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Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content
Hugh Pickens writes Weston Kosova writes in Newsweek that Rupert Murdoch gave an impassioned speech to media executives in Beijing decrying that search engines — in particular Google — are stealing from him, because Google links to his stories but doesn't pay News Corp. to do so. 'The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content,' Murdoch says. 'But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.' But if Murdoch really thinks Google is stealing from him, and if he really wants Google to stop driving all those readers to his Web sites at no charge, he can simply stop Google from linking to their news stories by going to his Web site's robot.txt file and adding 'Disallow.'"
Or make your site subscription-based. Of course you might want to talk with the guys over at Slate first to see how well that works out...
http://www.newscorp.com/robots.txt:
User-Agent: *
Disallow:
Hmm, so they have heard of robots.txt and already made the decision not to restrict any search engines...
Technically he is right.
No, he isn't.
And Google really do take without providing anything back.
Bullshit. As the summary stated: if Newscorp really was the victim here, they'd implement a robots.txt file telling Google to go away.
The problem is that if Google went away, Newscorp would lose business.
The rest of your post is even more idiotic than your first two sentences. (Come on, legal theft? If it was theft, it wouldn't be legal, asshat.)
You have every choice not to deal with them. It's perfectly possible to do without - there are other search engines, other webmail providers, other banner networks. If you have a website, you can even exclude them in your robots.txt if you want.
Not only that, but the one on foxnews.com provides Google sitemaps.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
Dude, go back school. 0.000001 only has one sigfig. 1.000000 has 7. 0.000001000000 has seven also.
User-agent: * /printer_friendly_story /projects/livestream /printer_friendly_story /google_search_index.xml /google_news_index.xml /*.xml.gz
Disallow:
Disallow:
#
User-agent: gsa-crawler
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
#
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_index.xml
Notice the sitemap section, they are directly telling Google what news they have
Murdoch is not an Australian - he gave up his citizenship as soon as it hindered his US interests.
He's as American as any other immigrant.
On behalf of Australians everywhere, I'm sorry that he's your problem now.
No, this isn't anywhere near as simple as just using robots.txt to deter Google from indexing.
Sure it is. If Google's spider is blocked from indexing "Murdoch" content by robots.txt, it's also blocked from caching any "Murdoch" content, the "Murdoch" headline never shows up on Google News, and there isn't any "Murdoch" text appearing to let me know if I really want to look that the whole article.
Murdoch has, in fact, deliberately made content available for free by and through Google. Before Murdoch took over the Wall Street Journal, all Wall Street Journal news content could not be accessed by Google News, and could not be obtained by using Google News or a Google cache. You could only get WSJ content by going to the WSJ site. After Murdoch took over the Wall Street Journal, all Wall Street Journal content was made accessible to Google News. Furthermore, the WSJ paywall was deliberately lowered to allow people to read articles on the WSJ site for free if they follow a link to the article from Google News.
Murdoch isn't letting Google access this content by accident or through ignorance. He has actively chosen to make this content available by and through Google. He can undo that any time he chooses, for any of his sites.
Precisely because its expensive to send out correspondents to do real reporting, big media has stopped doing it.
In the last couple of months hundreds of adverts have appeared in London (mostly on the Underground) for the Times saying how they have lots of science correspondants. Although having just searched Google for one to check I remembered it correctly, I'm no longer as impressed.
Google News is what is he's complaining about.
He doesn't mind the search links, the RSS feed, etc.
He's complaining that Google News is gathering the content from his News Corp properties using their Googlebot, and taking all of the advertising revenue because Google places their own paid ads on the pages instead of the News Corp ads that would appear from the originating sites.
This is the same issue/complaint that organizations like the AP and Reuters have with Google.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.