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Content Owners to Charge Royalties for Searching?
dwarfking writes in with a story that follows up on the impact of recent Google events: "Ok, maybe I'm a little dense here, but isn't this plan more of an impact to the content provider than to the search engines. From the article: 'In one example of how ACAP would work, a newspaper publisher could grant search engines permission to index its site, but specify that only select ones display articles for a limited time after paying a royalty.'
So, ok, a search engine company decides it doesn't want to pay royalties and therefore doesn't index the provider's site. Now won't the provider actually lose readers since their articles won't be locatable by search anymore?"
The problem is that the search engines aren't TRYING to be publishers. The entire point of the search engines is to direct you to the content that you want. Aggregation, caching, and content creation are means to further this end. On the other hand, creation and caching of content is the whole point of the publishers. That IS their end.
Saying that search engines are becoming publishers because they create, aggregate, and cache content to help users FIND content from publishers seems to be just a little off the mark.
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First, we must remember that not all web sites are found through Google. When was the last time you did a search for Amazon.com or BarnesAndNoble.com? Sure, it's nice to be listed but hardly deadly if they weren't - they already have the name recognition.
Now, there is a legitimate downside to being listed on Google News - all of your competitor news sources are also listed - right next to you. If the New York Times runs a piece from the Associated Press, I can see that the Des Moines Register runs the same story, why go to the big name source? The NYT has spent decades and millions of dollars building their reputation and get listed next to other, less-known papers. It serves to dillute their name and reputation.
For those of you convinced that you can get plenty of news from other places and that these print publications can adjust to new business models or die, are you crazy?!? One nice thing about having a huge newspaper is that they generally try to verify their stories, or at least avoid making things up. (I said generally...) When your paper owns buildings and huge printing presses and is sold at every newsstand your reputation means something. If you are a few people working out of a basement, then who cares? As long as you got people reading, you are happy. I like the idea of responsible journalism. It may be less than it was, but if I see it in the NYT I am inclinded to believe it. If it is in some tabloid, I am inclined to not believe it. In a strictly Internet world, how do you tell the difference?
I hope that a good arrangement is made between the press and the search engines, but I don't think the survival of the press is based on them being indexed by Google.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
But is it really "dumb"? I don't have any doubt that these media outfits have very talented economists, financialists, and lawyers working for them. These are people who can accurately predict what will happen if the media companies were to take this course of action. They know how consumers will respond, and they know how it will affect their company's bottom line.
The question, though, is whether those smart people are actually allowed to make the final decision. This is the newspaper indstry we're talking about. The same industry that is *still* making you start an account and sign in to track what you read. This pisses a lot of people (like me) off, who end up not coming back to the site. Not only that, 90% of that information can be tracked by simply logging IP. So they turn away advertising revenue because of a completely antiquated practice.
So no, it's not surprising that companies like that would fail to figure out that search engines are FREE FUCKING ADVERTISING.
Go check out some of the recent articles on Techdirt, this is one of the author's favorite pet peeves. The upshot is that the newspaper industry has its collective head up its ass and completely fails to understand this whole internet thing. The recent developments in Belgium and France, where newspapers have sued google to avoid being cached, demonstrate this principle in action.
If I'm google, I tell them go ahead - your funeral.
An organisation representing French and German speaking newspapers in Belgium has won a court order forcing Google to stop indexing these journals. They also forced Google to post the order on its homepage in belgium: http://www.google.be/ Here the address of these enlightened people: http://www.presscopyrights.be/ Lucky I speak Flemish and NEVER read these newspapers anyway. Nothing is lost, I assure you. Only a bunch of isolated people will get even more isolated since any news of them will totally fall into oblivion.