Rupert Murdoch Blocks Google
The billionaire Rupert Murdoch has announced that he will try to block Google from using the news headlines and content from his companies. The speech was revealed to Sky News Australia that he will explore ways to remove stories from his newspapers from Google search indexes and Google News. He has previously said that he will start charging customers online to access the websites. He doesn’t believe that search engines cannot legally use headlines and paragraphs of news stories as results. He had set a target for June next year. News corp. owns the Times and Sun newspapers in the UK and the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the UK. Newspapers across the world are considering the best way to make money from the internet.
Since Google has no means of selling search software to end customers, it is riding on the free content wave. This is surely hurting the content guys as most of the ad revenue is moving away from content to search.
As an Aussie, I’d like to impress on people that we don’t think of him as Australian… we think of him as a cross between the Sheriff of Nottingham and Mr Burns…