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Comments: 468 +-   Murdoch-Microsoft Deal In the Works on Monday November 23, @07:53AM

Posted by timothy on Monday November 23, @07:53AM
from the exploding-cuban-cigar dept.
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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.'"
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  • Murdoch-Microsoft Deal In the Works

    Thank you! Finally some good news. These hatred consolidation programs cut my insane ranting down significantly and gives me more time to appreciate the finer things in life like making intricate tinfoil feathers to put into my tinfoil pimp hats. I applaud Murdoch & Ballmer for finally thinking of people like me. But it may be too little too late, ever since the government subsidized hatred and what with the sub-prime hatred rate financial crisis, I've been forced to cut down on hating as much as forty or fifty percent. Tough times we live in. Tough times.

      • Re:This Really Simplifies My Life! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by m.ducharme (1082683) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `emrahcud.cram'> on Monday November 23, @10:37AM (#30202474)

        I wonder if Microsoft isn't entering its "post-evil" phase. I have a personal hypothesis that large corporations that last long enough will eventually enter a phase where they've made all the money they can out of evil, and will then start to explore areas where doing good things can also make them money. My canonical example of this is IBM. A company that has lasted a good long time doing evil things (up to and including allegedly selling tabulating machines to the Nazis -- Microsoft's evil is small-time compared to that), but that found that its evil business was drying up and decided to start making money from good actions like throwing support behind Open Source. Kind of like Dr. Evil returning from his long sleep to find that his legitimate business interests are making more money than his evil schemes can.

        Of course, it could be that since Gates handed the reins over to Ballmer, Microsoft has entered a "directionless wandering" phase, where much of their directionless wandering looks like "good things," more or less by accident.

  • Evil genius (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 23, @07:57AM (#30200922)

    '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.'

    Which is just as well because I've never heard anyone accuse Murdoch of being more than half way towards being an evil genius.

  • say and do (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tom (822) on Monday November 23, @07:58AM (#30200926) Homepage Journal

    I'm pretty sure that Murdoch will hate M$ for this step. No, I'm serious.

    He's in the publishing industry. In other words: Perception and stories are his trade. The whole "Google is stealing from us" angle is an excellent story and contains a number of great opportunities to profit (from the government if you threaten loss of jobs, from Google if you threaten lawsuits, etc.) - but what M$ is doing is essentially calling his bluff.

    Now he'll either have to go along with it, and de-index his sites, which will result in page views coming down crashing, or have everyone and his dog dig out the old stories and say "wasn't so bad after all, was it, old liar?".

    He's probably already busy trying to find a way out without loss of face.

      • Re:say and do (Score:5, Insightful)

        by dbIII (701233) on Monday November 23, @08:36AM (#30201220)

        Wow, you assign him so much credit. Do you think he actually has any technical people in his inner circle who dare tell him he's acting like a buffoon?

        Now that really shows you have no clue - for his entire long life he's been surrounded by technical people in his inner circle that have told him when to backtrack away from a bad idea. Ask the English press if he's a dinosaur that never considers technical issues and has no experts to advise him and they will laugh at you and mention Wapping. He's an evil old bastard but he's not a stupid old bastard and he's had a chunk of online commerce only a couple of years after Microsoft noticed that there was an internet out there.
        I'm not sure if he even cares much about what Microsoft or Google do - I think Google is the strawman used in all the noise he's raising to get the attention of governments to change the internet into something he can more easily make money out of. Of course it's all overblown bullshit that he is spouting, but he's made millions that way by spouting lies and carving up the corpses of the companies of those that fell for them.

      • Re:say and do (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TapeCutter (624760) * on Monday November 23, @08:51AM (#30201322) Journal
        "Wow, you assign him so much credit. Do you think he actually has any technical people in his inner circle who dare tell him he's acting like a buffoon?"

        Yes, you don't get that rich by surrounding yourself with sicophants but you might keep a few of them around for when you want to demonstrate who's in charge. I'm also pretty sure Murdoch is not above playing the old fool card when it's convienient to do so. Having said that I agree the story he is currently telling everyone is that he will cut off his nose to spite his face.

