Search Engine Herald

Search Engines as Leeches

by Gilad on January 10th, 2006

Jacob Nielsen, an Internet marketer and web usability expert had posted a very good article earlier today titled Search Engines as Leeches on the Web.
The article is makes a great read for anyone, and is summerized as “Search engines extract too much of the Web’s value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.”

The gist of the article is that search engines crawl the web very intensively, wasting website owner’s resources, and extracting any possible piece of unique information produced by these same site owners. They then use this extracted information to attract people to their own site and profit by selling advertising using copied content.
Now, as Joe, whose site is listed on search engine X in an unsatisfactory position, wants to advertise on this search engine, he’s about to find out that the prices are skyrocketed, and he has not too many options but to pay for advertising on the site which copied his content, and which is leeching the web.
So, in general, if tomorrow every site-owner will disallow Google from crawling their site, Google is out of business, as it will have no-where to sell ads on. Got it?!?

I highly suggest of reading this article, makes some great points and food for thought.

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