Danny "Search Engine Land" Sullivan has written a masterful rant about the newspapers' campaign to blame Google for all their trouble and to take steps to stop their material from being made available through a search engine.
Earth to newspapers: if people aren't talking about what you publish, it's not news. We call that stuff a secret.
Please get all your newspaper colleagues to agree to a national "Just say no to Google" week. I beg you, please do it. Then I can see if these things I think will happen do happen:
* Papers go "oh shit," we really get a lot of traffic from Google for free, and we actually do earn something off those page views
* Papers go "oh shit," turns out people can find news from other sources
* Papers go "oh shit," being out of Google didn't magically solve all our other problems overnight, but now we have no one else to blame.
…
The papers can't get coordinated on anything. Anyone remember Pathfinder, that was supposed to be the Time-backed portal for news. Yeah, that did well. What, a decade of the web, and none of the papers could put together their own version of Hulu? The only thing you can all agree on is that you hate Google News for "stealing" so much from you — despite Yahoo News still being the larger news site. But Google makes a better target, plus I suspect some papers might have favorable placements with Yahoo that makes them not want to yell about the Big Y.
Google's Love For Newspapers & How Little They Appreciate It
(via Jbat)
