It’s not unusual to hear people express all types of gripes about Google, but it is extremely rare for someone to actually react by blocking Google from indexing their
site. Now someone’s done that. Karl-Friedrich Lenz has declared his blog a Google-Free Zone over concerns about
Google Web Accelerator. He’s blocked Google from crawling his site and changed any links he had to Google to
now lead to Yahoo.
Nathan at InsideGoogle has a nice recap here of Lenz’s actions:
Anti-Google Campaign By Lenz? Of course, Lenz will have to hope that Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and Microsoft — the other major search engines — won’t also gather large amounts
of internet traffic data. Maybe they’ll shun a page caching service, but they might gather data in other ways.
FYI, the last move I heard like this was when Microsoft announced plans to build its own search engine. I
wrote at the time about a plan to block the crawler that had gained 100 sites supporting it. Obviously,
the plan never took hold, as MSN Search has free access to plenty of sites across the web. Still, the site behind the
idea for to this day still bans MSN.
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