, not less.
April 8th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Fo’ Shizzle!