Newspapers demanding Google cache removal being zapped from index alltogether
The newspapers that asked and obtained in court their removal from Google Cache and Google News respectively, have been erased from the Google result pages alltogether (Le Soir, La Libre…). That is… on the Belgian version:
The international and French, UK… etc version still show no change.
The search for the disappeared pages shows a link to a copy of the verdict, but the Belgian Google News and search home fail to formally mention the ruling as demanded by the court:
The court ruling did not order to take them out of the Search Engine Result Pages… just the removal of the cached pages and the excerpts from Google News… One might be tempted to interpret “all their sites” as including the
Is Google “taking revenge” by removing them from the index alltogether? And is it just a matter of time before they disappear from the the non-Belgian versions as well, or does Google consider the Belgian court not to have any authority on their non-Belgian sites?
To be continued…
Extra:
- Further international reporting: PaidContent, Matthew Ingram, GMSV, SEW Blog
- I corrected my statement in yesterday’s posting on a necessary prior consent from a publisher before its content can be indexed. The wording of the verdict really focuses on excerpts (in Google News) or copies (in the Google cached pages) of content. It does however still ignore the practice of the NOCACHE, NOARCHIVE robot tags and again raises questions on what is considered fair use for news aggregators.
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10 Comments »
September 19th, 2006 at 07:31
[...] Sometimes Google just makes me jump up and pump my fist, yelling, “Yes! You show those motherf-ers!” This is definitely one of those times. Google responding to Belgian newspaper’s complaints about being included in Google News and the Google cache, as well as a court ruling that they remove those newspapers from their services, decided to show them who’s boss and banned the newspapers outright from Google Belgium’s search results. [...]
September 19th, 2006 at 14:15
The ruling might not have required the removal from Google web search, but the underlying principle is the same. Google was simply showing titles and descriptions of these pages in Google News and got sued for it. They do the exact same thing with Google Web Search. Rather than wait to be sued over that, removing the papers is a good defense — plus, conveniently, probably a little revenge, as well. That’s especially important given that when I look at a place like Le Soit, the robots.txt file isn’t blocking Google from crawling. It’s not blocking either web or news search crawling. So the way Le Soir (or the copyright group representing it) seems to approach getting out of search indexes is to file lawsuits, rather than making use of commonly accepted no indexing systems. Given that, sure — wouldn’t you drop them to avoid any future suits as well :)
September 19th, 2006 at 21:21
[...] with del.icio.us | Email this entry | TrackBack URI | Digg it | Track with co.mments | | Cosmos Click here forcopyright permissions! Copyright 2006 Mathew Ingram [...]
September 19th, 2006 at 21:26
This should have a really nice effect on their web traffic, and so their CIM-statistics, and so their banner advertising income. Shows them right …
September 20th, 2006 at 01:22
They’re back again…
La Libre in Google.be
Le Soir in Google.be
September 20th, 2006 at 12:03
[...] Lisää aiheesta ovat kirjoittaneet Blogoscoped, Inside Google ja Notes, links and Conversation. [...]
September 20th, 2006 at 17:18
Odds are, it’s just infeasible for them to remove things *only* from the cache, so they had to remove them completely in order to avoid the penalty.
September 20th, 2006 at 19:00
@James:
that seems really unlikely…
It is perfectly possibly to have your site indexed but at the same time NOT have any links to cached pages in the result pages, see the explanation Google themselves give:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35306
September 20th, 2006 at 19:03
About my own comment in the early morning: I swear the results were back, but at this moment, they ‘re gone again…
La Libre in Google.be
Le Soir in Google.be
September 23rd, 2006 at 09:00
Serves them right. How unbelievably clueless can you get?