We must stop Google: A ScreenShot Essay
Ah. Thanksgiving. A day of relaxation, of visiting with family. After eight maddening weeks of introduction to J-school, it’s a weekend where I can lean back and reflect on how when I get my degree, there probably won’t be a journalism industry left. Just Google, sending News Spiders to our homes with the day’s events. For free.
Still in beta
Luckily, not everyone is going to lay down and wait for a future full of terrifying, super-convenient news-delivering spiders. Not media hero Rupert Murdoch, who gave a fiery speech to Bejing last week, letting it be known that he’s not going to stand for any more shenigans by news aggregators.
Murdoch’s basic point is that new aggregators and search engines are stealing content from those news organizations that make it. (He goes as far as to use the word ‘thief.’) While he doesn’t name Google, when he talks about search engines, you kind of get the picture.
I usually would just say that this is the grousing of someone too set in his ways and unwilling to embrace the future of news. But I thought, in the interest of fairness, I would look into this further. Besides, this comes from MURDOCH. If anyone is really concerned about the future of quality journalism, it must be him, right? Right? Who does Google think they are, picking on an old man?
Lovable.
So, I did some research. Booted up the old browser, and searches Google News for news on the biggest threat facing the Western world today.
I then proceeded to click the first link, and got ready to steal some content from the hard-working journos at Boston.com. I felt dirty, knowing that I would enjoy the fruits of their work, but all of the ad dollars would be going to Google! But still, it was for SCIENCE! So, I pressed on.
Dun-dun-DUN!
It was even worse than I thought. Google didn’t just steal all of Boston.com’s content. It stole the format and masthead as well! At first blush, it looks like Google simply linked to Boston.com’s website, sending the traffic (and advertising dollars) there. The uninformed person might think that Google is actually helping out these news sites. After all, Google is helping users get to their sites, meaning more readers, and better chances of getting advertisers.
But I know that’s not true. Because Rupert Mordoch told me so.
Just to make sure, I check to see if Google was also stealing the high-quality, hard-hitting journalism that Mordoch wants his people to be paid for.
News I can use…apparently
Son of a bitch.
Impoverished media moguls like Murdoch have been painted into a corner. Google has indexed their pages, and will continue doing it as they add more news.
Is there a way to keep Google from peeking into our sites? There might be, but who knows where to find it. If only there was some kind of easy way to scour the wild mess that is the Internet?
Oh. Right.
Sure, you can search for it. But Google would be a fool to let their engine direct you to an easy way to keep them away from your stuff…
…or they might just put it up on their help section.
What have we learned? I learned that if Google is trying to steal readers from the news sites, it’s doing a really crappy job of it. I learned that if Murdoch really thought the arrangement was unfair, he could keep Google away from his site with almost no work. And I learned Wordpress really loses its shit when you try to format a lot of pictures in a post.
SPECIAL BONUS MORAL
I also learned something unexpected. Check out the fourth headline from the top:
The Internet is crazy and dangerous. Dangerous like angry ghosts.
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