Rupert Murdoch Begins Blocking News Aggregators, Search Engines
By Joe Coscarelli | January 9th, 2010
New Corp honcho Rupert Murdoch has been known to refer to those running the web as “plagiarists” and “parasites,” threatening to remove all of his content from search engines like Google (especially if Bing is willing to pay up). Many wondered if he was bluffing, but now the process seems to have begun, with the Times Online blocking aggregation of its stories.
Aggregator NewsNow, via The Next Web, is reporting that they are being blocked from indexing Times Online stories:
As a consequence of this action — apparently the first change to the Times Online’s blocking policy since May 2008 — two million visitors to NewsNow.co.uk every month will no longer find headlines and links to content on the Times Online site in their news search results.
According to Struan Bartlett, Managing Director and Chairman of NewsNow: “It is lamentable that News International has chosen to request we stop linking to their content and providing in-bound traffic and potential subscribers to the Times Online and right now it looks as though NewsNow has been singled out. We note that no other major search engine has been blocked by NI in this manner. NewsNow is not fundamentally different to other news search engines that are part of the Internet infrastructure, such as Google News and Yahoo. Why block us and not them?”
The blocking has been technically implemented via the robots.txt protocol, a convention for requesting search engines, web spiders and other web robots refrain from asking for pages from all or part of a website.
Whether this will be the first domino in a line of things to come remains to be seen — Google News is, of course, far more noteworthy than a “homegrown” UK aggregator — but it is certainly a move in the direction previously threatened by Murdoch and his companies. But if it does happen, expect a far larger outcry when Murdoch and crew start blocking sites that steer the internet conversation.
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Who wants to read any of Murdoch’s bullshit content anyway? Let him remove it. It’s just less shit to wade through when searching.
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Who wants to read any of Murdoch’s bullshit content anyway? Let him remove it. It’s just less shit to wade through when searching.
Comment by j r walker
My thoughts exactly.
J Robertson
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Oh no! We won’t be able to read news from Crazyland anymore, boo-freaking-hoo! What will I do without my daily dose of propaganda?
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Rupert doesn’t understand how the Internet works, does he?
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Hopefully, this will be the beginning of the end for this economic traitor and warmonger. One less scumbag running the media.
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Suicide for Murodoch. Good, we were waiting for it.
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Oh no, you mean I won’t be able to easily access the finely crafted and informative news from the Murdoch stables?
Bugger…
I’ll guess I’ll have to look elsewhere for propaganda.
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this is amazing, I wonder if it’s a test of some sort?
I mean don’t they have computers to run these sort of things , i mean, I can lend a 486 if he wants to work out if this is a good move or not?
hook that secnerio up to DOS and just type
:\ Am I An Imbecile? > The internets.
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Hi,
Just Found this blogpost from my Technorati upcomming news event Story section. really interesting post , that’s why subscribed your RSS feeder, Hope you will add more usefull posts soon.
Keep it Up.
Angelina
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I have a post up this weekend about Rupert Murdoch that you may appreciate. When I found the information, it made my eyes pop open.
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