Thomson versus Google in fight for eyeballs

Now here's an interesting fight. In the red corner: Robert Thomson, editor of The Times. In the blue: Krishna Bharat, Google's principal scientist. During his presentation to the IPI world congress in Edinburgh on Monday Thomson claimed that Google was looking at a new algorithm invented in Australia that would enable the search engine to display content without referring the surfer to another website, thereby threatening newspapers' on-line revenue aspirations. Not true, said Bharat in his most animated contibution to the conference. But look at this Melbourne Age article. It reports that Rob Pike, a senior Google engineer, was so "wowed" by the new tool that Google bought the rights to it last year. Now Thomson is too much of a gent to say Google are greedy geeks. But I can, and so can blogger Tom Foremksi, an ex-FT staffer, in an interesting assault on Google for "cherry-picking" and thereby cutting traffic to news sites. Am I alone in thinking Mr Bharat has been economical with the truth?