Google's changes to Google News and it's restrictive guidelines regarding letting other news sites crawl it's own news site reveals a contradiction in Google's approach to the world.
As noted in Techcrunch's - Google News Hypocrisy: Walled Off Content - Michael Arrington:
"…Google crawls news sites and grabs their content for republishing on Google News. They rely on the willingness of those news sites to get distribution on Google. But Google restricts others from crawling Google News itself via their robots.txt
file and terms of use
That policy wasn’t a problem when Google was simply aggregating news from around the web. But now they are hosting original news content
While the policy may change, the underlying assumption it's based on is that Google has the manifest destiny to connect up all the information in the world in a way that makes it searchable by anyone, pretty much anywhere. That sounded fine when no one was actually able to do it before.
Assumptions that it was OK to just crawl news content and aggregate it for Google News was great when it was first done four or 5 years ago - but now that Google is becoming dominant in so many different spheres, besides search, some of it's assumptions and ideas of what it has a right to do, need to be re-examined.
And the Google News situation that hit the fan today is one of them. Another example of Google Manifest Destiny is the use of it's own real estate - highly valued high page-ranked links to it's own Google Checkout Affiliates, as mentioned in SEOBOOK - Google Caught Selling High PageRank Links, Again
"..The Google Checkout blog, currently a PageRank 8 site, recently posted about the success of GolfBalls.com on their blog. Not only does that post provide direct links, one one of the links is a deep link with targeted anchor text.
The blog post about GolfBalls.com contains the following passage:
In addition, Google Checkout helps make it even easier for consumers to find us when they search for items like Titleist Pro V1 Golf Balls by displaying the Google Checkout badge next to our search results.
They talk about searching for an item, and instead point that link at a product page on GolfBalls.com. That is like me telling you to search Google for something then dropping an eBay affiliate link in the post.
If Google does something like that it is a co-brand cross promotion, and all is well. If I do something like that it is an attempt to manipulate Google and/or a spammy link buy.
"…How can Google ask webmasters to police paid links then do that kind of crap? What a bunch of hypocritical garbage."
So some of the things they are telling everyone that they can't do …. Google is turning around and doing themselves - showing that, in a pinch …they don't follow their own advice.
Before they were so big - this stuff was not so much of problem, or even noticed at all - but now …. it's feels like Google is a newer version of the companies they displaced, Microsoft and IBM. More and more, Google's positions, early on, are becoming problems now - where the Webmaster Guidelines, for example, need to be re thought out - not so much because anything much has changed for anyone else …but because Google has changed - it's now the most powerful company in the world and people are becoming scared of it's power.
If Google is perceived to be saying one thing, but doing something else - it starts to be seen as many Governments are now viewed - self serving, and not deserving of any particular loyalty. Before they had people's loyalty - but now, many the only reason to really use Google is because I'm used to always using Google.
If someone gave me a better alternative to Google, that was not Big Brother, maybe I'd switch….now that's a thought.
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