For those owners of websites who do not want their content indexed by google, please edit your robots.txt file and shut up about it.

Which leads me to today’s bombshell news: News Corp is probably going to yank their search results from Google and sell them to Bing. This is just such a bad idea, on so many levels.

First, as mentioned in the TechCrunch article, the web is free, and information gets free quick. Somebody reads an article, blogs about it. Google then indexes said information from the blog. People still arrive at the article, just not directly. Anybody else see News Corp suing the internet, turning the people who might actually switch to Bing completely off, and back to Google. I see no win here.

Second, Microsoft has had an amazing amount of anti-trust issues on multiple continents, with their Europe difficulties still ongoing. This will do very little to take that bulls-eye off their back. No win here either.

Third, the idea that a website has to pay to link to an item of news is completely against what the internet is. That is the free dissemination of information to all that seek it. Google has brought this idea forward, as has Yahoo and now Bing by allowing people to find information they are looking for. How can there not be a backlash of scorchingly negative publicity on this deal if certain parts of the internet are only indexed by certain search engines?

It is hard to remain unbiased on an issue that affects the free and open nature of the internet like this. If News Corp thinks Google is stealing the news, then they need to edit their robots.txt file to stop it. Otherwise stop whining, embrace what the web stands for, and become the uber-news organization that will be the first one to understand this. Can one of these dinosaur executives running the various media companies (news, music, tv, movies, books) finally join us in the 21st century, and give us the media experience we are asking for?