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.'"
This Really Simplifies My Life! (Score:5, Funny)
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)
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)
'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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The thing is that the anti-Microsoft people sometimes get carried away and accuse MS of all sorts of evil that they haven't necessarily committed, so others sometimes correct them. Nobody does this with Murdoch's media empire because there isn't any sort of evil they haven't committed.
say and do (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, WSJ is pretty good, but most of it is behind a paywall and isn't getting properly indexed anyway.
Speaking as someone who is working in the finance industry, it actually isn't very good. The financial news is OK, but you can get better coverage even on US businesses and finance news from the FT (without hassles or paywall); and the politics/economics section has gone downhill ever since they compromised their journalistic integrity to get in step with the Neoconservative party line. (It's worst in the editorials, but it tends to bleed over into the selection of economic commentators and the spin of news
Let me get this right (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What Murdoch doesn't realize... (Score:4, Insightful)
He is painting most of the internet as a denizen of petty criminals depriving people of jobs and will continue with that until it gains political traction, then he will make money out of the result if he can. If he can't he really won't care if key portions of the internet are effectively broken.
Paying someone to disadvantage another? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So what you're saying is that fair competition isn't the American way of doing business.
Or you've been living under a rock..
People won't know and won't care (Score:3, Insightful)
No one is going to switch search tools because some particular newspaper is in Bing's index and not Google's. If Bing wants to get the traffic, all they have to do is return better results. Buying exclusive access to index the WSJ isn't going to help, because anyone who actually cares about what the WSJ has to say specifically will just go to the WSJ site, not to Bing.
This would be a waste of MS money, and would hurt the WSJ by having them be found less often (Bing isn't yet as popular as Google, as I understand things), thus getting them less hits and less notice. Unless Murdoch doesn't care about the WSJ's future, this is overall likely a bad move for him.
If Bing wants the traffic, they have to return better results. Eventually, that will translate into users, but it's not a quick thing.
This would be a stupid move on Microsoft's part, and probably a bad plan on Murdoch's part. That doesn't mean they won't go forward, but it's a dumb idea all around.
Missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
[I! Love! This! Company!] YEEEEAAAAAH!
My enemies' frenemy is my frenemy (Score:3, Insightful)
Google on one side.
Microsoft and Murdoch on the other.
Gee... I wonder who the public will side with?
Sure, Microsoft once beat Mozilla who was burning up cash, but that memory will loom large with Google who has bucketloads of cash and more importantly: smarter people that those old dinosaurs. Microsoft these days is a poor imitator. News Corp is irrelevant unless you like spoonfed opinionated news. My money is on Google.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft and Murdoch is who they will side with, of course. Look at which OS is on 90% of desktops, look at whose papers/"news" shows are most watched.
Thank you, Mr. Murdoch (Score:3, Insightful)
Now I don't have to append -site:fox.com to my search results to filter out the lies. Thank you for going to all this trouble.
Shooting what? (Score:5, Funny)
"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:Shooting what? (Score:5, Funny)
It's actually a reminder to himself for when he's naked. "Go Ogle."
If you are defined by your enemies... (Score:4, Funny)
...this is prima facie evidence that Google's "Don't be evil" policy is working very, very well.
Good luck with that (Score:3, Insightful)
Poor Fox - they think their content is important enough to change the behavior of the entire web surfing public. Newsflash - it's not.
I wonder if Rupert Murdoch has ever used Google for anything. When I do a Google News search, I get the beginnings of articles that link right to the newspaper site to read them. All I get from Google is an aggregation showing me what articles are available on a topic. Even if you put the content itself behind a paywall (the last great idea that didn't pan out for the news industry) I'd still just see that teaser paragraph. I still don't understand where the "theft" thing comes from.
Now if the entire news industry rose up in unison to lock out search engines it might have a small impact on the habits of users, but as long as there are some holdouts and/or wire feeds online one or two providers dropping out will have no real impact.
Except for Fox's losing some eyeballs as a result of this I don't see how it works out for anyone. Sure, they get some money that Microsoft is willing to waste, but still - the loss of eyeballs will drive their ad rates down and it'll all probably wash out.
What content? (Score:3, Insightful)
Making Google pay for "content" is like charging the guy on the corner you ask directions from ten bucks.
Someone tripped over their own mind. (Score:3, Interesting)
There sure is some strange logic in this deal, especially from the news moguls. 99,9% of all searches regarding news or a topic is about getting information about it regardless of the source.
When someone do a search for something, the quality of the pages is the interesting part, not where those pages resides. If its pointing to a blogger, Wikipedia or a newspaper is totally irrelevant just as long as the information is correct. By removing their own content the newspapers are only encouraging bloggers and the like.
I cant see people jumping ship towards Bing to get better results. Its much more likely people will be put off when any search on Bing leads to a paying newspaper instead of to that blog you want to find.