  • Let me get this right (Score:5, Insightful)

    by plover (150551) * on Monday November 23, @07:59AM (#30200938) Homepage Journal

    Fox wants to pull out of the news business? And we're supposed to complain?

    I don't thinks this means what he thinks it means.

  • This is a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by smartin (942) on Monday November 23, @08:00AM (#30200942)

    I don't personally see any down side of having all of Murdoch's content removed from my searches. If I want news, I want the real deal, not the Faux News spin on it.
    Also I can't imagine two entities that deserve each other more, it's a marriage made in hell.

  • Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)

    by headhot (137860) <tom AT rupture DOT net> on Monday November 23, @08:01AM (#30200954) Homepage

    If I were google, I would let MS have News Corp. The average internet user is not going to even know about the missing content to drive them to switch to bing, and the savvy users could not give a shit about News Corp and MS.

  • What Murdoch doesn't realize... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MikeRT (947531) on Monday November 23, @08:02AM (#30200966) Homepage
    He can't legally win in the US against bloggers who use fair use excerpts of his companies' stories. There is too much precedent there. As long as bloggers comply with the law, he's screwed. The only ones he can nab are the ones who excerpt half of a story, provide one or two sentences of commentary and that's it. What this means is that his stories won't be indexed in Google, but the bloggers who link to them will be indexed. So really, it's a two-fer against Murdoch. If he were smart, what he'd be doing is putting EVERYTHING they've done online since the founding of his companies, and be encouraging everyone to link to their work, talk about it, excerpt it, etc. so that News Corp would become the most powerful news source in Google's index.

  • Paying someone to disadvantage another? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by erroneus (253617) on Monday November 23, @08:02AM (#30200970) Homepage

    I can't but help to think that this is illegal behavior somehow. I also can't help but think that this proposed move has already been cleared by Microsoft's legal department.

    In my mind, there is "competition" and there is the game of "dirty tricks." In competition, competitors simply do the best they can and operate under the idea of "may the best man win." In the game of dirty tricks, competitors do their best to slow, stop or even kill the competition. I can't say for sure which color hat Google is wearing presently, but Microsoft most definitely subscribes to latter behavior rather than the former.

  • Missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Silverlancer (786390) on Monday November 23, @08:05AM (#30200976)
    Murdoch seems to think that people use Google to search Murdoch's sites.

    By Murdoch's logic, clearly if he withdraws his sites from Google, people will stop using Google to search his sites. But hardly anyone using Google has the intention of "searching his sites". People just want information--most people don't care which site has the information as long as it's good information. If Murdoch pulls out of Google that just means fewer people will visit Murdoch's sites. Nobody is going to give a toss about the fact that Fox won't show up on Google. This entire strategy suggests that Murdoch misunderstands his own readers.

  • Wait! Does it mean, Myspace will be deindexed? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Alex Belits (437) * on Monday November 23, @08:06AM (#30200984) Homepage

    [I! Love! This! Company!] YEEEEAAAAAH!

  • Shooting what? (Score:5, Funny)

    by 4D6963 (933028) on Monday November 23, @08:19AM (#30201084)

    "Rupert Murdoch is pointing a gun to Google's head, and Microsoft is helping him pull back the trigger."

    Oh old Rupert, is it really Google's head, or did you write G O O G L E on your toes? (Yeah that's right, Rupert Murdoch has 6 toes on each foot, you heard it here first!)

    • Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Informative)

      by QuantumG (50515) * <qg@biodome.org> on Monday November 23, @07:59AM (#30200934) Homepage Journal

      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.

      • 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.

        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.

        2. So his sites will appear on bing and not google? Sounds like the quality of google searches just went up.

        3. I'm sure the sites that will replace NewsCorp properties in the searches can't believe that Christmas came early.

      • Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:4, Informative)

        by L4t3r4lu5 (1216702) on Monday November 23, @08:12AM (#30201026)
        I remember reading that what Rupert Murdoch actually wants is headlines to be trawled as currently done, but for actual news items to be paid for. He wants Google to check the story for relevance but not display it; Just a link to the place where you pay for / subscribe to the article.

        Needless to say, Google said "It doesn't work like that."

        • Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Insightful)

          by jimicus (737525) on Monday November 23, @08:30AM (#30201184) Homepage

          I remember reading that what Rupert Murdoch actually wants is headlines to be trawled as currently done, but for actual news items to be paid for.

