What's so bad about Google?

I remember realizing the potential of the internet when I first heard of and used Yahoo as a search engine in the mid nineties.

Without a search engine, I would never have found out about RoR.

I visit plenty of sites that require that you register to use theeir services and that require you either to watch preliminary or popup or adjunct advertising.

And I link to such sites.

But Rupert Murdoch, whose advertising I see all the time, has a beef with Google, because it links me to his articles.

Murdoch vs The Internet

Google does not steal his content and rebrand it and sell it to me as if it had produced it.

Yet Murdoch has a problem with the fact that they index his articles.

What is the beef here?

Google indexes plenty of premium porno and other content you can't access without payment even if you know the address. Is Murdoch stupider or less resourced than "bang my big brown ass dot com"?

What, exactly, is the property rights complaint that Fox has against Google? I don't see it.

Post 1

Saturday, January 9, 2010 - 4:12pm

Google has money. Murdoch wants some of it. So he's putting out stories about arranging with Microsoft's Bing search-engine to have Bing pay Fox money for the rights to be the sole search-indexer, as part of a negotiating stance with Google.

Or, at least, that's the consensus I've heard from people I've talked to who are interested in the story.

Post 2

Saturday, January 9, 2010 - 4:31pm

Murdock, and everyone else that has web property knows (or ought to know) that a simple html meta-tag in the heading of a page will stop all search bots and his articles will disappear from all search engine results.

{meta name="robots" content="noindex"}

and/or with a log-in site (like RoR, where pages your browser receives are generated or retrieved at the time of request, there is nothing for a bot to crawl if it can't log-in with a valid password/ID.

These are very common practices - and baby-level issues for web developers.

So, in my mind, there is something going on that we are not privy to... some agenda not being mentioned.

Post 3

Sunday, January 10, 2010 - 10:56am