Google has hit back at its newspaper critics, rebuffing suggestions that it is profiting from their content.
Fronting the World Newspaper Congress in India, Google chief legal counsel David Drummond told angry publishers that the search giant is a friend, not a foe.
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt also took to the pages of one of News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers to defend accusations from angry publishers that Google is “stealing” stories and allowing others to reproduce those stories online without consent.
“With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame,” he wrote.
Further pushing the idea that Google is not the enemy, Schmidt said Google wants to “work with publishers to help them build bigger audiences, better engage readers and make more money.”
Google last week announced changes to the Google News format after Murdoch threatened to block Google from indexing his newspapers.
The news-specific crawler lets online publishers automatically keep stories, photos or videos out of its index. It will also allow publishers to limit the number of online pages people can view after being routed to their websites by Google’s search engine.
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