hutcheson - 5:26 pm on Nov 11, 2009 (gmt 0)

>...it is "snippets" on Google News that are so large that the visitor doesn't actually need to go to the target site.

Here's Mr. Murdoch's real problem. For any given user, over 99% of his articles are useless. In the old days, consumers had to flip through pages of ads to find the nuggets of less-uselessness. And they didn't have a choice of looking at some OTHER paper's nuggets. (See, newspapers were so expensive and so time-consuming that the poor people couldn't afford two papers, and the rich people didn't have that much time to waste reviewing two of them.)

Google gave consumers a choice: skip the uselessness quickly, and go on to something that matters.

The Newspaper's dirty little secret here is that the information conveyed by Google's snippet is not "the informative essence of my carefully-crafted article is bla bla bla"; the information conveyed by Google's snippet is "you really don't want to waste your time reading this article."

Google is effectively acting as a personalized critic, giving people enough information to figure out that they don't want to read. That saves consumers' time, and it is an extremely valuable service.

Mr. Murdoch (and other media lords, many of them more vicious and more biased) are hurt. Their captive customers are freed. They're going to have to start giving service worth paying for, competing on a much more level playing field. I know they won't like it. And that's all good.