NONE: ONLINE-ADS>> Re: Site abuse? What's a guy to do?
ONLINE-ADS>> Re: Site abuse? What's a guy to do?
Peter Hartley (hartley_at_shop.hartley.on.ca)
Tue, 15 Oct 1996 21:42:43 -0400
>> At 10:42 AM 10/10/96 -0400, Bob Wyman wrote:
>> >
>> >You see Green runs the "The Strategic Health Review" which focuses on
>> >providing access to information concerning "Social, Economic and
>> >Political Issues in Health." However, he does a bit more than that.
>> >One of his services is a "Free Medline" search...
>> >
>> >While he's got his own search form up on his site (with no
>> >advertising on it), the backend to his search form is *my* machine
>> >here at HealthGate. Whenever folk do a search on his site, my machine
>> >is the one that goes grunting through the 8.5 million documents that
>> >make up the Medline database... The problem is that we use
>> >advertising revenue to pay for the tremendous costs involved in
>> >keeping this database running but our advertising revenue is limited
>> >when sites like Green's build front-ends to our engine (there are a
>> >number of sites that do this -- primarily outside the US).
>
>Doc wrote:
>> Many sites link to yahoo and other search engines. fundamentally
>> you are the same as they are. Why not adopt the same policies?
>> (Thought you may have less financial backing.) I believe they
>> usually use the Yahoo Icon with ALT text and the button that
>> says "Search Yahoo". This seems fair and adequate so long as
>> the search results actually produce the source pages and ads.
I think there are some other issues here that need to be considered.
There is a common misconception that everything on the net is or should be
FREE and is always stuff that any other sites can "plug into". Makes life
kind of tough for a small server out in the sticks where the connections max
out at 28.8 if that site succeeds in acquiring some "hot/kule property" that
everyone and his dog decides to link into. Yahoo has resources that others
do not have.
Clearly that Bob Wyman has a legitimate need to expose the advertising on
the front-end to his search engine to underwrite the costs of running the
site. In which case the search engine shouldn't be accepting searches that
originated elsewhere.
Earlier in this thread, someone said that this needs cookies. Well, that is
one way of doing it, but some users have recently started to avoid cookies.
It is probably easier to trap the referring page.
The search routine is software, be it a Server Side Process or a cgi-bin,
it is simple enough to add a line that checks that the referring page was
the correct one and to force the user back to the front end it it weasn't.
This recovers the lost exposure, but at some cost of the search engine's
exposure. Like everything else to do with computers and networked
resources, an appropriate compromise has to be made.
Even with a web page, the owner/operator has the ultimate right to refuse
admission - and considerable ability to do just that, based on user id's,
passwords, referring pages, or cookies. And the same owner/operator has the
ultimate and irrefutable right to change his rules and his list of who has
the right at any time.
Peter Hartley
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