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On Wednesday 20 June 2007 12:34, Simon Waters wrote: > Tom Potts wrote: > > Not so amusing when you consider that a huge amount of new internet > > business seems to be an attempt to charge you for things you could get > > for free... if the internet search engines weren't paid to put things > > like experts exchange at the top of the list..... > > I don't think Google are paid to list Expert Exchange highly -- I think > it got there on merit in the days when the content was free. > > Of course whether returning results people can't see without paying is > THAT useful is another question. At the very least you'd think they'd > offer you the option to exclude such content. Type in Linux into Google. Who comes up first - and how much work have they done to support it? I don't know how Google's system is weighted but I bet money talks in there somewhere. When I used to program a lot Expert Exchange came up for just about every query I asked and when I've worked for people who where dumb enough to pay for it there seemed to be no reason why they came higher up the search results than other, often more closely related results. What I was trying to highlight was the fact that most of what is supposedly new technology that people are trying to sell is in fact old hat and available for free elswhere: Experts Exchange will sell you MSN content re-written, and content given freely when it was free. Skype will sell you internet telephony - like I don't have an IP connection for my internet already? Its getting to the stage where companies are so worried about people doing their own business over the internet and not paying 'taxes' to them they're thinking of taking it away under various pretences. The fact that companies like expert exchange are technically so bad they cant actually stop you getting the data for free may seem amusing but I personally find it very scary. Tom te tom te tom rustling his silver paper hat.... -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html