          How is he going to do this when nobody who works for him has actually written a news item themselves (rather than just repeated a press release or copied directly from AP or Reuters) for years?

        • Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Registered Coward v2 (447531) on Monday November 23, @08:46AM (#30201290)

          I remember reading that what Rupert Murdoch actually wants is headlines to be trawled as currently done, but for actual news items to be paid for. He wants Google to check the story for relevance but not display it; Just a link to the place where you pay for / subscribe to the article. Needless to say, Google said "It doesn't work like that."

          Interesting. Google could simply not index any NewsCorp sites and let MS pour money into Murdoch's pockets till it gets tired and stops. Depending on how long that takes and the success of Bing vs Google to capture market share, News Corp may find that many people no longer think of their papers when looking for news, especially if viable alternatives establish stronger online presences.

          Google can check and see what percentages of searches involve News Corp sites, click through rates, etc., an dteh decide on the impact of barNews Corp may be betting Google folds, but Google has pretty good idea of who holds what cards.

      • Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by dbIII (701233) on Monday November 23, @08:14AM (#30201042)
        He doesn't want to change robots.txt.
        He wants to change laws and get the blessing of governments to fence off the internet and make money out of it. That is why there have been a lot of speeches and a lot of noise and the implication that we are all a pile a leeches.
        It may look like an ignorant bull in a china shop but that isn't what is happening. He knows what he's doing, he's just prepared to break all the rules and turn the net into a virtually worthless thing in comparison to what it is now so long as he is making more money out of it that he is now.

      • Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by abigsmurf (919188) on Monday November 23, @08:19AM (#30201088)
        What good is robots.txt if a site that crawls pages ignoring the rules set is then indexed by google?

        I'd be willing to bet that if Fox News had a blanket ban on bots in the robots.txt, putting the opening sentence of a Fox News story into google would still return dozens of news sites that had ripped the first paragraph or two from their site.

      • Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Interesting)

        by tibman (623933) on Monday November 23, @08:43AM (#30201274)

        You know what would be funny? Google should remove all of murdoch's news sites from the index and say "We took the liberty of removing the sites, like you've been publicly talking about". If he wants them back he'll have to publicly ask to be reincluded. That should make his intentions clearer.

        • Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Leynos (172919) on Monday November 23, @08:53AM (#30201348) Homepage

          Hear, fucking hear. Google should call this wanker's bluff and do the world a favour.

          • Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Alistar (900738) on Monday November 23, @12:03PM (#30203442)

            Murdoch isn't paying Google to index their sites.

            How could he sue them for simply refusing to do something they aren't required to do in the first place.

            Equitable estoppel (spelling?) only counts for specified contracts.
            You simply stop providing a free, no-obligation service when you want.

            You can't even count a Google EULA in this matter as Google is the one indexing the content.

            It would trivial for them to argue that the increased legal concerns have given them cause to drop them from the index.

            If you did want to argue equitable estoppel, Google could make a complaint just as valid (read not very) as Murdoch could.
            Murdoch has been allowing Google to index its sites all this time (they use robots.txt and haven't blocked Google), and by specifically refusing them now, while not limiting any other search engines is causing damage to Google's business.

        • Re:no matter the mocking (Score:5, Interesting)

          by h4rm0ny (722443) <h4rm0ny AT tarddell DOT net> on Monday November 23, @08:47AM (#30201302) Journal

          It may be different in other countries but in the USA and the UK, the act of linking itself is not a problem. There might be cases where it is, e.g. if you say "the following people are peadophiles" and then link to a list of home sites, but these are all as relevant to the legality of linking itself as the illegality of murdering someone with a hammer is to the legality of hammers.

          Now if you're doing other things, such as caching the sites content and perhaps displaying it in a different format, then things become more confused. Google displaying the first few lines of a search result? Fair use in the USA. The UK doesn't have "fair use" as such, but I doubt a case would get very far and, more to the point, no-one would bother bringing such a case. The thing is, it's pretty easy to add a robots.txt file to your site and Google respects these. Laws would only have to made to deal with this area of technology if it were onerous or in dispute - e.g. a site owner has to keep track of hundreds of different "don'tcrawlmebro" files, or they're horribly complicated, or Google or Bing or whoever refuses to respect them or caches more than site owners feel is fair.

