It’s not the first time that a news organisation has called for Google’s index to be purged of its stories, but Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corporation, has a definite financial motive for his recently publicised stance.
Calling Google a “parasite”, and questioning whether its use of excerpts constitutes fair use, he said that when News Corporation had found a way of making money from its arsenal of news sites.
In his tirade against other established corporations, he said that they merely “stole” stories from newspapers and that News Corporation would be suing them for copyright.
I’m sure the BBC will be glad to hear that they’ll actually have to “spend a lot more money on a lot more reporters to cover the world” when in fact they already do.
One positive side-effect of newspapers such as the UK tabloid “The Sun” going behind a pay wall is that we won’t accidentally be subjected to its tirade of hateful “journalism”, because it will no longer show up in search results. Only those that actually want to pay to read such a sorry excuse for news reporting will have access.
Google, on the other hand, said that it merely took a couple of lines of code added to the robots.txt file of any web site to de-index content.
Google delivers more than a billion consumer visits to newspaper websites each month. These visits offer the publishers a business opportunity, the chance to hook a reader with compelling content, to make money with advertisements or to offer online subscriptions,” wrote Google’s senior business product manager Josh Cohen back in July.
If News Corporation doesn’t want that free publicity, that’s fine by me.
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