[KobaQ]

I think in this case it's a blurred line. In the case of Youtube even more. True, they don't want to create their own content, but when they republish it and making money by doing so, we're in the middle of the copyright discussion. The question to answer in each of Googles (or others) businesses is, when is Google presenting it's own work (search results, etc.) or the work of others.

[eru]

There's also always robots.txt, if you don't want your contents indexed.

[mcv]

Google is generally useful to the sites they link to. Most sites want a high rank on Google, because that brings them more visitors and more advertiser revenue, and Google offers them that service at no cost.

If they don't want Google to link to them, they can control that through robots.txt.

You may remember a recent German law that allowed German news sites to charge money for this, and Google removed links to news sites that didn't want to be listed for free. Pretty soon, all sites allowed Google to link to them again, because the loss of traffic hurt them.

Basically this amounts to the question: should search engines and aggregators be allowed to exist at all? Should we go back to the pre search engine days when you could only find new sites when someone discussed it on usenet, or through web rings (a network of sites about a similar subject where each links to the next one)?

[eitally]

See, this is what I don't really get. Sure, they can make money by selling ads on the content they're indexing (which is the primary reason their ranking system has to stay egalitarian, or roughly so with a few exceptions), but publishers are by no means obligated to purchase display ads from Google, or to host using Google's platforms (Youtube, Blogger, etc). Imho, it's only a blurred line iff a publisher chooses to make it so.