Deindex MSNBC? (Score:4, Insightful)
Exclusivity contracts come to search engines (Score:3, Funny)
Everything Microsoft touches turns to gold. (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe Microsoft will learn the distinction between money and value before the damage gets too bad.
Is this really the only way Microsoft can make their products look good, by overtly attempting to damage competitors' products?
"Google News" (Score:4, Insightful)
All Google has to do is create its own "Google News", maybe with some fancy roll-overs with well-written but brief summaries. Reporters are cheap these days due to shrinkage. That'll scare the news industry like nobody's mother and they'll come running back begging to be included. Google is the New Microsoft: every twitch they make sends entire industries into frantic tizzies.
I will just rely on the news I can get for free (Score:4, Funny)
You can still get plenty of news for free on the Internet!
Did you know that George Bush parachuted out of the airplanes just before they hit the WTC? I would not know that except for reading the free news. Also did you know that Al Gore is using global warming as a smokescreen to hide the thermal exhaust from his secret base under the ice cap from which he will enslave the world?
If I were a Microsoft stockholder I'd be seriously (Score:4, Insightful)
pissed off and demanding Ballmer's head on a pike. How does pumping Microsoft's cash into the coffers of News Corp improve things for Microsoft or Microsoft's stockholders? Yeah, it's a great deal for News Corp's stock holders. I mean how bloody stupid is Steve Ballmer anyways? He's going to spend a bunch of money not trying to compete with Google but instead with having a temper tantrum because Microsoft's efforts to compete with Google have been so lame.
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:5, Insightful)
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.
I can see it now, maybe. (Score:3, Funny)
Okay, maybe not. But I was just carrying things to their obvious conclusion. And Boing-Boing seems to agree. Look at the photo of Ballmer and Murdoch [boingboing.net] and see the evil. The photo file is named Balldock and Mumer. (Should have been Balldoch and Murmer.)
Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Insightful)
Hear, hear! I've been trying for years to get Google to let you selectively filter things out from the results lists in both the news and web search. If it is from FOXNews or experts-exchange, I won't even click on it. That screen space is wasted to me, and I would rather use it on something potentially useful.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a Greasemonkey script (also works as a Chrome extension) to block Fox News & WSJ posts from Google News.
WRT experts-exchange, you can click on the Google cache of the page, scroll down to the bottom, and there's your answers. That's their trick for getting Google to index them so highly. This trick also works if you set your browser's user agent to Googlebot's.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I am not a Fox News watcher but the hate seems to be more an act than anything so let's just get past that.
Can this work? Well how will most people know that when they Google it that they will not find Fox news or the other properties that Murdock owns? Of those how many will go to Bing or Yahoo which is now powered by Bing to search for it?
That is the question. Will the money the get make up for the lack of traffic? Will this drive enough traffic to Bing to make it worth while?
Actually I heard Bing is a go
Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Funny)
But I'm grateful to experts exchange for at least one laugh. Hint: the hyphen in their domain name appeared some relatively long time after site launched.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The first one hides links to Expert Sexchange from your Google search results (unfortunately, it still shows the text, it just hides the link. Someone with better CSS-fu than me can probably tell you how to hide the entire li. The second line puts a big red
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Now let's just hope Larry and Sergey (Score:5, Insightful)
On a more serious note, though, about Fox News. Closing your eyes to one perspective, can only diminish you. Even if the only thing you lose is a window into other's ways of thinking, that's a valuable thing you.
Normally, I would agree with this...however, Fox News (along with the rest of the mainstream media...CNN, MSNBC, etc.) exists SOLELY to sell ads and opinions, not the news. I don't need to listen to someone who is paid to tell me what to think; I'm quite capable of forming my own political opinion, thank you very much.
I completely agree with listening to sources other than those you agree with, but listening to a "news" channel Like Fox News (again, MSNBC/CNN/etc. included) really is a waste of time.
point 3 (Score:3, Interesting)
3. I'm sure the sites that will replace NewsCorp properties in the searches can't believe that Christmas came early.
this is the real point that will be tested. is there intrinsic value in news production and presentation or not? if so then google has been getting a free ride on others valuable content. if not then this will bear out as a failure for newscorp.
I suspect newscorp is right. but I could be wrong. Th eevidence for this is that cable will pay to have Fox. And people will pay to have the WSJ. ANd people were willing to pay for sky news even when BBC was free.
Re: (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: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: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: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:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (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:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
I dont think paying people to block google is a winning strategy, but lets say that Microsoft had an unlimited amount of money to devote to killing off google's search business. How many sites would have to be removed from google before people would actually stop using it?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I remember that used to be the case with experts-exchange.com; if you set your browser agent to Googlebot you could see the search results,
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:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Insightful)
What Murdoch really wants is for Google to pay him for the privilege of linking to his paywall.
Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
no matter the mocking (Score:4, Interesting)
what is the legal status of NOT honoring a robot.txt, at least hypothetically?
or for that matter, simply linking to another website who has told you "don't link to me"
in other words, if someone says don't link to me, and you link to them, is that a matter of illegality or is there a legal basis for someone to sue in civil court? on what grounds?
its a valid question. and certainly one with broad reaching ramifications
Re:no matter the mocking (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
well said (Score:4, Insightful)
the dinosaur is sensing his extinction
Re: (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 happe
Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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)
Hear, fucking hear. Google should call this wanker's bluff and do the world a favour.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If anyone can see it, it can be indexed (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It's useless content. (Score:3, Insightful)
Most News Corp. content is generally complete shit, to put it nicely.
We're probably all better off if Google doesn't index it. It'll leave the rest of our results less cluttered with turds.
I as an australian apologise for this man (Score:4, Funny)
This man who turned journalists into the story factories they now are.
"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story" - I'm sure that this was a Murdoch quote.
Has obviously decided he is sorry for the hurt he has caused and now wishes to remove all the crap fiction that is vomited out of news corp from the poor (emphasis on poor ) innocent internet users.
I for one want to say thank you Rupert Murdoch.
Re:Bing vs Google (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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)
Re: (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: (Score:3, Insightful)
I do, however, appreciate Al Jazeera. They have a fresh open view that gives me new perspectives and insights and I look forward to
Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)
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:4, Interesting)
Ya know, this free ride can't last forever. Somebody has to pay all those reporters to collect and publish the articles we read, and the advertisers are not doing (they are trying to reduce costs). So that leaves us or the search engines.
Of course if you wanted to argue there are too many reporters, and about 75% of them should be laid-off to streamline the industry, I could agree with that. No bailouts - let the market sort itself out
Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
I can see how that would work as a PR exercise now. It's reminiscent of the breakdown between Sky and Virgin Media in the UK that left VM customers without Sky channels, which Sky were quick to capitalise on with advertisements. In that instance VM pushed back by sending out an apologetic newsletter to its subscribers, presenting Newscorp as disrespectful to its customers, putting corporate politics and income before its loyalty to its viewers. There's a risk that Google could do the same: witness its old "
Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you some kind of anarchist?
Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
If anything, this one is a killer deal!
Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
More to the point: if you have lots of money and friends in high places, you can get accused, judged guilty on both sides of the Atlantic and sentenced, and still walk away victorious. It's a bit similar how you can drive your company into bankcrupty, demand government subsidy, pay said subsidy to yourself as a bonus for a job well done, fire a shitload of your employees whos taxes paid for the subsidy in the first place, and still not get punished.
Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft is going to kill Google the way they killed Netscape.
Hmmm. I'm not so sure. Especially as Google's major business is ads, not search. Taking out any company that dominates advertising in any media is pretty difficult and takes a lot of time. Google search has ads, Gmail has ads, and almost every single f%*ing page has Google ads. I really don't see Google loosing the war anytime soon.
But I agree, it's going to be very interesting to see what Ms tries to beat Google. In any arena.
Then they tried to beat the PS3, which they succeeded in doing but now they're getting trounced by the Wii. Maybe with the Xbox 3 they'll finally beat both Sony and Nintendo.
Well, in the console area I think their money can more easily pay in the medium t
Re:Bing vs Google (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Microsoft's Dilemma (Score:4, Insightful)
If Microsoft has any strategists at all, they must see the bind they're in, though. Google is charting a future where all information is free, all consumer software is free, CPU cycles are free, and the OS is irrelevant; all will be paid for by advertising. That leaves Microsoft without a future outside of their X-Box division, unless they can make Bing popular enough to take away Google's business and wrest away that vision for themselves (either to embrace it, or to kill it).
Although giving the top 1000 sites a million dollars each to delist from Google would be a futile and crazy move, you can still see why Microsoft would consider spending that kind of money if there were any chance of success.
Deals like this could ruin the internet (Score:3, Insightful)
Excellent point. Although I think that this will never work (explanation here [slashdot.org]), if it does, it's bad precedent.
Currently, web sites compete to offer the best content, and search engines compete to help you most easily find the best sites. The best sites and search engines win. If somebody created a search algorithm tomorrow that kicked Google's butt, they could win the market.
If these guys succeed, search engines will stop competing on quality and start
Re:Rupert's right (Score:4, Insightful)
I really see no reason why Google shouldn't be allowed to do exactly what it's doing, because it's providing a search service. Sites have the ability to opt out if they want.
Re: (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 int
Re:Rupert's right (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, I think he's a greedy jack***
Normally I'm against this sort of self-censorship, but I agree that "Thompson" [wikipedia.org] is an incredibly vulgar word nobody here wants to hear!
At first I thought you meant "jackass" but there's nothing vulgar about donkeys.