Looks like somebody is getting sick of all the Google advertising. I wonder how long this will last until Google lawyers get into the mix...
And this comes just as I was looking into pimping myself with Google's AdSense program...
[Editor's Note: Which I subsequently did and have been doing for 3+ years...]
Just another gunslinger in the Wild Wild Web. I can see both sides of the issue. That does’t stop the fact that it’s a highly profitable inductry and I fully intend to partake of that profit (in ways that fit with my ethics, of course).
If prople didn’t profit from exposure on google, then there would be a lot more complaints like this one. The fact is that most people put things on the web to be seen and they see the free publicity that they get from google as a good thing.
Actually I totally agree that:
– google exposure is a good thing for the website owners
– google provides a service to the website owners
– google provides a service to web users
In this light, I think it’s perfectly legitimate that google advertise as they see fit. If people don’t like it, they can use a different search engine or start their own (as google came into being, so can others). The guy’s claim that google’s database be freely available because it was derived from content that is not google’s (i.e. the websites) is pretty flimsy.
I like the name this guy has for the scraper though: Scroogle…