The court ruling may have backfired big time for the newspapers, as Google has begun to block articles and sites not only on Google News but also on Google Search. That’s a serious blow to the suing newspapers considering that Google’s market share in the Belgian search market is believed to be higher than 90%.

Belgian newspapers like the La Capitale are now stating that it was not their intention to get banned from Google Search. All they wanted to achieve was to either get paid to be included in Google News, or do not appear at all there.

Google on the other hand believes that the court’s decision applies to all of their products, and that the company would face fines of 25,000 Euros if contents of one of the newspaper websites would appear in the search engine results, Google News or any other Google owned web property.

All banned Belgian newspapers are members of Copiepresse, a copyright management company. Websites like Alexa are already showing a downward trend for affected newspaper websites. While Alexa is not the most accurate tool when it comes to determining a website’s traffic stats over time, it can be used to visualize trends.

The search traffic for the LaLibre site dropped from 12.7% on average for the last 30 days to 3.2% yesterday, which indicates a traffic decline of almost 10% because of the ban. It is likely that search engine traffic will drop further in the coming days.

Sudpresse, another Belgian newspaper shows a decline from 17.1% to 8.7% yesterday. It is fair to say that the ban will hurt the newspapers in the long run. Possible effects are less links from third party sites which correlates with less visitors from those sites. It is likely that the newspapers will see further decline in traffic over the coming months and years.

What is your take on this? Let me know in the comments.

Interested users can perform a text search which can either be broad or very specific. Advanced search parameters allow to specify a timeframe, place of publication, publication section, frequency and language among other parameters. It is furthermore possible to only search for information that are freely available. Free newspaper articles are available instantly while those that are not free require a registration on the site and the purchase of a 24-hour or 7-day pass which are good for 100 and 200 articles during that time (the website selling the passes was unavailable at the time of writing so no information on the pricing scheme)

A free search will only yield a few results compared to a full text search. Searching for Jack the Ripper will for instance displays 23 free results but 2035 free and pay to view results. All contents of the newspaper library are usually available for people in UK higher and further education and in some public libraries.

Newspaper articles can be printed and marked as favorites. The British Newspaper archive can be accessed freely by people from all over the world.