News Corp blocks search engine

News Corp has for what appears to be the first time prevented a search engine from crawling a publicly accessible site in a move that was threatened by boss Rupert Murdoch late last year.  

The company has targeted a specialised search player – the UK-based news aggregation site NewsNow – for the move, which has seen it institute the robots.txt protocol on its British Times Online site. The piece of code tells search engines not to crawl a site. In this case, it specifies that the block is for NewsNow’s web crawler.

The move was revealed in a statement from NewsNow.

In November, Murdoch threatened to use robots.txt to make News Ltd sites invisible to search giants such as Google.

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