An article in the dated 31 January, 2006 in the Financial Times titled: Search engines challenged on ‘theft’ set me to thinking.
It reminds me of the arguments made a few years ago when Ticketmaster didn’t want people “deep linking” into their website. They wanted everybody to start at the top of the site and work their way down. In otherwords they wanted to control the flow of the information they were putting forth.
In both the Ticketmaster the Google vs. Newspapers situations technical solutions exist. There are standards in place, observed by Google, to prevent Google from spidering any given site. You don’t have to contact Google all you need to do is put a simple text file at the top of you site. That all. And Google will not spider your site until you give the ok.
But the newspapers aren’t interested in that. They want Google to spider their site. Otherwise how will they show up in search engines? The problem is that Google and the news aggregators do a better job of presenting the news in a way that consumers want to receive it.
Rather than complain about how others utilize the existing medium the newspapers should come up with a better aggregate. They have the resources. They have the news. Build a better solution.
Where to start? How about you ask the very people that visit your web site. Put more content at your site so people have to click through. Get creative. Bottom line – ask your customers what they want. Then give it to them. Then ask again. Then give it to them. Then ask again. Keep doing this until you have a better solution.
I wrote about how businesses can do this simply here:
