Newspapers are Clueless – Want Search Engines to Pay

According to C|Net News the old newspapers are all upset that Google and other search engines are ‘profiting’ from their content.

Web search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, collect headlines and photos for their users without compensating the publishers a cent, according to the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), which announced Tuesday that it intends to “challenge the exploitation of content” by the Googles and MSNs of the Web.

“The irony is that these search engines exist, largely, because of the traditional news and content aggregators and profit at their expense,” WAN President Gavin O’Reilly said in a statement.

Yet what is not stated is that all the newspaper would have to do is put in a simple robots.txt file on their sites. With this file they can ban Yahoo and Google and almost any other search engine they want. Of course that is not what these newspapers want either. They want Google to point people their way when the search results match – they just don’t want Google to figure out a way to profit from it too.