The big chiefs of the old school news organisations, in particular Rupert Murdoch of NewsCorp and Tom Curley of AP, have been making a lot of noise lately accusing the search engines of stealing their content.

This is of course nonsense and it’s hard to imagine that these apparently intelligent men don’t actually realise that.

At a meeting of media moguls in Beijing this week both men gave speeches in which they warned the likes of Google and Yahoo that they had better start paying up for their content or else.

“The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content,” Murdoch said. “But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators—the people in this hall—who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.”

This is all nonsense and here is why. Go to Google News or type a news topic into Google’s search box and you’ll get a list of URL’s and headlines with a brief teaser. Click the URL and you’ll be taken to the news site where you can read the story.

Google didn’t steal anything. It provided a free link to the news organisations website, where the story is surrounded by that site’s ads.
This free service on the part of Google and the other search engines actually feeds valuable traffic to the websites. Without it those websites wouldn’t get anywhere near as much traffic as they currently do. What does that do for the revenue model built on advertising.

If these media moguls really don’t want Google to list their stories it’s a very simple job to stop them. In fact Google publishes a step by step guide to doing so. It’s a simple addition to the websites robots text file:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

and bingo, the site becomes invisible to Google and the stories will no longer show in Google searches.

But I don’t think they’ll be doing that any time soon, as their website traffic would almost dry up overnight.
They’ll carry on accepting all the traffic Google and the other search engines send them for free, and probably carry on accusing them of theft.