Re: Web-page jacking and copyright implications?

On Wed, Jun 14, 2000, Lee T. Lau <lau[_at_]wedge.com> wrote:
>
> "Ideally, search engines might provide a system like Google's popular
> caching feature. That allows you to see exactly the page that Google
> has indexed. However, it remains unclear whether Google's caching
> feature itself is violating copyright laws by displaying copies of
> other people's pages without permission."
>
> A quotation taken directly from the following article -- which, in
> itself, is interesting.
>
> http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/00/05-pagejacking.html
>
> Can anyone expand on Google's caching feature? I'm not sure what it is.

By way of example:

   http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.wedge.com/+david+wedge+computer+law&hl=en

It is a copy of website content stored in Google's 6000 node Linux cluster, rather than on the original website.

The cache is updated periodically, so content may or may not be current. "Spiders", or web indexing 'bots (actually, automated browsers which seek out and download web content) continuously "crawl" the web, but may only hit a site ever few days (for a busy site) to months (for minor sites).

Given that Google uses a scoring metric to rank site significance, I'd be very surprised to find that spider activity isn't also keyed to a similar metric -- more significant sites being scheduled for update more often than lesser ones.

--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com>         http://www.netcom.com/~kmself/
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