[sdoering]

This reminded me of a project an acquaintance of mine did in 1997/98 when he build a news aggregator site. Mind this was before Google News arrived and it was a great way of seeing all headlines from the bigger (ans also smaller) sites in Germany.

Until the publishers came, dragged him to court on claims of copyright infringement (for doing deep links into the articles). That was a time, when clicking on a teaser brought you to a category page where you had to click the teaser again to get to the intended article. Why? To increase ad impressions. Sometimes you had to click three or four levels deep.

So they feared the lost ad impressions. They pulled the big guns on a high school kid creating a service. He agreed to delist them and the service was dead in the water. Because nearly every publisher wanted his sites to be delisted.

One or one and a half years later Google entered the German internet with Google News and the publishers sued again - this time it came to a trial and Google won. But 20 years later the publishers still try to lobby for laws against aggregators, against quoting from "their" news.

Thanks for this trip down memory lane into the late 90ies. Now I feel old. ;-)

[marban]

I've been running this under various brands for 25 years — Back then I was the #1 referrer for Reddit and Digg so to this day, i still take some credit for their success ;) Folks from Conde to Forbes call me to get on the site — no one ever asked to be removed. It's great not to be Google.