Lawsuits threaten Google's ad revenue

A series of proliferating lawsuits and legal disputes could challenge Google's sacrosanct business routines.
The New York Times

The story "Lawsuits threaten Google's ad revenue" published March 27, 2005 at 9:40 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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[hadaso]

Why don't they use robots.txt?

Anyone can use a robots.txt to disallow googlebot crawling.

What these companies are doing is using Google's technology to get publicity, and then suing Google for more money. Google's technology is just matching words. They don't look for trademarks to infringe on. If they don't like the way this technology works they are not obliged to use it. They are perfectly able to keep Google out without even contacting Google. All they have to do is to include a file named robots.txt in their website with the lines:
user-agent: googlebot
disallow: /
That's all!
So why does Google have to pay so much money if a french webmaster failed to include those two lines?
I think Google should insist that their service is free, and everyone can easily avoid it, but if anyone chooses not to avoid it, they accept the result of the computation that determines what will be on the search page! If you don't like the solution of a math problem, you don't have to solve it!

[hadaso]

Why don't they use robots.txt?

Anyone can use a robots.txt to disallow googlebot crawling.

What these companies are doing is using Google's technology to get publicity, and then suing Google for more money. Google's technology is just matching words. They don't look for trademarks to infringe on. If they don't like the way this technology works they are not obliged to use it. They are perfectly able to keep Google out without even contacting Google. All they have to do is to include a file named robots.txt in their website with the lines:
user-agent: googlebot
disallow: /
That's all!
So why does Google have to pay so much money if a french webmaster failed to include those two lines?
I think Google should insist that their service is free, and everyone can easily avoid it, but if anyone chooses not to avoid it, they accept the result of the computation that determines what will be on the search page! If you don't like the solution of a math problem, you don't have to solve it!