Is there such a thing as life without Google? Possibly not, for most of us, but it may still be possible to exist on our increasingly connected planet if one is deprived of one little bit of Google -- even though life may not be quite the same. In this guest post, Spanish IP enthusiast Míchel Olmedo Cuevas explains how humanity has fared in Spain, a month after the withdrawal there of Google News service. Writes Míchel:
As Eleonora Rosati reported in early December here,
Google stopped offering its news aggregation services (“Google News”) in Spain
after the Spanish Parliament passed a bill reforming the current Intellectual
Property Act 1/1996 which included a new provision on the regulation of
snippets in Spain
[You can see the updated version of the Act in Spanish here
and the modifying bill in Spanish here. A
brief review on the implications of the reform can be found here].
This reform was met with heavy criticism from all
aggregators, and resulted in a swift reaction from
Google that it would stop offering its aggregation
services on 16 December. So, how is this situation affecting the Spanish media?
First, what has actually stopped is the aggregation
service. It is however still possible to
find news results. This means that, just as happened in Germany, Google no
longer shows news snippets —but it doesn’t exclude the Spanish media from its
results, so the user can filter these results as news as well.
Here, we can see what the result of a German News search for bayern münchen looked like
after the German Law was amended:
The results indicated the red arrows are those of the
media represented by VG-Media which had, at least at the time, refused to be
indexed by Google (even though, since then, many editors have opted out from
the system, such as Axel
Springer).
Now, here we can see what a search result for podemos españa in the news
section looks like in Google News Spain today:
And here we have the very same result, but done
through Google Italy:
So, visually, one can see that there is a significant
difference in the results. This
variation doesn’t only affect the results; it also affects the amount of
traffic these sites generate. According to the media themselves, there has been
a marginal impact on their results, while other sources talk about a 10% to 15% decrease in their visits in just the very first hours of de-indexation.
Official data from Comscore regarding traffic in December will be released in
February, when I shall follow up this story and evaluate how this measure has
affected the Spanish media. At first
glance, though, everything indicates that Spain might follow the steps of other
countries and modify (if not abolish) this provision in its next Intellectual
Property Act reform, expected early next year (if not earlier).
Copyright in Spain: a month without Google News
Reviewed by
Jeremy
on
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Rating:
5
Just to inform you that the link named "marginal impact" at the end of the article points to a google search on "podemos espana" and I'm not sure this was intended.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Ju Xuv. I'm chasing Michel!
ReplyDeleteMichel has kindly provided a replacement link http://www.prnoticias.com/index.php/internet-y-redes-sociales/1252-tasa-google/20137400-google-news-no-cae-el-trafico-de-los-diarios-aede, so all's well that ends well!
ReplyDeleteThe blogpost has been amended accordingly.