by Flemming Funch
A few ornery journalists who don't like blogs are complaining that blogs are represented unfairly in Google search results. In other words, anything said in a popular blog is likely to place very high in a search engine search. It is sometimes presented as a sort of conspiracy termed "googlewash". And the old fashioned media companies might be thought to have reason for considering it unfair that little one-person blogs are more authoritative on many subjects than they are. But there's no such conspiracy, and it is quite obvious what those media companies should do to be equally well placed. Doc Searls has an excellent overview on PrintWash.Tim Jarrett summarizes what I said two days ago about why Google search results are often thickened with blogs, and why the situtation could quickly be corrected by full exposure of print journal archives on the Web:In other words, if you choose not to participate on the public, freely linkable, not for pay Web, don¹t complain when others who do participate by the rules of the game are easier to find. Dave agrees:Anyway, Doc Searls, the happy blogger (always!) finds a glass-half-full solution. The print journalists should walk down the hall to their publishers' office and request that they make their archive publicly available so it can be indexed by the search engines. Google is just indexing what's on the Web. If you want to be in Google, you gotta be on the Web. It's pretty simple. Very simple indeed. And very fair and democratic. If you want mind-share on the net, you need to put out a lot of good stuff that people like. It has to be easily available, and it has to be possible to link to it and quote from it. But then again, maybe we shouldn't tell the big corporations about this. I kind of enjoy my splendid google rankings.
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