Newspaper publishers have long complained that Google rakes in mountains of cash by indexing news stories. Now, in a conciliatory gesture, Google is allowing publishers to set a daily cap on how many articles readers can access for free through the search engine.
In a post on Google's official blog, the company said it will let publishers limit readers to five free articles per day while still allowing news stories to appear in search results.
The move came the same day that News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, speaking at a government seminar on the future of journalism, blasted aggregators for "feeding off the hard-earned efforts and investments of others."
Murdoch and other media execs say aggregators like Google make money, in the form of ad revenue, by posting snippets and links to news stories, while the news outlets that actually produce those stories get nothing.
Murdoch has threatened to block Google from displaying his company's articles and is mulling the idea of giving Bing, a Google competitor, exclusive access to News Corp. news content. Many other news sites are considering charging subscription fees for their web content.
Google claims it helps news outlets by sending web surfers to their sites. But Tuesday's announcement is clearly meant to show that the world's most popular search engine wants to be friend, not foe, to newspapers and online news sites.
The move represents a change to Google's "first click free" system, which lets web surfers users find and read articles blocked by subscription paywalls. Under the change, news sites will be able to limit Google users to a maximum of five pages of free content per day unless they subscribe or register.
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