Jeff Jarvis gets some interesting data from a research group in Germany - it's clear that mainstream publishers need Google a whole lot more than Google needs them:

TRG took the content of the 1,000 domains controlled by the 148 German publishers that signed the so-called Hamburg Declaration(a veiled shot at Google) and analyzed how critical they are to Google search results. TRG asked the question: “How empty would the first 10 Google search results be if one could no longer find anything from the 148 German publishers?”

It’s quite another matter if Wikipedia were not there. It appears on 13% of first-page results. That is, one entity Wikipedia is on the treasured first page almost three times as often as all of Germany’s top publishers.

There's a chart on Jeff's blog that makes it even more obvious. The bottom line is, people like Rupert Murdoch, who periodically natter on about Google "stealing" content have no clue. Let him pull his stuff from the Google index; after he's down to about 3 readers, maybe he'll figure it out :)

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