http://tech.blorge.com/Structure: /2007/01/19/belgian-press-sues-yahoo-google/ Technology news Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:15:02 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 hourly 1 http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:/2007/01/19/belgian-press-sues-yahoo-google/comment-page-1/#comment-3392 Gareth Powell Fri, 19 Jan 2007 20:55:43 +0000 http://tech.blorge.com/Structure: /2007/01/19/belgian-press-sues-yahoo-google/#comment-3392 Those are excellent points you make about Yahoo! Google and so on. In fact there are two parts of your note which struck a resonant chord with me. The first part is where you metioned 'greed' which is, I think, very seriously the motivating factor. The second point, somewhat shames me. I had forgotten that you can, of course, hide your web site so that search engines disregard it. Indeed, with some stuff in China I do that automatically. Your points are well taken. Gareth Those are excellent points you make about Yahoo! Google and so on. In fact there are two parts of your note which struck a resonant chord with me. The first part is where you metioned ‘greed’ which is, I think, very seriously the motivating factor.
The second point, somewhat shames me. I had forgotten that you can, of course, hide your web site so that search engines disregard it. Indeed, with some stuff in China I do that automatically.
Your points are well taken.
Gareth

]]> http://tech.blorge.com/Structure:/2007/01/19/belgian-press-sues-yahoo-google/comment-page-1/#comment-3388 umopapisdn Fri, 19 Jan 2007 18:36:57 +0000 http://tech.blorge.com/Structure: /2007/01/19/belgian-press-sues-yahoo-google/#comment-3388 Sounds like good old fashioned ignorance and/or greed to me. If the Belgian press doesn't know how the Internet works and doesn't want to follow the standards of using the Internet like everyone else, then they need to GET OFF the Internet. Period. Just because I can plug a phone in doesn't mean I can just start calling random people and giving verbal threats. Just because I can drive a car doesn't mean I can just drive through parks and on the sidewalk. There is an Internet standard that already exists for robots. If you don't want a search engine to crawl your website, use the robots.txt file. Period. There are other search engines such as Altavista, Ask, and others. There are also likely hundreds of other hown-grown search engines out there as well. If you don't want these search engines to crawl your website, just place the properly formatted robots.txt file on your website and be done with it. If a robot doesn't follow the rules, THEN sue. By just suing the top 3 search engines because you don't feel like following the standards is either ignorance, greed, or both. And if Yahoo is linking to archived articles that are supposed to be paid for, that's a lack of the press site's poor security mechanism, not a problem for Yahoo to sort out. You can't just attempt to "hide" articles in some "mystery folder" and then expect users not to find them. By installing a web server on my machine, putting files into a non-secured folder, then plugging this machine onto the Internet, and registering a domain name so that my machine can be easily found, *I* am responsible if someone ends up getting that file. If I don't want anyone to access the content, I should just unplug the machine. If I want only "authorized" users to access the content, I should implement a security mechanism. If I only want real people, and not robots, to access my content, I should use the robots.txt file. It's not rocket science. Sounds like good old fashioned ignorance and/or greed to me. If the Belgian press doesn’t know how the Internet works and doesn’t want to follow the standards of using the Internet like everyone else, then they need to GET OFF the Internet. Period. Just because I can plug a phone in doesn’t mean I can just start calling random people and giving verbal threats. Just because I can drive a car doesn’t mean I can just drive through parks and on the sidewalk. There is an Internet standard that already exists for robots. If you don’t want a search engine to crawl your website, use the robots.txt file. Period. There are other search engines such as Altavista, Ask, and others. There are also likely hundreds of other hown-grown search engines out there as well. If you don’t want these search engines to crawl your website, just place the properly formatted robots.txt file on your website and be done with it. If a robot doesn’t follow the rules, THEN sue. By just suing the top 3 search engines because you don’t feel like following the standards is either ignorance, greed, or both. And if Yahoo is linking to archived articles that are supposed to be paid for, that’s a lack of the press site’s poor security mechanism, not a problem for Yahoo to sort out. You can’t just attempt to “hide” articles in some “mystery folder” and then expect users not to find them. By installing a web server on my machine, putting files into a non-secured folder, then plugging this machine onto the Internet, and registering a domain name so that my machine can be easily found, *I* am responsible if someone ends up getting that file. If I don’t want anyone to access the content, I should just unplug the machine. If I want only “authorized” users to access the content, I should implement a security mechanism. If I only want real people, and not robots, to access my content, I should use the robots.txt file. It’s not rocket science.

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