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 Here's an idea sure to start some fires: Is it necessary to consider government regulation of search engines? Please hold your throwing-stones until the end of the presentation. Editor's Note: Whether you're generally for or against government intervention, this is a topic that will get more attention in the future and is guaranteed to spark heated debate. Is the free market strong enough to protect the Information Superhighway, or will Uncle Sam have to step in? Let us know in the Comments Section. A technologically advanced century brings with it more (much more) complicated questions that may or may not be properly addressed by old arguments. Worse, the concept is still hazy in the minds of most, making it that much more difficult to address. But the short version can be presented this way: The Search Engine Industry is one that controls access to the most valuable commodity there is in today's society, and that commodity is information. Access to the commodity is controlled by a few key players, and mostly by Google. As there is potential for abuse, then the appropriate and necessary role of the government is to guard against that abuse. A search engine can be defined as: an information retrieval agent; a value-judge (editor) of information; an information medium (i.e., press). And that is troublesome. Indeed, Google steers away from whatever definition hurts it the worst in court, citing the First Amendment at times, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act at others (i.e., our opinion is free speech, or, when necessary, we have no opinion as a an interactive computer service). We talk about Google most because it is the dominant player, and some would argue the fairest one. On the whole, though, a natural oligarchy has developed whereby a few entities control what information is viewable to the public. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the gatekeepers can be trusted. But there is an inherent possibility (and thus, temptation and motivation) that information can be manipulated to the benefit of the provider, or to the detriment of the competition. We've certainly addressed this before. In 2005, I explored whether the search engines were politically biased. In that same year, searches on both Google and MSN regarding the infamous Kai-Fu Lee lawsuit revealed dramatically different results – both parties had vested interests and their results seemed to reflect that.
And earlier this week, my colleague, David Utter, dropped a new term on us: Search Neutrality. An interesting point was that Google argues (rightly, I might add) that the telecommunications industry cannot be trusted with the Internet without government oversight. Yet, Google maintains it most certainly can be trusted with our information because, well, "the company says so." The line between ISP and search engine, then, are effectively blurred – both act as gatekeepers to information and therefore should be, in some way, regulated to protect the people's access to this unprecedented information availability. You may not have heard of Frank Pasquale III, but you won't find a more impressive résumé. Summa cum laude, Harvard; Marshall Scholar, Oxford; Coker Fellow, Yale Law. That's my ham-fisted way of saying the dude's pretty smart. Read the rest of the article.
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Don't Try Crawling Google News Comments 
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David A. Utter Editor | WebProNews The newest feature on Google News - comments solicited from participants in a news story - won't be part of anyone else's news. When AOL broke down its subscriber walls, it looked like the end of walled garden content models on the Internet. They have been coming back in some ways, Facebook being one less-restrictive example. Google News doesn't seem like the place to find high walls and ivy creeping up the bricks. TechCrunch thinks it is, citing Techmeme's Gabe Rivera about the policy for comments on Google News: One thing that bugs me: they’re now hosting original news content, yet they prohibit other aggregators from crawling it (per robots.txt restrictions and TOS). Of course Google News relies on the openness of other organizations with original news content.
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Duplicate problem Our featured post today comes from deadhippo. Deadhippo has a problem with a site of a friend that's being displayed through an iframe on another site who didn't have permission to do so. They are worried that this may hurt them in the search engines, and could be considered duplicate content. Think you can help deadhippo out? Tell us your thoughts at WebProWorld. Subscribe to the WebProWorld Feed 
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