World Watching

Google seem incapable of not making the news of late, usually for all the wrong reasons (street view, google books etc) but as one famous hollywood type whose name i have forgotten said “all publicity is good publicity” It seems google is battling on none the less.

The lastest brainwave of the internet giant is apparently called ’shop view’ where it seems they are trialling something similar to the much hated street view, just inside shops now. Coupled with an aquaintence bemoaning how it seems google are ignoring the noindex tags on his website, this got me thinking, If you don’t invite google or any other search engine to index your site i.e submit your url to them… do they actually have a right to be indexing your site, docs and pictures that you may have on the server at all?

Is ignoring noindex tags on a site that has not been submitted to them by the sites owner tantamount to digital trespass?

Having seen many of my pics turn up in googles image search in the past when i would rather they didnt, this has got me thinking about the whole subject of webcrawlers (bots) zipping across the internet via links from one site to the next and wondering about whether a link pointed at your site from another actually constitutes invitation to index at all given the site owner has no control over who links to his/her site.

What do you think? should google and co be restricted to sites they have been invited to index?