Meta search engines may infringe database rights: EU Court of Justice

@Anonymous Coward: Re: This seems eminently reasonable.

"This kind of aggregation is a combination of web scraping and freeloading on someone else's work, which is pretty much what Web 2.0 is built upon so this might mean big changes in the way the web operates, and yet more Googlebucks spent on lobbying, various front organizations, and of course individual Google Tools."

That's probably what you meant to say, right? If so, then +1 insightful.

A Google presents the results for terms relevant to a subset of pages across multiple web sites. These sites on the other hand present what is often little more than a new front end for the complete content of a site owned by other people, the contents of which they present under their own front end. I've noticed many websites do something similar with tech question and answer format websites, so you find e.g. the same Stack Overflow question and answer thread republished in its entry multiple times over. It's easy to deal with if Stack Overflow is in the list, just go to Stack Overflow, but for other websites where they are not so well established, often it is difficult to know who the true source is. The true source will find it difficult to build and maintain a brand. They don't get all the credit they deserve for their work. Also often the clones have bad performance which is really bloody annoying if you are grazing across multiple results (though of course the originals also often have bad performance, but it is worse for the clones). I find it rather annoying when websites do this, plus I personally think it is wholly wrong. Ditto the same problem encountered when booking hotels (especially when you can't find the authentic hotel website and all the others deliberately hide the telephone number because they don't want you going direct to the hotel, when and the telephone number for the hotel is all you want to f*!%*ing well look-up). ditto when booking theatre tickets.

I like the thumbs down without the explanation - I'm not saying "Search engines are evil and wrong", I'm saying "Doesn't this ruling mean that what all search engines do is infringing, and if not, why not".

Hi,

a normal web search searches for content on a site, displays a small part (not all) and provides a link to the actuall site.

The small part which is displayed helps you to find the results that are relevant to you, but most of the information is not displayed and in the end you end up on the page from which the content originates.

They do not "display the information on their own site" in any significant way and hence do not breach intellectual property laws.

Meta searches though, use other search engines (say, google, yahoo and bing, all at the same time) and use the information those other engines provided (aka the snippets and links), do something with it (like grouping by first letter, if that is what you want) and displays those results.

The Results will also link to the original pages (those, that were found by google, yahoo and bing), but here a database (googles, yahoos and bings in my case) was queried and their results used without the user actually going to their (google, yahoo, bing) frontends (and hence without generating any add revenue for them, which is the problem)

If the meta-search is only a copy of the engine they use (only a free text field, that let's you enter a search string) without providing additional options (like... an option to group websites by dominant color sheme for example), then they would use "content [from] other sites and then display the infomration on their own site" which would breach intellectual property law.

TL;DR:

Displaying a snippet from a site, causing the user to go to that site in the end (which is what search engines do) -> legal

Using other search engines and displaying their findings as if they were your own without increasing the value of the result or linking back to them -> not legal.

I hope this answerd your question ^^