login |
register |
problems logging in?
My Running Goal
- I've been running a bunch lately, and it feels great. In fact, I continuously get notifications from Runkeeper.com that I've bea...
The Economist: Web Wide War
26 November 2009, 2:46am
A simple idea that is horrifying when thought out completely: restrict search engines' abilities to index your site in exchange for a load of cash from the search engine that can index your site.
That's what people are talking about now, after Rupert Murdoch started complaining about Google showing too much content in their search restults, and after Jason Calacanis wrote about how to "kill google... in six months".
What bothers me about Murdoch, head of News Corp, complaining that Google is showing too much of their articles without payment, threatening to sue, is that Google is arguably helping his papers. According to Hitwise, about a quarter of their traffic comes from Google. Clearly he doesn't want Google to play fair — he wants to have his cake and eat it too. And what kills me is that his bitching is threatening the web as we see it.
If News Corp and Bing go through with this, then Google, and other search engines, will lose a little of its value (and in turn, all search engines will take a similar hit). In terms of competition, that's understandable and okay. But that means you'll need to remember which search engine to use to find the article you read a while back and need to find again. That means that searching news on Google could show completely different results than searching on Bing or Yahoo!. This means that search engines could eventually become somehow politically charged (imagine if Bing's biggest customer in the news world was Fox News, but Google's was CNN. That would change the way people saw events).
This is, in my opinion, related to how Apple censored a dictionary app on the iPhone because it contained dirty words (as most dictionaries do, i imagine).
This is very frightening.
comments
Benji!
[26 November 2009]"But that means you'll need to remember which search engine to use to find the article you read a while back and need to find again."
No. No, it means never using their sites. Because you don't want to support them in any way. Ever. So, because they are removing themselves from the Google index, it solves that problem for you.
I don't think it is frightening. I think it is stupid of them. I think they are the kid with the trampoline that gets upset that you can jump higher and doesn't let you play anymore (or maybe some other better analogy). They are definitely irrelevant now if the only way they can think of turning around their failing business is to make it harder for customers to come to their website. But they desperately want to be relevant so they are grasping, reaching.
But it won't work. My mom isn't going to switch to Bing, neither is my dad. Neither are the majority of the people I know. People use whatever search engine is either in their browser or shows up on their homepage.
For most people, they don't choose where they search. they just know what they use and that's what they use.
No one is going to miss the sites that are pulled from the Google index because they won't know what they are missing. They'll search for news and get 50 other articles on the topic and click on one of those. They won't even know they missed something. It isn't like Google is going to say "We'd live to show you [this] article but can't. Sorry!" No, ignorance is bliss and people won't even skip a beat.
If they do want the wall street journal, they'll go to its website.
And frankly I don't want to support websites that run their businesses in such a matter. So, let them leave. All it does is prove that they don't matter. And good riddance!
THE Lowly Peon
[26 November 2009]bentomas: You raise very valid points. And I think that is very true for me as well. I suppose I'm just scared because the suits have thought of yet another way to close the web a bit more for money. And regardless of whether you (or I) choose not to support them, our web would somewhat get a little smaller. Right now it's the WSJ. What if later it's some useful site that you don't know about?
I agree that ignorance is bliss, but on principle, I think it's a bad thing, and I vote to end it. I don't think Rupert will go through with it, because there's no way Google will cave at a threat like this. It is clearly a loss to WSJ, but I feel it is, in some way or another, our loss too.