Rupert Murdoch has said that Google are stealing content from his news sites and that they should pay for it.

If you visit http://news.google.com/ you can see a selection of news items aggregated from a selection of news sources. When news items from any of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation sites appear in these pages, he believes that Google should be paying him.

It seems that Mr Murdoch isn’t seeing the big picture. All you see on the Google News pages are headlines a a single sentence from the editorial. To read the entire story, you have to click on the link which takes you to the originating site. So anyone wanting to read a story related to headlines taken from a News Corporation site will actually be taken to that site.

Google are, in fact, driving traffic to those news sites. Personally, I never choose to visit any of Rupert Murdoch’s sites, but I do look at Google News. If I’m interested in a story, I’ll click the link and may end up at one of his sites. Therefore he gained a visitor who wouldn’t choose to visit. Heck! Shouldn’t Rupert Murdoch be paying Google for that service?

Any website owner can prevent Google from indexing their site by adding the two lines of code:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
to their “robots.txt” file. It’s unlikely that the News Corporation webmasters are unaware of this, which suggests to me that they are simply trying it on by suggesting that Google should pay.

If I owned Google, I would simply drop the News Corporation sites from the search database. After all, I’m sure there are plenty of other news services out there who are only too happy to have links to their stories featured in Google.
I would be delighted if Google featured stories from one of my blogs!