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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.'"
There's a department store. It probably carries a lot of merchandise. But the store owner wants everybody to pay him a fee to walk through the front door. And he wants the local papers to not say what he carries, or what he's got on sale this week. He feels that he should be the only one getting paid for anything that mentions his merchandise.
Would you bother going to his store? Or would you go to the Target or Wal-Mart that's happy to have a flyer in the paper listing everything they've got on sale this week.
Yeah, thought so.
It's your right to be stupid and wrong-headed, Mr. Murdoch. Everyone has that gods-given right. But don't come whining to us when your plan fails to go the way you want it to go. We, after all, never signed any agreement saying we'd only behave the way you want.
http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_index.xml
Murdoch is so intent on blocking Google News that his site automatically generates the feed necessary for the import.
Wait.. I think I missed something.
If you want to be seen, stand up. If you want to be heard, speak up. If you want to be respected, sit down and shut up.
And murdoch's news.com.au's robots.txt file even directs bots to the sitemap!
/*comments/* /*print/* /*email/* /*SIT* /*.swf /printpage/
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow: */404*
Sitemap: http://www.news.com.au/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.news.com.au/couriermail-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.news.com.au/perthnow-sitemap.xml
> I wonder if Google could argue that by not using robots.txt, Murdoch had
> essentially given permission to have his sites searched and indexed.
I believe that in the US case law has established that Murdoch has given permission to have his sites searched and indexed by making them public. Obeying robots.txt is just a courtesy, but the fact that he has not used it to block Google totally destroys any feeble case he might have had.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Really. Of course he knows. He just wants a cut of Google's pie.
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
Just for grins, I took a look at http://www.foxnews.com/robots.txt, and guess what? It specifically allows google.
I just looked at the Fox News site main page and visited all their top news stories accessable from the front page.
So out of their top ten stories, nine are either pure AP stories or edited from AP stories, and one comes from the Discovery News website.
Total identifiable original Murdoch content: one hurricane graphic from a Fox organisation hurricane-tracking site (which Fox News forgot to link to).
No identifiable "Murdoch press" journalistic content.
Completing the list:
#11 was AP, #12 was credited to FoxBusiness.com (a Murdoch journalism hit! Wahey!), #13 was AP, #14 was AP, #15, finally, was a Fox News piece on the Mclaren buggy recall, with a bold FOXNEWS logo and a photo provided by Mclaren. #16 was AP.
So from their "most read" list, Fox News only have one story out of the sixteen that they actually wrote themselves.
Associated Press are a news syndication company (like Reuters), who supply news content to media outlets. This lets news companies supplement the content produced by their own journalists with ready-made stories that they can just slot into place as padding.
Given that the clear majority of FoxNews' top stories on this page (nearly 90%) were actually bought in from AP, and that Google News also subscribe to AP as a content provider to buy stories, it's not surprising that when both sites rank their content by popularity, if Murdoch looks at the Sky News page and compares it to the Google News page, he's going to see a lot of the same top-ranking stories on both sites.
But this doesn't necessarily mean that Google News are stealing stories from Fox News Journalists, or stealing the selection. Both sites are buying content from AP, and the site viewers are dictating the popularities, not the editors.
I don't know whether this means that FoxNews.com don't actually do much journalism themselves, and mainly act as aggregators (like Google News) ... or whether it means that they /do/ do a fair bit of journalism, but that their readership simply prefers the AP material that can be gotten from Google News anyway.
Either way, I can see why RM is concerned. Shouting that Google is stealing their stories kinda stops people noticing that, for Fox News, their own site statistics say that most of their most popular stories aren't actually theirs anyway. One out of sixteen?
Eric Baird