He makes a good point. Since Google recently went after the content farms that hurt their search results, it would be nice if they extended that to authors and legitimate content producers.
The content farm issue has different incentives from the authors and content produces. In the content farm the user is usually landing onto substandard content and the click is basically a user search that has "failed" because it has not produced a high quality response. For the ebooks its likely that the user is looking for precisely the book, and not providing the book would in fact be the "failed" search.
This is a good point. Why is it still so hard to find legal, DRM free ebooks to buy?
It doesn't make sense that when you search +"title" +ebook you get almost only pirate sites. This is the same problem that used to exist with music. Unless it becomes easier to buy ebooks legally, the "pirates" will win.
This is not really Google's fault only though... Some weeks ago I tried to buy a scifi ebook, but was bounced by Amazon because I'm not from the USA. In other stores I had similar problems.
Authors: at least make sure everyone can buy your ebook legally!
Honestly, this has recently given credence to the idea that Google is just broken recently. I can hardly find anything I'm looking for anymore. Even for freely available books, searching for the PDF just links me to a content farm that doesn't even have it. It's just a maze of "herbal Viagra" ads.
dman|15 years ago
wladimir|15 years ago
It doesn't make sense that when you search +"title" +ebook you get almost only pirate sites. This is the same problem that used to exist with music. Unless it becomes easier to buy ebooks legally, the "pirates" will win.
This is not really Google's fault only though... Some weeks ago I tried to buy a scifi ebook, but was bounced by Amazon because I'm not from the USA. In other stores I had similar problems.
Authors: at least make sure everyone can buy your ebook legally!
phren0logy|15 years ago
cicloid|15 years ago
Maybe another search engine?