Digital Media

Rupert Murdoch is threatening to pull his content from Google. Is this a bluff?

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET)

Update: 11:15 a.m.: To include comments from Google.

Rupert Murdoch, the media tycoon who has long accused Google of ripping off content from his newspapers, said this weekend that his sites may soon disappear from the search engine's listings.

Murdoch is chairman of News Corp., the newspaper, TV, and Internet empire that includes The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, 20th Century Fox, Fox News, and Hulu. He made the comments in an interview late last week with Sky News Australia.

After Murdoch accused Google, Microsoft, and others of "stealing" his company's content, he was asked why he just doesn't pull his Web sites from Google's search results.

"I think we will," Murdoch responded. "But that's when we start charging."

Murdoch and other News Corp. execs have said that they intend to charge readers and viewers. In the past, the company's sites have relied on advertising revenue.

Murdoch made it clear he's no fan of the ad-supported model. "There are no news sites or blog sites making any serious money," he said.

"What's the point of having someone come occasionally who likes a headline they see in Google," Murdoch continued. "The fact is there isn't enough advertising in the world to go around to make all the Web sites profitable. We'd rather have fewer people coming to our Web sites but paying."

When asked why he would buck the trend of offering free content, Murdoch said: "(The public) shouldn't have had it free. I think we've been asleep."

Google has said that it feels obligated to help media companies because it needs their content. That hasn't stopped Murdoch and his staff from continuing to make hostile comments about the search engine. What News Corp. hasn't done much of is follow up with action.

Is News Corp. trying to scare Google into making more concessions? Or is it just afraid to pull the trigger?

On Monday morning, Google responded to Murdoch's quotes in a report by the British publication The Telegraph.

"Publishers put their content on the Web because they want it to be found," Google said in a statement. "Very few choose not to include their material in Google News and Web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don't."

Editors' note: Besides the Google News outage, there have been problems affecting other Google sites as well. Click here for the latest on those widespread Google outages. In addition, this story was corrected at 11:30 a.m. PDT to reflect that YouTube videos already had been available, but now are spotlighted as a part of a broader Google News facelift.

Google News was inaccessible for many on Thursday morning. But when it re-emerged, it sported newly prominent news videos hosted at YouTube.

Some news headlines now feature a small YouTube logo. Clicking on it triggers an embedded YouTube player with a news video. Although the videos had been present before, Google is calling attention to them with the new logo as part of a facelift launched Thursday, spokeswoman Jennie Johnson said.

YouTube news videos now are prominent up on Google News.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Johnson said the videos are drawn from Google partners in the YouTube news channel.

Another change at Google News Thursday includes the addition of photos and images on the section pages devoted to topics such as Sci/Tech, World, and Business.

Thursday's changes followed another batch a week ago that added more heft to the "cluster" pages that show when you click on the "all 1,000 news articles" link that shows beneath groups of related headlines. Those earlier changes included images, excerpted quotations, sections that organize headlines by geography, and a section for blog headlines.

The greater attention to YouTube move not only increases the profile of video news within Google News, but also potentially increases the incentive for news organizations to work with YouTube. And it makes Google News more of a hub for news consumption, rather than just a mechanism for referring readers and viewers to other sites.

Some prominent media executives have been attacking Google, asserting it benefits more from professionally produced content than it gives back. Google argues that it sends billions of readers to news sites through Google News, whose results are sometimes blended into the main Google search results as well.

Earlier this year, Google began showing paid advertisements on Google News, too, when people perform searches.

Google News may be influential, but it's not perfect. The site was down Thursday morning for users in Boston, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, Texas, and Sarasota, Fla., but worked for one user in London. One CNET News reader reported that the outage began at least at 5:50 a.m. PDT; service appeared to return for people between 6:30 a.m. and 7 a.m. PDT.

Google confirmed the outage.

"Earlier today, Google News was temporarily unavailable for many users from approximately 3:30 a.m. until around 7 a.m. Pacific Time. This issue has now been resolved," the company said in a statement. "We know how important Google News is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously. We apologize to those users who were affected."

Twitter search, which can be a useful gauge of whether a problem with a Web site outage is widespread, showed many other reports as well.

Google News was inaccessible for many on Thursday morning.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

News on YouTube itself isn't new; YouTube has a news channel, and Google has been encouraging citizen journalists to add their own content.

And YouTube, of course, is a force to be reckoned with in online video. Of the 9.5 billion video streams delivered online in the U.S. during April, 5.5 billion of them, or 58 percent, were through YouTube, according to statistics from Nielsen Online on Thursday. And while online video stream delivery overall in April grew 24 percent year over year, it grew 36 percent for YouTube--meaning that it's not only large, but it's also gaining share.

