In June of this year the so-called “Hamburg Declaration” was released. A cry from 166 international publishers to get legal protection, to get paid for others linking to their sites.
Numerous providers are using the work of authors, publishers and broadcasters without paying for it. Over the long term, this threatens the production of high-quality content and the existence of independent journalism.
148 Of the 166 publishers are german, so The Reach Group GmbH (TRG) did a test.
Google is often cited as one of the main villains linking “for free” to this costly cintent.
So what happens if you would imagine that all these sites would block Google from accessing their content, how empty or different would the top-ten of search results become?
It turns out that only 5 % of the top-ten search results of Google links to the domains of the publishers, and the links are not very relevant.
The domains of the publishers contribute to 4 % of the Google index for Germany, much less than for instance Wikipedia. Apparently the content is hard to find for search engines. Even in Google News they are hard to find.
Apparently these publishers overestimate their own importance on the web.
