Google has a webpage where you can tell Google about new websites that you think Google should start crawling and indexing. It's had this page for years - decades even at this point. It's at https://www.google.com/addurl.
At some point, Google made it so that you need to sign in to a Google account to do this.
Search engines rely on having as complete an index as possible. The more websites they index, the more useful they are, and the more users they'll get. If there are websites they don't index, users will go to another search engine to find them, and there's a real possiblity they won't come back.
Imagine if DuckDuckGo did that. If you needed a DuckDuckGo account to tell DuckDuckGo about your new website, no-one would ever submit a new website to their index. They'd just not bother and DuckDuckGo would be worse off.
Google, on the other hand, knows that you need it more than it needs you.
Google is so ubiquitous, is so widely used, and has been so well verbed, that it knows that individual websites need to be on Google more than Google needs individual websites. At this point, if your website isn't on Google that's going to be seen as more of a problem with your website than it is a problem with Google. And Google knows this. So, if you want to add your website to Google's search engine you need a Google account. Which means you need to agree to Google's eleventy-billion page terms-of-service, which you're not going to read, and even if you did you've got no way to actually object to any of the clauses, and means you "voluntarily consent" to Google's capture, storage, processing and sharing of whatever data about you Google can get its mitts on, in whatever ways it thinks it can get away with.
Talk about leveraging market dominance and success in one area of business to strong-arm people in another.
Gits.
posted at: 23:14 | path: / | permanent link to this entry