Bill McGonigle
Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:15:56 -0700
On Oct 14, 2007, at 21:04, Ted Roche wrote: >> Also, O'Reilly's Safari engages in page cloaking towards the search >> engines. I half-expect that the Google people are looking at my >> complaints saying, "I don't get it, I see the content there, not an >> advertisement for Safari..." They're wasting my time, so I'm even >> less likely to support them. >> > > I'm not sure I understand if this is reprehensible behavior or not > giving away the content for free. Could you explain what you're seeing > and how you think it should be working?
Safari apparently serves up its entire content to Googlebot (using IP ranges and User-Agent's, apparently) with a no-cache flag set. So, when you go to search for something on Google, you'll see a summary that looks promising. When you click on it, you're greeted with an "if only you subscribed to Safari you could have seen the content on this page"-type of message. Google prohibits this kind of behavior: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355 but doesn't take any action on Safari doing it. My guess was that rather than being in conspiracy with Tim O'Reilly, everybody at Google has access to Safari, and thus don't see cloaking when reported. A clever publisher will someday start publishing books with serial numbers that enable online access to the book built in to the price. Smart heuristics required for when the same book starts appearing all over the world simultaneously, of course. -Bill ----- Bill McGonigle, Owner Work: 603.448.4440 BFC Computing, LLC Home: 603.448.1668 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cell: 603.252.2606 http://www.bfccomputing.com/ Page: 603.442.1833 Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/ VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/