Search engines are making money from content despite the fact they do not create it, a leader of a major media firm has highlighted.

Carolyn McCall, the chief executive of the Guardian Media Group (GMG), stated that the value of information and services is dropping as search engines help businesses get traffic to their websites.

She made her comments to delegates at the Joint Westminster eForum & Westminster Media Forum keynote seminar: Digital Britain, emphasising the irony in content generators finding difficulty in capitalising on the added visitors to their websites.

Ms McCall continued: "For online newspapers such as Guardian.co.uk, search engines and aggregators are important clients - they drive traffic and they are marketing channels.

"We work extremely closely to them, as you would expect, throughout our entire group."

The seminar took place at the Royal Society of Medicine in London and discussed the importance of improving the digital economy through government intervention and regulatory challenges of convergence.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were guaranteed response times and allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues.