Including Everything Blog

Posts Tagged ‘search engines’

In a debate going back a while, Google was told recently by Rupert Murdoch that he has been blocking Google from indexing its websites, essentially making them invisible to Google’s crawlers. Google doesn’t seem to mind.

Sky News political editor David Speers talks to News Corporation chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch about paywalls, politics, and more. Murdoch wants to charge users for access to its news services.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7GkJqRv3BI

This is already being done on the Wall Street Journal, with plans for other Murdoch properties to soon follow. Ultimately, Murdoch feels that Google has been stealing this news and doesn’t care if they’ll be losing traffic to their websites as the news source by blocking Google.

“The people who just simply pick up everything and run with it, and steal our stories. We say they steal our stories — they just take them without payment. There’s Google, there’s Microsoft, Ask.com … there’s a whole lot of people.”

Google chosen to respond today, telling the Telegraph that they don’t care if Murdoch wants to block its sites from being found via search and/or Google News.

A spokesman for the search giant said: “Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organizations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute.”

“Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.”

Google’s response is essentially using tactics like robots.txt and meta tags to block its search engine from crawling the news results.

This argument isn’t over and may continue for some time. I see Google as being the chosen option by users over paid news for the foreseeable future, however, wonder how the tables will turn (or rather, how Google will evolve) if larger news sources such as CNN start to opt out of search results.