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Murdoch To Explore Blocking Google Searches
In another move sure to continue the certain doom looming over classic publications, Rupert Murdoch has elaborated on the direction he would take in an effort to monetize the content that his websites deliver by attempting to block much of Google's ability to scan and index his news sites. "Murdoch believes that search engines cannot legally use headlines and paragraphs of news stories as search results. 'There's a doctrine called "fair use," which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether,' Mr Murdoch told the TV channel. 'But we'll take that slowly.'"
Google have mentioned "robots.txt" pretty much every time Murdoch has spoken about this idea or anyone has cared to ask them for a comment. They've done so that many times in fact that I expect they've resorted to sending sample "robots.txt" files over to News Corp. just to get them to shut up and leave them alone and have possibly even considered proactively bypassing News Corp's sites. Personally, I think the endless rhetoric from Murdoch and complete lack of action on behalf of News Corp. is because either this boils down to a serious difference of opinion between Murdoch and a good chunk of his senior staff or they have their doubts and don't want to go it alone just in case.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
From fox.com/robots.txt:
User-agent: * /*?exid=
Allow: /
Disallow: