Thursday, Nov 19, 2009    Text size: 

The publishing titan has sounded an alarm for newspapers everywhere, suggesting that search engine giant Google is poised to take over the news industry by making its search engine a one-stop shop for all news.

To that end, Murdoch has threatened to remove his news sites from Google’s search index, including the Wall Street Journal. In addition, Murdoch’s News Corporation owns scores of huge properties, including MySpace.com, Hulu.com, Fox.com and AskMen.com.

The prospect of those sites disappearing from Google sounds at once terrifying and hilarious to the Internet giant, according to leading tech analyst Erik Schonfeld.

“In fact, Murdoch is such a sly fox, it is hard to say who he is really going after here,” he said. “By playing on his rival’s fears of Google becoming the new homepage for news, he might convince some of them to deny Google the ability to index their sites.”

Schonfeld noted that Google is responsible for about a quarter of the Wall Street Journal’s traffic, so at first glance, de-indexing the site from Google might be suicide.

Or would it? Apparently Microsoft’s Bing may be a part of this fight. Microsoft recently invested more than $100,000 in a technology called Automated Content Access Protocol, or ACAP. ACAP would give content providers the power to index their sites, but still prevent users from getting full access to their sites through digital backdoors.

That means that if Murdoch and his assets jumped ship on Google, Bing might be waiting with a powerful search engine of its own that’s equipped to deliver content on a tiered platform that’s also adult-friendly.