Results tagged “google” from Birmingham Mail - Technobabble

Online web search engine colossus Google is being sued by Belgian newspapers who claim it is infringing copyright by publishing and archiving their articles.

This follows on from a similar case in the same contry by a French language group who won, forcing Google to take down cached versions of articles from its news service.

It's an interesting case - on the one hand papers and writers have a compelling argument that their copyrighted content is being used by another organisation to make profit for themselves.

After all Google, by providing 'news', although it generates no content whatsoever itself, gains hits, traffic and can sell advertising and other services, so making a profit by operating in a parasitic manner.

On the other hand newspapers are usually desperate to get their articles featured on Google News because it leads to a load of click throughs, increased traffic and so more revenue for them.

On balance most are more than happy to have their content used by search engines in this way, making the lawsuit all the more strange.

Of course they stand to gain from a big fine from Google - and perhaps it's no bad thing - after all why should an organisation effectively stealing content from someone else be allowed to make a profit on the back of it without asking for anyone's permission before publishing?

Well if nothing else, the above headline should please those giving out advice on search engine optimisation (as the below will show).

I've just come out of a lecture from Anton Grutzmacher, head of client services, from Hitwise, a web information and usage company.

There was loads of really interesting stuff about the regional media and how they are doing in terms of website traffic.

But there was one stunning statistic which I had never seen before in 'official' terms.

We all know that online porn, also known as 'bongo' and 'grumble' is somewhat popular. But in terms of actual cast iron information I didn't know how much.

After all, the popular searches through engines like google and yahoo are ranked - but 'purient content removed' is the rider.

So we know that people are searching for Britney Spears or Pamela Anderson and loads of other stuff like ipods, but are they really in the top ten?

Well hitwise can put it in perspective - they monitor the usage of more than eight million surfers using information from internet service providers.

And the results are that 'adult' content is as popular as all the internet search engines put together.

So for everyone logging on to google or whatever as their homepage or as a search tool, there's someone shiftily finding something rather more grubby.

As to how this fits in to the debate over the future of local journalism, I'm not sure - but perhaps executives might be tempted into taking more drastic action in terms of the online content they provide!