Media mogul and outspoken Google critic Rupert Murdoch seemed to be hinting, in a recent interview with New York Magazine, that he was considering a lawsuit against the search giant if it did not stop indexing content he owns.
Murdoch’s view, which he has not hesitated to express publicly, has always been that Google News is effectively hitching a ride on content provided by his and other media outlets by indexing it and collecting revenue for search advertising.
Murdoch has, numerous times, floated the idea of de-indexing all News Corp content from the search engine and instead signing a deal with Microsoft to have that company’s Bing search engine become the exclusive indexer and online source for News Corp’s media properties, which include the Wall Street Journal, FOX News, and the Times of London, among many others.
His critics, however, say that the revenue that Google takes in from Google News advertising is insignificant next to the search engine optimization (SEO) that Google provides to news websites, and that Murdoch would be making a grievous error in fighting it out with Google.
