Murdoch Making News Invisible To Search Engines? Not So Fast | Hacker News Reader

Murdoch Making News Invisible To Search Engines? Not So Fast

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26 pointsfiaz13 comments

Okay, that makes a lot more sense.

The author's conclusion, supported by the statement's context, is that viewers referred by search engines will get a paragraph and a subscription nag. It's certainly more reasonable than removing his sites from search indexes entirely.

So that means Google is only going to index the first paragraph of the story? (Otherwise it would violate Google's rule against showing different content to the GoogleBot versus visitors)

I doubt Google's rules apply to News Corp.

I think that depends on if Google feels that they need News Corp. If they decide to play hardball with News Corp, then they'll call it cloaking (and it is).

I wonder what backup plan they have in that case? I suspect that Bing.com won't have any problems accommodating these demands... I wonder if that's the backup plan?

Why do you say that? I'm pretty confident Google News would still be the #1 news site, even if they completely delisted all news corp sites.

Google already makes quite a few exceptions from this rule: journal articles, for example, show up in search results, but you get to a paywall if you click on them.

Also, people could circumvent the restriction by just using the Google cache.

OT: but you can disable google cache with a META tag

The guy is definitely smart, but I think his hubris here is almost embarrassing. Don't want to wish bad on anyone, and I hope he gets what he wants, but I suspect he's not "getting it" here.

What's he not getting? The current method of news distribution, where papers put their content up for free on the web and continue to take punishing losses isn't sustainable. From what I understand, online advertising alone simply won't cover the cost of running a newsroom - some sort of pay model is inevitable.

But what happens if people don't want to pay?

But what happens if people don't want to pay?

Not everyone wants to pay today. The people who do pay have access to much more content, by subscription, than the people who only read what is free. That's a distinction that could survive for a long time--paying customers having access to content from charging providers, and everyone having access to content from free providers.

> The people who do pay have access to much more content, by subscription, than the people who only read what is free.

The amount of free content not behind a NewsCorp paywall far far exceeds the amount that is. This will hold true after every NewsCorp property is subscription only.

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