the belgian google lawsuit

I must admit that I’m ashamed – my countrymen are being ridiculous. The lawsuit against Google does not make any sense. The Google blog has a nice post outlining the basics of the case.

Basically – if those newspapers don’t want to be indexed by Google News, they could just use robots.txt. And while they are indexed, Google News only shows a small photo and a couple of lines of text – if the user clicks on the link, she is redirected directly to the website of the newspaper.

This is basic stuff. This is how search engines on the web work. This lawsuit is ridiculous. Great work, fellow countrymen. Once again, you are making us all look like fools.