OT: Quantum Books closing...

[Bill McGonigle]

On Oct 14, 2007, at 21:04, Ted Roche wrote:

>> Also, O'Reilly's Safari engages in page cloaking towards the search
>> engines.  I half-expect that the Google people are looking at my
>> complaints saying, "I don't get it, I see the content there, not an
>> advertisement for Safari..."  They're wasting my time, so I'm even
>> less likely to support them.
>>
>
> I'm not sure I understand if this is reprehensible behavior or not
> giving away the content for free. Could you explain what you're seeing
> and how you think it should be working?

Safari apparently serves up its entire content to Googlebot (using IP  
ranges and User-Agent's, apparently) with a no-cache flag set.  So,  
when you go to search for something on Google, you'll see a summary  
that looks promising.

When you click on it, you're greeted with an "if only you subscribed  
to Safari you could have seen the content on this page"-type of  
message.  Google prohibits this kind of behavior:

   http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355

but doesn't take any action on Safari doing it.  My guess was that  
rather than being in conspiracy with Tim O'Reilly, everybody at  
Google has access to Safari, and thus don't see cloaking when reported.

A clever publisher will someday start publishing books with serial  
numbers that enable online access to the book built in to the price.   
Smart heuristics required for when the same book starts appearing all  
over the world simultaneously, of course.

-Bill

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