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"While it made me angry when Google put their results above ours, I never questioned that they had a right to do that. It is their website." The website is the
by jakubp 9y ago
"While it made me angry when Google put their results above ours, I never questioned that they had a right to do that. It is their website."
The website is theirs, but the content they scan through and link to is not theirs. Google Search is of incredible value (to us in form of service _and_ to Google in form of an asset), but it's been built on top other people's content. They took that content for free. Perhaps it gives those "others" some rights in deciding what kinds of things can be done with such a service. It could be done through law, conversation, or applying a fine when a large enough group of representatives of a large market decide that maybe they do something a bit off.
- grondilu 9y ago> They took that content for free. Because it was freely available. As I understand it, Google feed its database with robots surfing the web. Those robots don't steel anything. Moreover, if I'm not mistaken you can explicitly forbid access to those robots with a robots.txt file or something. If you don't, it arguably means you give away your data to everyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard