Florian Jensen's Weblog

You could call it the revenge of Google.

The search engine has removed all links to the belgian mewspapers: “Le Soir”, “La Libre” and “la DH”, three major belgian newspapers which have sued Google before.

This was ofcourse not what the court asked for, they only asked to remove the articles from Googles Newspage.

Try searching for one of the three newspapers on Google Belgium and on any other Google. You’ll find links to the newspapers pages on any of the pages except belgium.

Google wants to make clear that they have alot of power, as they are the N°1 search engine worldwide.

This fight is followed by the entire world, as it could encourage other editors to do the same thing as the 3 Newspapers from belgium.

I’ll keep you posted!

(Source: RTBF Belgium)
Feel free to comment !

On Friday, a Belgian court ruled that Google may not publish any news content of any german, french or belgian newspapers without paying or asking them.
So google shutdown Google Belgium, Google France and Google Germany.
If you try to visit google.be / google.de / google.fr you will get an timeout.

I also had problems accessing GMail or it was really slow. Will that be offline too for the three countries?

Here are some links on the topic:
News Article

I had the chance of being early this morning and still got a last screenshot of Googles Page.
But while writing this article, I seem to have lost the tab… I know … really dumb of me.

Lets see when it will be back.

UPDATE (19:20 CEST – 2006-09-23):
The 3 local pages are back online.