A few days ago in an interview with Sky News Australia, Rupert Murdoch declared he would remove his newspapers from Google results, accusing the search engine of "stealing stories."

Online traffic analyst, Hitwise, has posted an article revealing that the media mogul's threats could have a disasterous impact on the exposure of the newspapers' sites to potential readers.

Looking at the Wall Street Journal in particular, Hitwise data found that 25 per cent of all traffic to the website was driven by Google and Google News in the US. Even more interesting is that according to information, over 44 per cent of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google were "new" users who hadn't visited the domain in the last 30 days.

Whilst Murdoch has said: "We'd rather have fewer people coming to our Web site but paying," the statistics are an eye-opener and give credit to Google defenders.

Mathew Ingram, of the Nieman Journalism Lab has said that it is ridiculous to think that "by expanding their readership and making it easier for people to find their content, newspapers have shot themselves in the foot, and should do their best to avoid being found by new readers."

"Cutting yourself off from the world's largest search engine is like cutting off your nose to spite your face," he added.

"The bottom line is that newspapers need to think about what kind of value they are adding and focus on that, instead of trying to either beat Google at its own game or pretend that it doesn't exist."

As the Murdoch versus Google wrestling match continues it only seems to be more apparent that the situation is a very complex one. Charging for online news is tricky so long as search engines continue to reproduce articles or proportions of articles for free. But then to cut search engines out all together is a major risk as it could isolate potential readers and subscribers.

And the debate rages on.

Source: Hitwise, WSJ