ResourceBlog Article: <b>National Public Radio's New Linking Policy and Search Engines</b>

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Friday, 21st June 2002

National Public Radio's New Linking Policy and Search Engines

Search Engines
National Public Radio's New Linking Policy and Search Engines
Much is being written about NPR's new linking policy. I'll save the big legal and enforcement discussions for later, but I wanted to share a thought or two. I'm wondering how NPR is going to monitor for non-authorized links? My guess, using web search engines (note: other, more sophisticated approaches are possible). However, this might not be a good idea. Why? Will they only use one search engine? Remember, each of the major engines have unique databases. How will they track down pages that are completely indexable but not accessible from any engine? Will the search engines get involved and not allow the engines to be used for this purpose? Another point (it was coincidentally mentioned on the weblog yesterday), is the fact that any server owner can place a file on the server and not permit the crawler/spider to crawl, what the engines send out to build their databases, and make the content on the page non-accessble via a search engine. It would be very easy for someone to place his or her pages with NPR links in a directory and then tell the Google spider to crawl the content except for the pages in that directory. Heck, it's even easier than that and you don't even have to have server access. All a web page author needs to do is place a META tag in the html coding of a page and that tells the crawler/spider NOT to crawl that particular page. Finally, what are the long term implications if NPR and other organizations with linking policies use search engines to monitor for violators? Will the amount of material not accessible to the general web engines grow because page authors use META tags and methods?
Note: I'm doing my best to get a comment from NPR.
(Updated 6/22) NPR To Reevaluate Linking Policy, See Current Posts

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