By Gemma Simpson, 25 September 2006 16:45
NEWS
Publishers around the world are collectively putting their foot down against search engines in a new global initiative to regain control of their content.
The initiative, called Acap (Automated content access protocol), is intended to stop search engines aggregating content in breach of permission or copyright.
Permissions on different forms of content across the internet are currently diverse, without a single standard model to oversee how and where content is being read.
This means when users look something up on the internet, they might access it without permission from the content's publisher, through no fault of their own or the search engine they used.
Instead, a software tag can be used to communicate with search engine spiders. The tag details the conditions under which a search engine can use published material.
Jens Bammell, Director of the International Publishers Association (IPA), said "publishers feel like they're losing control" of their content. Bammell said Acap is about integrating search engines and publishers' business needs in a sophisticated manner.
Google was recently banned from publishing snippets from Belgian news websites. But Bammell said this incentive is one where the publishers and search engines can work together.
Besides IPA, other bodies involved include the European Publishers Council and the World Association of Newspapers.
The Acap pilot project is due for launch later in 2006 and is envisaged to last 12 months.
At the time of writing, Google and Yahoo! had not responded to calls for comment.
Comments
There are 4 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
It's a bit silly that currently available methods, namely robots.txt which is honored by Google spiders, are not used by the news providers. Of course using readily available solution is not as fun as inventing one's own.
2. anonymous
Do these guys know about robots.txt? Evidently not.
3. Karen Challinor
so putting sensitive content in specific folders and using robots.txt to prevent search bots from looking in those folders isn't sufficient any longer is it ?
now we have to invent a new protocol and update all our websites to adapt to it do we ?
so basically what we are saying is that the people who designed the websites that charge for viewing the content, have found that they haven't catered for search engines indexing that content and providing direct links to it and instead of fixing the problem using the tools at hand they want to introduce a new standard so everyone else has to change their websites to suit them
please feel free to correct me if I've got this wrong
4. Joe Whitehead
Reinventing the wheel? Just ask any experienced website operator what methods can be used to control/ban spiders and their user's. Hint: Most search engines do obey robots.txt.