Trust the Germans!

[Clinton]

Germany Wants To Charge Search Engines To Use News Excerpts

As in the UK, Germany is proposing “normal” private re-users of web news article summaries be exempt from royalties. But, whilst the UK mechanism avoids charging Google News because it targets only pay-for news aggregators, Germany’s proposal mentions both search engines and news aggregators.

The debate over whether search engines should pay for the privilege of crawling and using excerpts has been a long-running one that Google has sought to contain on multiple fronts…

I bet they want to "contain" these debates!

Good idea or bad one?

What about other data like definitions, current weather, flight info, price comparisons etc. that Google now shows straight in the SERPs?

[JJMcClure]

What about other data like definitions, current weather, flight info, price comparisons etc. that Google now shows straight in the SERPs?

It's common business practice to give a little in order to get more back, I do it regularly. Teasers, loss leaders, they're all common. Google is just another route to market should you choose to use it and whether we question the morality of it or not, the information they scrape is all publicly available anyway or they wouldn't be able to access it.

Back when there were paper telephone directories, I never gave my permission for them to use my phone number and then make revenue from the advertising in the directory. I didn't try to stop them though because it suited me for people to be able to find my number, there was a benefit for me. Same for online directories that list my business currently.

I wouldn't buy a flight or anything else straight out of the SERP, I'd visit the actual site first, probably several, wouldn't you?