Rupert Murdoch: No fan of Google News. The News Corp. chief says he will likely tell Google's spiders to buzz off.
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Rupert Murdoch: Get lost, Google
News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch said he would consider blocking Google spiders from indexing his companies' content.
By Andrew Heining | 11.10.09
The long summer hasn’t done anything for Rupert Murdoch’s mood toward Google.
His Dow Jones CEO called the search giant a “digital vampire” in June, and Murdoch himself didn’t do anything to calm the waters Friday, using an interview with Sky News Australia to affirm murmurings that his company would begin shielding its sites from Google’s indexing.
News Corp. is a huge media conglomerate – is Google scared? Notsomuch. The company seems more concerned with which Sesame Street character to feature on its homepage. Google has long made it clear that all it takes is a few simple edits to the “robots.txt” file, and the spiders from Mountain View will scurry on down the road.
In a statement, a Google spokesperson said Google News consistently sends news sites about 100,000 clicks a minute, but that no one’s forced to be indexed. “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,” the statement said. “But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.”
Why wouldn’t News Corp. or anyone want a piece of the Google pie? The thinking, Murdoch says, is in quality of visitor. “What’s the point of having someone come occasionally who likes a headline they see in Google,” Murdoch asked. “The fact is there isn’t enough advertising in the world to go around to make all the Web sites profitable. We’d rather have fewer people coming to our Web sites but paying.”
Many have ridiculed Murdoch’s proposition, and despite the Wall Street Journal’s persistence with its paywall, others, including the New York Times, have abandoned the pay model.
One media mogul who shares Murdoch’s view? Mark Cuban. The HDNet exec, in a Monday blog post, touted the growing influence that sites like Facebook and Twitter are having on how people get their news. The two sites “are platforms that allow the news sources, like Newscorp, to post breaking news and gain value from their brand. Google does not. In other words, if I trust a newspaper, TV or any brand, I can follow it on Twitter and expect the news to come to me,” Cuban writes. “Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008,” he concludes.
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What’s your take? Watch the Sky News interview with Rupert Murdoch below, and leave a comment or catch up with us on Twitter.
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2. goodstuff | 11.10.09
this is silly-business. Time to put a bottle-neck on information in the information age. Good one murdoch.
3. birdy | 11.10.09
that would be awesome cause quite frankly, i’m irritated by faux news even being included in google’s news section. i would be so happy if google didn’t index faux news at all. they might be number one for tv but faux news isn’t even in the top 5 for online news sites. older people and the less educated still get their news from tv while the younger and more educated people read their news on the internet. fox news doesnt belong on the internet. it reads like a tabloid cause its nothing but fake news.
4. RG | 11.10.09
Fantastic interview! The most tech-savvy 
78 year old in the world. He surely has a SHARP intellect at this age…Hats off to him!!
BTW, Mr. Murdoch, I would’ve missed seeing this nice interview of yours, had it not been for Google News that pointed me to it
Hope you & Google figure it out for users’ sake!
5. Daniel Parra | 11.10.09
Yes, please, Mr. Murdoch, PLEASE PLEASE block Google from indexing your publications. That way I won’t have my Google news page cluttered up with Foxnews junk that I never click on, and instead will have additional worthwhile material.
6. James Hovland | 11.10.09
Murdoch is free to take his right-wing propaganda and go. No more Fox in my Google news? Cool. Very cool.
7. Craig | 11.10.09
Cuban’s is the first argument I’ve read that makes any sense. Not saying I agree or disagree, but it is a logical viewpoint. Murdoch’s? Not so much….
8. margaret | 11.10.09
Murdoch is a businessman so he’s being true to himself when he insists that the products he produces, i.e., news/information must be paid for. Whatever one might think of FOX (someone else is responsible for its content), or Murdoch’s other news enterprises, the Wall Street Journal is much improved since he purchased it. I’m a lover of print news, but since most of it went digital and free, it’s content has deteriorated significantly. The “free” information you get on Google is merely surface stuff. In this society you get what you pay for which is not much if it’s free.
10. WhitDent | 11.10.09
I suspect Rupert Murdoch will be remembered for piloting his media empire into the side of a mountain if he keeps to this course. And nobody will miss him or go looking.
