Rupert Murdoch threatens to pull content from Google
News Corporation supremo Rupert Murdoch says he may block Google from indexing any content from his Web sites, accusing the search engine of “stealing” content. Google appears unconcerned by the threat and noted that Murdoch could simply request that it no longer link to his sites.
Murdoch’s organization runs many major newspapers around the world including The Sun and The Times in the UK and the Wall Street Journal and New York Post in the U.S. He has previously stated he wants to make the Web site editions of all his titles subscription-only.
At the moment, most of the sites are fully accessible, but the Wall Street Journal is subscription based. Only the first paragraph of each story is freely available, though somebody visiting the site from a Google link can see the first page they arrive on in full.
Murdoch’s greatest ire appears to be with services such as Google News which reproduce a headline and a “snippet” of text from an article in their indexes. Speaking to Sky News Australia, Murdoch said that such firms “simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them.”
It’s not quite clear if Murdoch really understands what is going on online as sites such as Google don’t publish full copies of pages from his news sites (except in cached versions.) In any case, as Google points out, Murdoch could get the snippets removed immediately: “If publishers want their content to be removed from Google News specifically all they need to do it tell us.”
It appears Murdoch intends to wait until if and when he makes his sites subscription-based before pulling them from Google. That still seems like a ridiculous move. Even leaving aside the fact that few paid news sites have thrived online, pulling links and snippets from Google would be totally counterproductive.
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November 10th, 2009
If he doesn’t want people to even be aware of what is on his own sites by blocking Google. I am sure his competitors would be most grateful