[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)?