Publishers Seek Change in Search Result Content

explosivejared writes "The Washington Post is running a story on the fight between publishers and search engines over just what exactly is allowed to be shown by search results. From the article: 'The desire for greater control over how search engines index and display Web sites is driving an effort launched yesterday by leading news organizations and other publishers to revise a 13-year-old technology for restricting access. Currently, Google, Yahoo and other top search companies voluntarily respect a Web site's wishes as declared in a text file known as robots.txt, which a search engine's indexing software, called a crawler, knows to look for on a site ... [new] proposed extensions, known as Automated Content Access Protocol, partly grew out of those disputes. Leading the ACAP effort were groups representing publishers of newspapers, magazines, online databases, books and journals. The AP is one of dozens of organizations that have joined ACAP."

Re:And the link to ACAP...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

You would think an article about ACAP would provide a link to it.

Sorry, their new exclusionary rules prevent any linking to their content.

Re:Historical footnote: where robots.txt came from

[Cheapy]

It figures that perl would be the root of one giant misunderstanding.

oblig...

[doyoulikeworms]

Bustin' ACAP in Google's ass.

Re:Seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

and if you don't want to be logged, don't chat on irc

Re:So they tell you what they don't want you to se

[gbjbaanb]

I think it would have been better named Content Retrieval Access Protocol.

Re:The Text I Actually Submitted

[Tanktalus]

As a slashdot user, I *only* look at the summaries. I don't click to read the actual article, but learn everything I need to know about a subject simply by the summary available on google.

It works fine here, so why not on google?