Dave Winer, former Netscape engineer and developer of RSS, sometimes seems as powerful and as feared as Aunty Entity, the Tina Turner character ruling the Thunderdome, but he knows his stuff.
In an entry in his blog today, Winer points out how pages that are locked behind paid databases–like those published by the NY Times–get less page views than those out free on the web. Conclusion: if you want to show up in Google’s search results, make your pages reachable by Google.
Winer: “Weblogs, on the other hand, are not only on the Web, but beautifully organized for search and retrieval. Google is just indexing what’s on the Web. Most print pubs aren’t there…There’s basically a very simple rule. If you want to be in Google, you gotta be on the Web. “