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Comment by oaw-bct-ar-bamf | Hacker News Reader

I am in favour of this. If a site is doing the work of providing content (news, sport game scores, weather, ...) and Google passes by, scrapes the most important information and shows it on their own site, a large swath of users will never visit the content provider.

The one providing the content has rights to his content.

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I'm wondering whether you're also in favor of disallowing journalists to basically create blogspam copies of other, real journalist's, work?

Because that actually hurts the original source. Google providing the first 2 sentences with a link to the article? Not so much.

As the Springer case has shown, Google is actually providing a service to the publishers here, who receive considerable less traffic without Google sending users their way.

What do you mean by disallowing? Regulation is extremely specific for a reason. If it works, yea, that would substantially raise the quality of reporting. Google just seems trivially regulatable compared to “journalists”.

Please explain to me how Google makes money by keeping them on their search site. Google's revenue comes from ads. Not from the few link ads on their search site but from ads on other people's websites. Google has a strong incentive to make people click on those news article links, because it's behind the link they are making money.

There's robots.txt to prevent that and Google will respect that.

That doesn’t give the consumer any power here. It should be trivial to disable this metadata scraping feature. It doesn’t improve results so why should i support this?

Consumers have the power to stop using Google.

They have the rights, they only need to use robots.txt

They can simply put up a paywall and set their pages to “do not index.”

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