Samuel Zell’s declaration against search engines like Google made me think that this billionaire man is nothing but a selfish one and doesn’t understand what a web is. He said (as posted at the Washingtonpost):

“If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?” Zell said during the question period after his speech. “Not very.”

Zell must be lectured about the things on the web for him to understand what is it and how would we deal with it. Few of the things that he must understand are:

Google is a search engine.

Google is not a publishing tool. It’s a tool in searching those information posted somewhere on the web. Without the search engine, would it be possible for us to easily (time saving) find the information we are searching for?

Posting or publishing the information on the web is an obvious act of giving permission to search engines to spider them, index them, and let the users read them and talk about them (as pointed by Doc Searls).

Google don’t steal contents. 

Just like what we pointed out above, indexing those contents posted on the internet is not a way of stealing content. Obviously, the reason why Zell consider it stealing, because Google monetize their searches by publishing ads on the search results pages. Zell concern is clear: He doesn’t want Google to monetize the seach services.

But why is he thinking this way?

Google don’t monetize the indexed contents.

We should understand that every service needs something for the maintenance of it. Google spider, index, search and display results to searchers of information without asking any fees from the users. So, it’s also a normal thing that Google will find ways to monetize the service, and that is by publishing ads on the search result pages.

In other words, it’s not the content posted on the search result pages or on aggregators pages that are being monetized by the search engine but the service itself.

Search Engines are useful to Content Owners.

We should not forget that search engines help us find readers. Just consider how this blog find its readers and visitors, who are mostly referred and directed to by search engines.

Most of the content owner understand that. That is why they’re striving hard to top at the search results.

My Words to Zell.

I think, you need to accept the fact that Google really is destined to the state that Google has now. Just focus yourself working for your newly owned papers and help them reach the state equal if not higher to that of Google.

More reading here, here, here,

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