Murdoch-Microsoft Deal In the Works 468
Hugh Pickens writes "The Financial Times reports that Microsoft is in discussions to pay Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, to 'de-index' its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry. Microsoft is desperate to catch Google in search, and, after five years and hundreds of millions of dollars of losses, Bing, launched in June, marks its most ambitious attempt yet. Microsoft's interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content. 'This is all about Microsoft hurting Google's margins,' said the web publisher who is familiar with the plan. 'It's easy to believe that [Microsoft] may spew senseless riches into publishers' pockets, radically distorting the news market, just to spite Google,' writes Rob Beschizza at BoingBoing. 'Murdoch could be wringing cash out of a market he knows is doomed to implosion or assimilation. And he doesn't even have to be an evil genius, either; he just has to be smarter than Steve Ballmer.'"
Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Informative)
The children are right to mock you AC. Google honors robots.txt, if a news outlet doesn't want their site indexed, all they need to do is put a deny rule in it.
Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:4, Informative)
Needless to say, Google said "It doesn't work like that."
Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:4, Informative)
No, I'm pretty sure that with expert sex change (I'm going to call it that because it seems to have little to do with experts exchanging info unless your definition of "experts" is "non-experts" and your definition of "exchange" is "lock up behind a paywall"), you have to view source, THEN scroll down.
Re:no matter the mocking (Score:3, Informative)
The assumption that Murdoch doesn't understand robots.txt is untenable. When this issue has come up for discussion here on /. in the past, someone always reproduces a robots.txt file from one of the Fox sites, and that file demonstrates a full understanding of robots.txt, including setting up indexing maps for the Googlebot.
Google should do exactly what it's doing, and honour robots.txt without comment, and let MS and News Corp shoot themselves in the foot (or succeed wildly, if that's what's going to happen, but I doubt it). To unilaterally stop linking to News Corp would probably result in even more scrutiny from the DoJ.
Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Informative)
He does put a robots.txt file in his sites. See for example
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/robots.txt [timesonline.co.uk]
http://www.thesun.co.uk/robots.txt [thesun.co.uk]
He's put loads of crawlers on it. Googlebot isn't one of them, because he presumably is happy for it to visit.
Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:1, Informative)
1. So why doesn't Murdoch just put a robots.txt file in his sites? It's because he WANTS them to be indexed ... but he also wants to get $$$ for it.
Easy answer: he did. In fact, not only is Google allowed to index foxnews.com, but it also points Google to a number of sitemap XML files for easy indexing of the news.
Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:3, Informative)
In Britain, The Sun and News of the World are about as trashy as it gets, although there is the Daily Star and the Daily Sport if that's too upmarket for you. The Times however is a pretty decent paper, although there is the Telegraph, Independent and Guardian if he starts charging for it. It is not as good as the Financial Times which already has a successful pay model in place.
Re:point 3 (Score:3, Informative)
ANd people were willing to pay for sky news even when BBC was free.
Sky News is free. You can get it on Freeview, and it's (well used to be, I haven't checked recently) unscrambled via satellite.
Re:Bing vs Google (Score:3, Informative)
Hey Microsoft, how much are you paying Murdoch to stop me from finding his sites on google? I'll undercut him! For a mere $2/mo, I promise never to follow a google link to a Murdoch site again! Let me know soon.
Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Informative)
he already uses a robots.txt file,
User-agent: * /printer_friendly_story /projects/livestream
Disallow:
Disallow:
#
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_news.xml [foxnews.com]
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_entertainment.xml [foxnews.com]
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_opinion.xml [foxnews.com]
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_politics.xml [foxnews.com]
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_news.xml [foxnews.com]
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_entertainment.xml [foxnews.com]
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_opinion.xml [foxnews.com]
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_politics.xml [foxnews.com]
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_sections.xml [foxnews.com]
Re:Rupert's right (Score:3, Informative)
That's what robots.txt is for - Google really don't care if you want to use them or not, but they respect anyone who wants to opt out using an industry standard. Good luck being the person to explain to your boss why 83% of your market can't even see you online any more, though. It's like "opting-out" of advertising for free on 83% of all billboards in the city you're advertising in... nobody's stopping you, and nobody can blame the biggest billboard company in the world if you can't get enough people interested in your product when you only advertise on the other 17%.
Re:Now let's just hope Larry and Sergey (Score:1, Informative)
I couldn't have agreed more with you ... until you said "death cult". Most followers of Islam aren't like that, and I'm sure you know it.
I've been informing myself about islam, and one inescapable truth looms ever larger : the center of islam, the prophet, worshipped death.
You can just not describe what a despicable man it was : he raped a girl he bought, who was 9 years old. While the muslim texts themselves do not speak of rape, they do mention the girl had to be dragged into his bedroom by multiple of muhammad's slaves. Yes he had slaves, and he raped slaves. He also freed some of them, generally in roundabout business transactions, in trade for promises, or gold. But that cannot ever excuse exploiting and raping slaves.
