The Tribune has taken another swing at Google in the blame game over the United Airlines story debacle, but its argument is pretty hard to swallow.
It released a statement Wednesday saying it "asked Google to stop using Googlebot to crawl newspaper websites, including* The Sun Sentinel* (Ft. Lauderdale), for inclusion in Google News."
“Despite this request, Google continued using Googlebot to crawl The Sun Sentinel’s website,” the release continues.
Google bounced back, denying that any request was ever made.
"The claim that the Tribune Company asked Google to stop crawling its newspaper Web sites is untrue," Google said.
And Tribune now released a new, reworded statement clarifying its previous accusation:
"We asked Google to stop using Googlebot and use site maps instead. We're happy to have Google acquire information from our sites, we just asked them to do it more accurately because we were aware of problems with Googlebot."
Clearly T**he Sun Sentinel is still being picked up by Google’s bots. And even if a newspaper were to do as the Tribune claims, removing the bots involves more than a simple request.
If a site were to approach Google, they would be directed to a page explaining how to implement robots.txt in their source code, Stricker tells Wired.com, removing the pages from appearing in both Google News and general Google searches.
But this also seems counter intuitive. Most newspapers these days would love to appear at the top of a Google search, driving traffic to what might otherwise remain virtually unseen.
“I’m not aware of any major U.S. newspapers who have requested that we stop crawling and indexing their newspapers using robots.txt,” said Stricker.
But they did have similar trouble with a European media company.
In August of 2006, Google was sued by an organization called Copiepresse, which represents a number of newspapers in Belgium. The media company won the case, accusing the search engine and news site of breaching the publications’ copyright by posting abstracts of the articles and links to the stories.
“We really make it easy for publishers who don’t want their websites to appear in a search index. We have really easy tools for them to use to tell us not to crawl them,” Striker added.
You can read more details of both side’s takes on the story that doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon here: Tribune, Google.
*Photo: Flickr/whiskeytango *
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