Google Being Stupid About RSS Feeds and Google Base
Google’s stock started to fall for me when they turned Urchin into something less than useful. Looking around at their stable of apps; gMail, Google Analytics, gTalk, Froogle, Google Desktop, AdSense/AdWords, Google News, Google Maps, EPIC just to name a few – they’re over-saturated in my mind. Jumped the Shark if you will.
Then they go and do 2 stupid (not quite evil, yet) things:
- Bring up RSS feeds in their search results.
The problem is, when you click on it, an RSS reader opens (if it exists). Now that’s great for my subscriber counts, but it’s not the behavior I expect when clicking on a blue search result link. Googlebot should be smart enough to figure this one out. - Preventing other search engines from accessing the Google Base
Seems to me there’s an inherent conflict of interest with Google being a search company and a publishing company – but only because they won’t let other robots into what they publish.
The next generation search engine can’t come soon enough. Maybe I’ll spend more time poking around IceRocket.
2 Comments
They’re losing their lustre – they’re a lot larger than they were a year ago.
I find it interesting that del.icio.us also declares: . Why would they do that?
Here’s the markup that WordPress stripped out:
meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive,nofollow,noindex”/