Google tells Australian Government it is considering withdrawing “completely”

theage.com.au

11 points·zadokshi··5 comments

Given the fact Google is growing its data centre count in Australia, one assumes they mean to withdraw news from search results. But it is interestingly ambiguous.

Google is like the app store of the internet or worse. If you want to be on it you must follow google’s arbitrary and changing rules while google makes money off of your content. Your cool new website is dead at launch if you don’t build it as google demands. They can ban or derank you at will with no recourse. They rank their own products higher over competitors. Yet somehow people still side with google here

Arbitrary and changing?

I built a simple a plain CMS site for a school about three years ago. I made it load and render quickly, cache well, made sure all the headlines and text was on-message and... I think that's about it. The site ranks excellently.

There's nothing arbitrary or changing about any of that.

Very late comment: I understand it now; someone explained it offline.

It's not about what Google says, it's about how others explain what Google says/Googlebot does. So Googlebot boosts, for example, sites that load and render quickly, and people explain "you should use X" and a few years later, "you should use Y". I do see how the change from X to Y is arbitrary.

I agree that it doesn't seem right that google can scrap news site's (and other industries) content and use it directly on Google's website. "Don't bite the hand that feeds you" comes to mind. But it sounds like the Australian government is going a bit to far in trying to solve the problem if I understand correctly. They want Google to pay a news site to be able to put them as a search result? Seems like they would have to pay to place the link's _content_ on Google's site

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