A group of Belgian newspapers sued Google for including them its Google News search results, and now they are saying that Google is boycotting them, by not including them. Google can’t win.
Google is going to be screwed one way or the other if the Belgians have their way. In 2006, Google was sued by a group of Belgian newspapers for including them in its Google News listings. The papers said there was a clear copyright violation. According to the Belgians, copying a selection of a few words for a search result was an onerous violation of copyrights. The newspapers won in a European court, and so Google pulled the papers from all search results. Now the papers are crying bloody murder. They claim Google is boycotting them. What? Are they psychotic? Apparently, showing up on the search results page with the exact same information as you would see on the Google News page is okay by them. Google sees Google News search and Google Web search as functionally the same thing, so it is filtering the Belgians out of everything. This has created a bad scenario for Google. I’ll explain why this is true after I explain why Google is doing the exact right thing. First of all, the results on the Google News page are just a re-organization of the Google search page. If it wanted to, Google could do a half-dozen specialty sites like this that are based on search engine filtering. These Belgian newspapers said the snippet that appears with the headline of an article in the news section was a violation of their copyrights, but they are okay with it in another place? I don’t think so. What really happened is these idiots in Belgium have realized that this wasn’t such a good idea, and now they are whining to get back into the mix. They should be begging. The problem for Google is that this will be spun to make it look as if Google is the bad guy that’s ruining a company by altering the search engine results because of an a vendetta. It’s crucial for Google to avoid this sort of image lest the users get upset. Nobody wants to see Google become the TSA of the Internet.
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