Murdoch Blocks Meltwater From Search
Times Online Blocks Media Monitor Meltwater
Public relations news monitor Meltwater, which is still refusing to pay UK newspapers for crawling their websites, has now been blocked from indexing Times Online, the most serious of Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspapers.
The news site, which is due to go behind a paywall this spring and which had already blocked the NewsNow news monitor in January, enacted the block via the standard robots.txt protocol on Tuesday. It means thousands of Meltwater customers around the world won’t get to inform clients when their company is mentioned in The Times.
The move stems from an increasing desire, from both Murdoch’s News International specifically and the rest of the UK press, that commercial crawlers pay them to crawl their sites.
Robert Andrews@robertandrews Mar 16, 2010 6:19 PM ET
Interesting to note that the defining point as it relates to Rupert Murdoch is that the site Meltwater is a paid service, unlike Google, which for now is off the hook. But for how long?
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