Not everyone likes to be indexed, or to tell more precisely, not every content publisher wants its webpages to be crawled and cached by search engines. This might seem ludicrous at a time when most of us – albeit the small website owners – feel heavenly when Google pays quick trips to our site to take note of new pages added.
The world is however more strange than we like to imagine. 2 recent events in Belgium and Australia prove so. First, about the Belgian case.
In August last, Copiepresse, a Belgian publisher’s group, sued Google and won a court’s ruling in September, which asks the search-giant to remove the publishers’ content from the Google’s Belgian search site and Google News. See Reuters’ Sep 22 report here.
Google though, having complied with court’s ruling, has appealed against it, which is likely to be heard later this month. Google’s statement here.
The fact is website owners can indeed opt out of crawling and storing of data by search engines. The Belgian publishers however feel that reproducing their content in the first place is itself an infringement of copyright law. Interestingly, instead of fighting out in court as Google is doing, Microsoft has voluntarily agreed to erase links to Belgian newspapers from its search engines and news publishers. Read the story.
The Australian case now. On the face of it, it’s too stringent compared to the Belgian court ruling. The Australian senate is considering enacting a legislation that presumably wants search engines to seek prior permission from website owners before crawling and storing their webpages. Here’s the Nov 7 AFP story.
Predictably, Google is alarmed at such an Australian prospect. Here is what its representative has to say:
Given the vast size of the Internet, it is impossible for a search engine to contact personally each owner of a web page to determine whether the owner desires its web page to be searched, indexed or cached.
Quite so, don’t you think? But then..
Technorati Tags: google, google news, search engine, copiepresse, microsoft
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