Murdoch Blocks Google From Indexing London Times Articles

Joe Pompeo
Business Insider
May. 26, 2010

Rupert Murdoch appears to be finally putting his money where his mouth is with respect to Google News.

When Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London and Sunday Times switch to paid web sites sometime in the next month, only their homepages, not individual articles, will appear in search engines, reports paidContent’s Robert Andrews, who got a preview of the new sites on Monday night.

Andrews writes:

It's all a more conservative strategy than News Corp (NYSE: NWS) stablemate WSJ.com, but: "When we showed it to people, that was the model they preferred," said Times executive editor Danny Finkelstein. "We're completely unashamed about this. We're trying to get people to pay for the journalism and we wanted to do it in a very simple way."

Assistant editor Tom Whitwell added on the search issue: "The clarity is something that was very important. If you're asking someone to pay for something, it has to be very clear what they're paying for."

And only last week it seemed like Murdoch and Google were starting to get along!

You can check out what the new sites look like here.