Murdoch to block news stories from Google’s search index

Rupert Murdoch plans to remove news stories from Google’s search index in a bid to encourage users to pay for online content.

In a recent interview, the media mogul said he is also considering blocking his newspaper websites, such as The Sun, The Times and The Wall Street Journal, from coming up on Google’s searches entirely once News Corporation’s much-anticipated paid-for model is introduced.

In the past, Murdoch has accused Google as acting as a “parasite” for featuring news stories in its search index.

“The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them,” he said. “That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people… they shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.”

Earlier this year, Murdoch announced plans to introduce paid-for access for content across News International sites, including The Sun and Times Online.

In response to News Corporation’s $3.4 billion (£2 billion) net loss for the year to the end of June 2009, Murdoch said the free model era was over.

“Quality journalism is not cheap,” he said.  “The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites.”

Murdoch had hoped to set up pay walls around his online news content by the end of News Corporation’s financial year in June 2010, however, last week he said he couldn’t promise to meet that date.