          At present, things are working nicely so there hasn't been much impetus to create laws dealing with this area. Murdoch would be happy to bury this area in laws, of course. His interest is against an open commons and in favour of a model that involves lawyers and money. He has lots of both, you see. The threat to him is not his business rivals stealing his customers, but his customers no longer needing him.

    • Re:Bing vs Google (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 23, @08:01AM (#30200952)
      What you're overlooking is that in the past, Microsoft has had very little regard for fairness in business or for their customers.

      I agree that Google's click tracking is annoying, and they certainly are datawhores... but so far I haven't seen any evidence that they're using this data irresponsibly.

      So far, I trust Google with my data over Microsoft... and they'll have to work really hard to overcome that stigma

      Capitalism only works when everyone plays by the rules -- Monopolies break the rules

    • Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tom (822) on Monday November 23, @08:01AM (#30200956) Homepage Journal

      Now if the big news sites suddenly drop from Google but can be found via Bing, people are going to change there.

      The interesting question is: Are people going to change search engine - or news site?

      Since most news sites these days essentially publish press releases and agency reports verbatim, there isn't much difference between them anyways. I'm pretty sure a lot of people wouldn't even notice. My vote is that they'll stay with the search engine and just read the same news story at a different news site.

      • Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mspohr (589790) on Monday November 23, @08:24AM (#30201138)
        I personally have no interest in Murdoch's news sites and I would pay to have an index that excluded all of his publications. They are either sensationalist trash or blatantly biased news sources.

          • Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Sockatume (732728) on Monday November 23, @09:20AM (#30201618) Homepage

            I'm not sure that Fox News or the rest of Newscorp actually caries any information that the other western news networks omit. It's all homogeneous. The only distinction between Newscorp's output and everyone else's is that it's pre-digested into a commentary-heavy form of "news entertainment".

          • Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Funny)

            by theskipper (461997) on Monday November 23, @09:37AM (#30201782)

            It's not odd if you don't have time to sort through sources that have a strong history of bias and agenda.

            Fox News we can leave as an exercise for the reader. CNBC consists of one constant rant against Obama (Kudlow, Cabrera, guests, etc.)

            But CBN? Pat Robertson as a news source? You can't be serious.

    • Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sockatume (732728) on Monday November 23, @08:01AM (#30200964) Homepage

      I think you've made an error here:

      But truth is, it's a lot easier to find the news you're looking for from search engine. If you spot theres a news site you think is good quality, then you go to it. Now if the big news sites suddenly drop from Google but can be found via Bing, people are going to change there.

      Current search engine users are almost exclusively Google users. If people almost exclusively get their news by searching, they have no site loyalty and almost exclusively get their news from whatever sites Google sends them, and therefore when the news sites drop off Google, they will stop visiting those sites. The people who visit the news sites directly or by syndication will not even notice the transition.

      Only the subset of users who are loyal to a news site, and only reach it via Google searches, and who figure out why they can't find it on Google any more, will switch to Bing.

      • Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)

        by williamhb (758070) on Monday November 23, @09:37AM (#30201770) Homepage Journal

        Current search engine users are almost exclusively Google users. If people almost exclusively get their news by searching, they have no site loyalty and almost exclusively get their news from whatever sites Google sends them, and therefore when the news sites drop off Google, they will stop visiting those sites.

        I think you're missing the point of Murdoch and Ballmer's pitch. At the moment, the public believe that Google is the best search site. But if they start to hear that Google doesn't include a lot of household name sites -- like The Times, The New York Times, The Sun, Sky News, Fox News, etc -- that perception suffers actually even if you are not a Times reader. If Google is missing a famous (whether or not frequently visited) chunk of the web, but Bing has it, then that hurts Google's reputation. And Google lives or dies by reputation -- despite all they do with email etc, there is very little "vendor lock-in" to a search box. I think it's a smart play by Ballmer -- he's decided that whether or not they could beat Google on quality, that alone probably wouldn't be enough to win back the market -- so they'll try to beat them on perceived coverage as well.

        • Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Jon_S (15368) on Monday November 23, @08:52AM (#30201338)

          What you are saying (in your first paragraph) is technically true, but is orthogonal to the Google issue. It seems like most people (not necessarily you, I don't know) who talk about "Google stealing news stories for free" never go to google news. Google new *does not re-display news stories*! All Google news does is present a bunch of links to stories, together with about one or two sentences so you get the gist of the story. To read the news, you have to go to the *actual web site* of the newspaper (or whatever).

          If the newspaper can make money by selling web ads or whatever, it still gets that revenue, so Google doesn't affect it one way or another, except perhaps *increase* the newspaper's ad revenue by sending searchers to their web page.

          The question still remains, however, is whether people drop their newspaper subscriptions because they can read it on line for free at the newspaper's website. But again, that is separate from what google news does.

          What really is killing the newspaper business is not loss of subscriptions, but rather loss of classified ads that have all gone to craigslist.

    • Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)

      by El_Muerte_TDS (592157) <elmuerte AT drunksnipers DOT com> on Monday November 23, @08:13AM (#30201032) Homepage

      As long as Bing keeps sorting the results based on the website's popularity rather than the page's relevance I don't see myself ever using Bing.

    • Now if the big news sites suddenly drop from Google but can be found via Bing, people are going to change there.

      I honestly don't think most users will notice if Fox, Sky and the Times are deindexed from Google News. If anything, they'll probably remark that the overall quality of results has improved.

      The principal question is this: Why is a big newspaper a big newspaper?

      • Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)

        by lorenlal (164133) on Monday November 23, @08:13AM (#30201038)

        Well, if it's the former, Google has its own "Do no evil" thing that they're supposed to abide by.

        This whole story irritates me. Microsoft is employing the whole, "If you can't beat them, find some way to leverage your stockpiles of cash to manipulate the market." If Bing really is a better search engine, people will start using it. Let it compete on its merits.

        • sudo gedit robots.txt (Score:5, Interesting)

          by linhares (1241614) <<linhares> <at> <clubofrome.org.br>> on Monday November 23, @08:42AM (#30201254) Homepage
          What? This is the best news to have come in quite a while: One desperate monopoly wasting dollars (after throwing out 5000 employees--think of the wasted karma) to make a desperate company (bleeding money [google.com]) lose traffic and the users that actually like them. Sudo gedit robots.txt. Insert password, beach! That I want to see. It's the coolest thing to ever happen to Microsoft, Fox News, and MySpace, all at once. I for one hope it goes through and, for the sake of world peace, I hope Google never mentions Tortious Interference [wikipedia.org] and let us have some well deserved popcorn.

          If anything, this one is a killer deal!

        • Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)

          by TheLinuxSRC (683475) * <slashdot@pag[ ]sh.com ['ewa' in gap]> on Monday November 23, @09:00AM (#30201416) Homepage
          I agree completely and I wonder why this is not considered an antitrust issue. I thought this behavior is basically the definition of antitrust; Using your monopoly in one market to force out competition in another market. Between paying off Murdoch *and* setting Bing as the default search engine in MS products, is this not illegal monopoly behavior?

          • Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Funny)

            by Ardaen (1099611) on Monday November 23, @09:16AM (#30201584)
            Not if you pay off the regulators as well, that makes it legal.

            • Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)

              by jefu (53450) on Monday November 23, @11:13AM (#30202858) Homepage Journal

              Google has had competitors for as long as it has been around. If you compare Google's share of search to Microsoft's share of OS installs, you'll see the difference.

              If Microsoft manages this, it won't take long before Microsoft does have an effective monopoly on search as well - between their making it hard to set Google as the default search provider in IE and perhaps taking over indexing of major news sites, it wouldn't take all that much to make Google a secondary player in the short run and potentially kill it in the longer term.

        • Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)

          by HangingChad (677530) on Monday November 23, @09:13AM (#30201540) Homepage

          Microsoft is going to kill Google the way they killed Netscape.

          That reminds me of a kid claiming he's going to kill a bear with a bb gun. Google is not Netscape.

          This move would be bad for MSFT and bad for News Corp, which means I'm not seeing a downside. If MSFT was smart, they would pass on this deal.

          The next thing Murdoch would come out with is the News Corp search engine.

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