incrediBILL - 1:19 am on Oct 23, 2011 (gmt 0)

Because despite our combined power, at its most generous estimate, we don't really have a way to use that power to bring Google to the bargaining table. At this point, only the govt does.

Sure you do.

But it would take major sites like news sites, facebook, twitter, groupon, etc. to agree to join to make a difference. Heck, just getting facebook and twitter to play along for a few days would be enough to get Google's attention. Add a few major news sites, Yelp, etc. and it would easily hit the evening news and gain national attention.

Let's call this mythical protest "Occupy Google" - simply cut them off from crawling a few major sources for a few days, redirect inbound links from Google to Bing to show surfers alternate places to surf, maybe even slap "NOINDEX" on a few million pages for fun and start reducing their index. Sit back and hope it goes viral and lots of small to medium sized sites join the fun. The net result would be everyone using Bing in the interim because of the redirects and maybe Bing ends up growing it's share of search in the process.

It would be a hoot.

Convincing site owners to give up their Google traffic, even for a day, and I would think it would take a week or more to make Google pay attention, now THAT's the problem.

People have to be willing to bite the bullet and make a short term sacrifice in order to make any long term changes of this magnitude and if Google doesn't take the hint, they would have to be willing to do it again and again until the message gets driven home.

We are the web, Google is NOT the web, and we deserve more control over how our data is being used.

Example, I should be able to disable screen shots without disabling snippets, Bing does it right, Google refuses.

It's OUR screen shots, our copyright, and tying them to snippets is completely ASSinine.

Not to mention displaying full copyrighted CACHE pages is opt-out, not opt-in, but I digress...

[edited by: incrediBILL at 1:21 am (utc) on Oct 23, 2011]