Google to Newspapers: Take your toys and go home!
I’m constantly amazed but never shocked by the constant departures into utter idiocy undertaken by main stream media, in this case a number of European newspapers who have become signatories of the “Hamburg Declaration”. (Scroll down to the “Note to Editors” to see the declaration).
The following extract is the piece that got my attention, and Google’s apparently.
Universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost. We disagree with those who maintain that freedom of information is only established when everything is available at no cost.
Universal access to our services should be available, but going forward we no longer wish to be forced to give away property without having granted permission.
Essentially this says in about as simple terms as I can make it: “Don’t crawl our content without paying us for it.”
Now I suspect that all the major search engines will have some sort of response lined up to this but my hat goes off to Josh Cohen, Google’s Senior Business Product Manager for his response:
For more than a decade, search engines have routinely checked for permissions before fetching pages from a web site. Millions of webmasters around the world, including news publishers, use a technical standard known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) to tell search engines whether or not their sites, or even just a particular web page, can be crawled. Webmasters who do not wish their sites to be indexed can and do use the following two lines to deny permission:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /If a webmaster wants to stop us from crawling a specific page, he or she can do so by adding ‘<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex”>‘ to the page. In short, if you don’t want to show up in Google search results, it doesn’t require more than one or two lines of code. And REP isn’t specific to Google; all major search engines honor its commands.
To paraphrase Josh’s well written post into more everyday talk: “Nobody’s asking you to play. If you don’t like it, quit your whining, pick up your toys and go home. You’ve always been able to, so put up or shut up. Let’s see how long you last without us!”
Bravo! About time Google!
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