Monday, November 9, 2009

Blocking Murdoch



Apparently, Rupert Murdoch is planning to block Google from displaying the content of the various domains he controls. The idea is that people will then pay to access News International sites (there at least two flaws there, but let's overlook them for the sake of convenience).



Anyone who doesn't want to wait that long, if they aren't already doing it, can exclude content from Murdoch's domains by adding a simple filter to their search terms in the form of a minus sign, the word "site" and a colon, followed by the domain to be excluded. For example:



  • "balanced news" -site:thesun.co.uk

  • "celebrity obsession" -site:thetimesonline.co.uk

  • "cross-media promotion" -skynews.com


If excluding individual domains on every search seems a bit tedious, Google offers a custom search engine option: http://www.google.com/cse/. After setting up a custom search engine, it's possible to add a list of domains to exclude.

Oh look, this post is also on the letters page of today's Guardian.



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