Simon Willison’s Weblog

Stupid Danish newspapers

5th July 2002

More deep linking stupidity (via Scripting News). A judge in Denmark has ruled in favour of a newspaper who took a search engine to court over “deep linking”, despite the search engine’s spider following the robots.txt standard (it seems the newspaper didn’t bother to implement a robots.txt file). Dave Winer summed things up perfectly:

BTW, deep linking is an oxymoron. There’s only one kind of linking on the Web. Why would you ever point to the home page of a news oriented site.