As if that wasn't bad enough, this guy raided and enslaved entire villages, and often participated in raping slaves he thus caught.
He has also massacred villages.
Worse than the acts themselves : in the muslim "holy texts" these acts are not described as deplorable, inevitable or anything such. They are described as if they "prove" the superiority of islam. The more you read, the more you will find the only justification for islam to be found in it's history is military dominance, used in the most absurdly cruel way.
Massacres, enslaving, theft ("raids" and piracy), racist domination, segregation, raping, maiming and destruction ... these things are triumphs of islam. Not by my words, by the words of the quran, and especially by the words of the hadith and the biographies of "the prophet". They are proof of it's superiority. That's the constant, ever present theme in islamic holy texts.
According to at least 2 islamic biographies the phrase "we love death and you love life and that's why islam will win" really was made by "the prophet" to the byzantine emperor, and was followed by more than enough death and destruction to illustrate the point.
And what worries me in normal muslims is simple : they refuse to state those acts are wrong. Sure they do so when it's about a war with America. But they refuse to say Saddam was wrong to gas the Kurds. They refuse to say what is happening in Iran and Syria is wrong. They refuse to say that separation between church and state is good, in fact, several I've met condemned it.
And they especially refuse to say that when their prophet massacred, killed, stole, raided and raped, that there was anything negative at all about those acts.
And no, they do not deny the acts took place, they deny they were negative. You get statements like "it were raids, it was not theft" (then what is theft, exactly ?), "it was involuntary marriage, not rape" (riiiight ...), and all other sorts of lame excuses.
I don't like this at all.
And I stand by my point, according to the words of the prophet, islam *is* a death cult. It is not for anyone to change that, it is for muslims to take responsability for the vile monster "the prophet" is. It is for muslims to apologize and attempt to make right the many injustices that rotting bastard comitted, and the many more that were comitted in his name by his followers.
It is time for muslims to take responsability for what they have done.
But no such thing is forthcoming in any muslim I've ever met, however "moderate".
Expert Exchange (Score:2, Informative)
Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:3, Informative)
My ass. If I have one of those maps covered in local businesses and I take yours off, you can't sue me. Google would laugh them out of court.
If Google were to stop dealing with the web entirely and start making buttscratchers, could people sue for (literally) the trillions of dollars it would cost them? I don't think so. Google has no obligation to them, or anybody but its shareholders (of which its founders are IIRC a majority).
You might not be joking - News Corp might very well sue - but the suit would absolutely fail.
That's completely disregarding that Google would only be complying with Murdoch's stated wishes.
Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:1, Informative)
If Google removed Murdoch's news sites from it's index for something that's not a violation of terms, they'd likely be sued for doing it - for doing his business irreparable harm, just like any other business would that's vying for placement in their index. No, I'm not joking.
Violation of what terms? Are you suggesting that there's some contract between News Corp and Google that obligates Google to crawl Fox News? If not, where do I sign up for free money because Google hasn't indexing my home page? Oh, that's right: I can't [techdirt.com]
If you're not joking, you're part of the reason the US legal system is such a mess. You assume that whenever News Corp is a little discomfited, the solution is to call in the lawyers, run their sadness through the courts, and get a sympathy payment. You assume that Google has some legal obligation to provide, at no charge, indexing service to every company on the planet just because they offer a search service. You sound more than willing to use fear of legal action as an excuse for your own inaction and apathy.
Re:My enemies' frenemy is my frenemy (Score:3, Informative)
Which is very telling, as half of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report is making fun of Fox News.
In fact, the DS broke the story about Fox re-using the footage of the "tea parties" for the anti-gay "protest" a few weeks ago - forcing Fox to issue a formal retraction.
Report spam sites (Score:3, Informative)
Google considers it cheating for a site to show different content to regular users than they show to GoogleBot. If you encounter a site that does so, you should report it to Google via their web spam report form [google.com].
I used to report Expert Sexchange, it's probably because of people like me that Google forced them to put the actual content on the page.
Re:Now let's just hope Larry and Sergey (Score:3, Informative)
Ok, now go read the history of *any* tribal society. You'll invariably find they either raided, murdered and raped and were glorified by history, or were raided, murdered and raped - and surviving histories paint them as savages.
The more effective the murdering rapist, the bigger his cult of personality. Whatever society evolves from this primitive state is guaranteed to show undue deference to their forebears. Ask a Italian what they think of Cesar, a Macedonian what they think of Alexander, a Frank what they think of Charlemagne, a Swede what they think about Eric the Red, a Jew what they think of Joshua, a Mongol what they think of Genghis Khan etc. etc. etc.
It's as much time for the Muslims to take responsibility for their (father's) actions as it is all of humanity. By your standards, not only have we all blood on our hands, we glorify it.
Ready for a shocker? It continues TODAY. There isn't an active army in the field who hasn't killed and raped it's opponents. Usually not to the same scale as in history, but not [wikipedia.org] always [wikipedia.org] - notice in those exceptions, it was Muslims who were raped and murdered.