Murdoch threatens to remove News Corp from Google

RUPERT Murdock, the Australian-born American media mogul, has suggested that when News Corp. starts charging visitors to its web sites, it will remove its content from search engines, such as Google.

In an interview with Sky News in Australia, the News Corporation boss claimed that content aggregators steal content from publishers – describing them as "kleptomaniacs" and "plagiarists".

News providers have seen plummeting profits in recent years as advertisers have migrated from print to online and this could be set to accelerate as mobile marketing hits consumers in location and in context.

"There are no websites - news websites or blog websites - anywhere in the world, making any serious money," Murdoch said.

It has long been possible for content companies to remove pages from search results by using a small text file on their web servers, called a Robots.txt file. These files can instruct search engines to ignore certain pages. Murdoch has said that this would be what News Corp. sites would do once they started charging.

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