11. Han | 11.10.09
James Hovland, Daniel Parra do not like to hear the truth.
As they say, The truth hurts. Living in dream land works for you.
12. cjacks | 11.10.09
Where can I request Google not index any of the false views (Aka Fox News) web sites? Let the people decide whether this foreigner promoted, lower 50% of the bell curve, propaganda gets to trash up the internet. Good bye and good riddance.
13. Stoopid American | 11.10.09
An uncharacteristically short-sighted decision by Mr. Murdoch. By blocking Google spiders, he does more than ensure his news articles aren’t aggregated. He also ensures that his web sites are not included in Google’s search engine. If his sites are not indexed by Google at all, they might as well not exist. If I were an employee of Mr. Murdoch, I would consider this to be a disastrously bad decision.
14. George | 11.10.09
Brand loyalty? For real? 1962 called - they want their preglobalization captive audience business practices back…
15. Fred | 11.10.09
Wow - My wish is that I could select the news sources that would be shown to me by Google! CSM, the BBC, NPR, … perhaps that’s enough!
16. Tony in Wilton, ME | 11.10.09
I’m really not going to miss Fox News, Mr. Murdoch. And Bloomberg along with the NYT will give me the financial news I need.
I might miss the feeds on the Bruins from the tabloid in Boston, but they’re not that essential to life.
BTW, Mr. Murdoch, where’s your nose?
17. Donna | 11.10.09
Murdoch may be the gossip king of print media, but Google is the online king of connecting to everything else! Just ask Bill Gates!
Print is soooo 2008!
PLEASE Murdoch! BLOCK your Google robots! Please? Please?
Now THIS is going to be fun!!
18. Shawn, MD | 11.10.09
By Gad, I have some idea of where he’s going with this. Time to abandon these internal nets and the faddish tele-vision. We shall embrace the talkie, as progress must prevail!
19. dj | 11.10.09
A huge gamble for Murdoch. Do people NEED the WSJ? Not very many, and there are thousands of other news sources. And do ANY of us need FOX? Now that’s a hoot!
21. John | 11.10.09
I think Murdoch is spot on. Anyone who has ever worked in a newsroom knows the amount of work that goes into fact checking and editing…and that cost money. Newspapers and all other traditional media are going to have to start charging to make websites profitable as old media shifts to new.
22. JimInNevada | 11.11.09
Mr. Murdoch does not appear realize that he is attempting to sell something that is already given away for free. He might therefore find the following experiment instructive: 1) Pick a story at random from any newspaper or website. 2) Pick a random phrase from that story, 6 to 8 words will do. 3) Perform a Google search for that phrase. In most cases the search will yield a press release virtually identical to the story.
23. mataj | 11.11.09
> “. . . if I trust a newspaper, TV or any brand, I can follow it on Twitter and expect the news to come to me,” Cuban writes. “Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008,”
If I trust, which I don’t. I trust no one to pick the news and send them to me. Centralized media are so 1930.
24. dale | 11.11.09
Don’t worry newspaper people. The internet won’t last that long… we have much more paper to make newspapers than we do oil to power the infrastructure of the internet and Modern, Overpopulated and Wasteful Civilization.
25. Bernard Bujold | 11.12.09
Interesting interview.
The war that he intends to fight will be a very difficult one
but Murdoch is a warrior!
To be followed…
26. Craig | 11.16.09
Funny thing is that i found this story when searching ‘Google’ in google, it was the first result too =P
Terrific businessman, and to say otherwise is cutting off your nose to spite your face. He has survived as long as he has because he adapts and adopts, although i don’t agree with his arguement it’s a bit over dramatic to say it would spell the end of his empire.
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1. Steve | 11.10.09
Murdoch is out of his mind. These news organization needs to adapt or they are gonners. The time of the newspaper has long since passed. Information is now cheap and spreads at a frightening pace. I have heard the concept repeatedly now that news organizations will charge for digital content but it makes absolutley no sense, as the NY Times found out. There is too much free information and its too easy to get.
The only advantage these guys have is that their name is trusted, they have to capitalize on that. Needless to say blocking your site from appearing on Google news is not going to help my friend Murdoch, hes lost in a world where information is cheap and easy. Its like trying to sell water bottles next to a fountain.