As annoying as this is, I hope it will push news outlets to consider other funding models. Getting subscribers to pay for journalism seems much healthier than subsisting on ad clicks.
The Globe kinda does this with their soft paywall. The ex-Irving papers in NB seemed to do pretty well with their hard paywall.
They’re all trying to get people to pay for journalism, but not enough people are paying.
am I understanding it correctly that if I’m in Canada and search for, say ArsTechnica, or other news source, Google will not show those results to me? Like they indexed the site and will omit it from a search?
Or are they pulling news in their “cards” or whatever they call them when they show previews and users never enter the site. Havent used Google Search in so long don’t even know what shenanigans they are up to.
As I understand it, they are pulling all links to Canadian news sources from search and from their cards, Google News, etc. So if you search for Canadian news you will not find it, unless international news organizations report it, and neither will you find world news reported by Canadian news channels and newspapers.
It might still be possible to use Google to search for Canadian news if you use a VPN and pretend to be in another country, especially if you do it from a browser that’s not logged in to your account.
I’m having a hard time believing that is the case for “search.” Cards and “google news” is another story.
As much as I dislike Google’s practices, they are doing a service by indexing where websites are and allowing them to be found based on keywords.
I feel if I go to “google.com” and search for <some Canadian news site> Google should show me links to <some Canadian news site> so that I can visit the site directly. Any law that retards that is shooting Canadian news outlets in the foot.
Now if Google somehow finds what you’re looking for and does not take me directly to the website and instead parses the site, presents the content, and shows its own ads, as opposed to ads hosted on <some Canadian news site>, then yeah - google can go play in traffic.
The amount of people that don’t understand how important a news propagator like Google is is mind-blowing. Access to information is a right. This beats this right down to a pulp.
“HURR DURR GOOGLE BAD HUE HUE GOOD RIDDANCE HUE HUE I’M LE INTELLECTUAL”
Really sad. This fucked every news org. Hard. Except the big ones that own everything.
Why should Google have control over the propagation of news? Everyone can still go to the individual news organisations’ website…yes Google consolidated everything into one portal, but maybe it’s time to go back to something less centralised, which isn’t under the control of a single corporate entity, i.e. the way the web was originally intended to work.
Same reason you’re using Lemmy and don’t just go to browse every single individual website on the internet.
So then we need a non-corporate portal for news. Centralising the power of information distribution with massive companies that are driven solely by profit is not the way.
The worst thing about Google to me is their grab on Android. Yes granted many software companies will not divulge the coding behind their apps but still. No way should Google have that much monopoly on an OS. You would think we would have learned our lesson with Microsoft but apparently not. I have de-google my life as much as possible and am starting to realize just how big Google Android ecosystem is. So…all that to say that yes…every thing that Google loses I’m all for it.
The core of Android is actually open source…if you install an aftermarket Android ROM like Lineage OS, you can avoid the closed source Google components (for the most part).
