Google’s Got A Secret
Anybody who has ever written a web crawler knows that Googlebot gets more access than everybody else. We’re a group of knuckleheads who are tired of Google abusing this privilege. For over two years we’ve been researching and fighting Google’s unchecked web crawling monopoly. We got cited in the Big Tech Antitrust Report released by Congress and our research was just featured in The New York Times. We have been helping governments around the world understand how and why they should fight back against Google. We invite you to join the club and join us in our fight for a better world.
Search Engines Depend On Crawling The Web
Search engines depend on a process called web crawling. Crawling the web is where you program a bunch of computers to go across the Internet and save copies of everything that they find there. These copies are then processed so that search engines can use those documents later on to answer users’ queries. So, if you can’t crawl the web, then you can’t run a search engine.
Only Google Is Really Allowed To Crawl The Web
Bandwidth costs money, so there’s a limit to how much and how often website operators will let their websites be crawled. This limit means that website operators are picky about who they let crawl their websites. Only a select few crawlers are allowed access to the entire web, and Google is given extra special privileges on top of that. This isn’t illegal and it isn’t Google’s fault, but this monopoly on web crawling that has naturally emerged prevents any other company from being able to effectively compete with Google in the search engine market.
There Should Be A Public Cache Of The Web
All of Google’s competitors in the search engine market have failed in their own way but most of them have complained bitterly about how Google has such an advantage when it comes to web crawling. We think that there is clearly a failure in this market and government intervention is required to break Google’s hold on the natural monopoly of crawling the web.
Fight For An Open Web
The Knucklesheads’ Club is a home for people who believe we deserve better than a Google-controlled internet. No one is coming to do this for us—so all of us together have to fight for an open web. Joining the club means joining this fight for a better world.