However, Hulu, which hosts video from NBC, Fox, and now Disney, is growing faster, Nielsen said. It's in second place with 373,000 streams delivered in April, or 4 percent share, but its year-over-year growth was 490 percent, Nielsen said.

A day after the editor of The Wall Street Journal referred to online news aggregators--particularly Google and its Google News product--as "parasites or tech tapeworms," and the chairman of the Associated Press announced an initiative to protect print media content from infringing use online, Google has fired back in a blog.

The gist of Tuesday's blog post, penned by Google associate general counsel Alexander Macgillivray: don't point fingers at us.

"We show snippets and links under the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the United States Copyright Act," he wrote. "Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rightsholder, in this case newspaper or wire service, to remove their content from our index--all they have to do is ask us or implement simple technical standards."

As for the AP, Macgillivray noted that Google already pays the wire service to reprint its articles and photographs. A dispute several years ago led to this agreement.

Of course, Google News is far from the only aggregator out there. Digg, Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post are also big players. But Google is unquestionably at the top.

For the past few years, as many mainstream media outlets (particularly on the print side) began to lose revenue, influence, and readership, some of them had a pretty clear message: blame Google. At the same time, Viacom still has a billion-dollar lawsuit against Google's YouTube over pirated video content. And much of the publishing industry is far from signing on to Google's book digitization initiative.

With struggling newspapers in a panic over whether offering content online for free might not have been such a good idea in the first place, Google--the ultimate source of free content--is an even easier target.

But Google says it's part of the solution, not the problem, and insists that its search and aggregation products only serve to help drive traffic to online news sites.

"Users like me are sent from different Google sites to newspaper websites at a rate of more than a billion clicks per month," Macgillivray said in his post. "These clicks go to news publishers large and small, domestic and international--day and night."

What was the unlikely culprit behind a 75 percent drop in United Airlines' stock on Monday? An erroneous Google News search, that's what.

The problem was that an investor news service, the South Florida-based Income Securities Advisors, found a Chicago Tribune article from 2002 via Google News and consequently included it in that day's news digest--which wound up on Bloomberg's news wire. The content of the story wasn't the sort you want to be publishing if it isn't true: that United Airlines had filed for bankruptcy. Considering the state of the airline industry today, it was by no means unbelievable, especially considering that United only emerged from bankruptcy in 2006.

By the time United put out a release denying the news, its stock had plummeted 75 percent from $12.30 on Friday to less than $3. It eventually climbed back up to $10.49; Chicago Tribune parent company Tribune Co. pulled the 6-year-old story from its online archives to avoid further confusion. But Nasdaq, which lists United Airline's stock (UAL), decided against rescinding trades that had happened as a result of the mishap.

Income Securities Advisors later said the story had turned up in a bankruptcy-related Google News search, with no time stamp attached. But different accounts of how it exactly happened upon the story don't fully add up.

The Tribune Co. effectively blamed Google's automated news search process, where headlines are filtered by bots and algorithms rather than by humans. The Chicago Tribune reported Tuesday that the six-year-old story "prominently popped up" in a news search, a position usually reserved for very recent news. The reason for its prominence, Google later explained, was that it had wound up on a list of most-read stories on the Web site of the Orlando Sun-Sentinel, another Tribune Co. newspaper. Increased traffic to the story, Google said, set off the bot--as did the fact that the day of the week that the original story was published was a Monday and hence lined up.

Bloomberg has admitted that it doesn't verify the accuracy of the news that comes over its financial data service through third-party partners. But, the Chicago Tribune reported after the fact, there's no evidence of malicious stock manipulation in this case.

Considering the lightning-speed nature of news on the Web, investors have had the occasional sobering reminder that online media isn't always accurate. Last year, a hoax memo published to a blog convinced many a securities professional that there would be delays in the release of the original iPhone, sending Apple's stock tumbling and leading to occasional whispers that someone may have been trying to manipulate the stock price. But the United Airlines situation is unique in that there was no hoax involved--the Tribune story was a real one, albeit old, and nobody appears to have been pulling a prank.

Late last month, Bloomberg accidentally sent the draft of a Steve Jobs obituary over the wire momentarily; luckily, it was pulled before incorrect reports of the Apple CEO's demise could have any effect on company stock.

This post was updated to clarify Income Security Advisors' relationship to Bloomberg, and expanded at 7:41 a.m. PT.