Murdoch vows to remove News Corp's websites from Google searches

Posted by Helena Humphrey on November 9, 2009 at 3:31 PM

In his latest move, Murdoch has vowed to remove newspapers in his media empire - including the Sun, the Times and the Wall Street Journal - from Google's search index. The mogul sees this as step towards e ncouraging people to pay for online content, the Guardian has reported.

The revelation was made in an interview with Sky News Australia, shortly after Murdoch claimed that "Google, Microsoft, Ask.com ... a whole lot of people" are stealing News Corp content and as a solution proposed blocking Google entirely once they had enacted plans to charge people for reading their stories online.

Backing his argument, Murdoch reiterated that he is against the idea that search engines fell under "fair use" rules - an argument many aggregator websites use as part of their legal justification for reproducing excerpts of news stories online.

An effective threat certainly, but whether or not such plans will be put into action remains to be seen. Over the summer, Murdoch outlined his plans to introduce website charges by next year - but last week admitted that such plans would be put off for a little while longer, saying that "I wouldn't promise that we're going to meet that date".

Furthermore, it emerged that social networking site MySpace (which he bought for $580m in 2005) was due to fall short of its targets in a lucrative search deal with Google - a slip that could cost the site more than $100m in payments from the internet advertising giant.

Source: the Guardian