Creating a Google-Free Zone
Inside Google provides this report on a growing anti-Google campaign by Dr. Karl-Friedich Lenz, professor at Aoyaman Gakuin University in Tokyo:
Citing major reservations about Google related to Autolink and Web Accelerator, Dr. Lenz recently posted a statement, that said in brief:
Two months ago, I had Google as the homepage of my web browser. It would have been fair to describe me as a fan of their service.This was followed by adding an anti-Google portion to his blog license:
Now I have decided to shut them out completely from my website, which I declare a "Google-free zone"...
... I have been opposed to any large-scale collection of Internet traffic data for years.
... it is absolutely unacceptable to try building the world's largest Internet traffic data collection under the misleading excuse of speeding up web surfing. This calls for active resistance to Google, which deserves to be put completely out of business for this move.
Permission for such commercial use is expressly denied to Google. I object specifically to inclusion in their cache and access to my pages with the "Google Web Accelerator".as well as banning Google's crawlers in his robots.txt file. The most extreme act, however, was adding code to his server that rewrote all traffic from Google to Yahoo. That means that if you click on a link in the Google search engine that points to his site (in spite of the robots.txt, this still does occur), instead of sending you to the page linked in Google, you will be sent to Yahoo.com, effectively sabotaging Google search and infuriating anyone who uses Google to find any information about him or information he is considered an authority on. Given that his blog has a PageRank of 7, and his website has a PageRank of 6, this is no small matter...
I certainly have my own reservations about some of Google's latest activities on the web, and a core part of my dissertation research will involve a critique of Google. While I might not be able to take such steps as Dr. Lenz, one thing I have been considering is moving this blog from Blogger and to a non-Google platform and hosting service.
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