“When is it acceptable to copy someone else’s Web page, even temporarily?”
One of my readers brought this article about Google’s cache to my attention. The article explores many of the issues surrounding the search engine’s copies of Web pages it allows users to view. One of the issues I hadn’t considered before is how errors and inaccuracies in news reporting might be perpetuated by cached Web pages. Randy Stearns of ABCNews.com makes the point that news organizations can easily go onto their Web sites to fix these errors, which the publications I work for do, but what happens when those errors are still cached in Google? What happens when someone gets the information through a cached page and doesn’t see the correction?
Throughout the article, Google officials keep saying that few people click on the cahced pages. I find this a bit surprising because I know a lot of people who will use Google in certain circumstances in the hopes of finding a cached page.
I think it is interesting that Google does not offer caching with its Google News search. That indicates to me that they’ve already explored many of the issues raised by caching and that they decided it would not be an appropriate commercial venture for them to do that with news sources.
July 11th, 2003 at 2:34 pm
Oh, I totally use Google’s cache all the time at work. However, I try not to
use it for news items because it’s obviously dated …
However, I wonder how Sterns et al. feel about the Internet Archive and its
harvesting. It can’t visit every site every day (or even every week), so I
suspect there’s a lot of uncorrected stories in there. Then again, Brewster
Kahle would argue that the Archive functions like microfilm: a version of the
historical record (as well as a research tool) …