Media News - Friday, November 30, 2007
Publishers seek to block Internet search engines from additional content
Seeking greater control of their content, leading news organizations and
other publishers said Thursday they would push for a revision to
technology that controls access to their content by search engines.
Google, Yahoo and other top search companies now voluntarily respect a
Web site's wishes as declared in a text file known as robots.txt. The
file allows a site to block indexing of individual Web pages, specific
directories or the entire site. The proposal, presented by a consortium
of publishers at the headquarters of The Associated Press, would add to
those commands, further restricting access. Robots.txt was developed in
1994 in part because of concerns that some crawlers were straining Web
sites by visiting them repeatedly or rapidly. As search engines expanded
to offer services for displaying news and scanning printed books, news
organizations and book publishers began to complain. The proposed
extensions, known as Automated Content Access Protocol, partly grew out
of those disputes. Leading the drive for the extensions were groups
representing publishers of newspapers, magazines, online databases,
books and journals. The new automated commands will use the same
robots.txt file that search engines now recognize. Web sites could start
using them Thursday alongside the existing commands. Like the current
robots.txt, the use of the new protocol would be voluntary, so search
engines ultimately would have to agree to recognize the commands. Search
engines could ignore them and leave it to courts to rule on any disputes
over fair use.
(International Herald Tribune)
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