Microsoft Offers to Pay News Corp to "De-List" From Google
Posted 11/22/09 at 08:39:00 PM by Justin Kerr
When Rupert Murdoch announced that he was thinking of taking his News Corp web properties out of the Google search index, speculation as to Microsoft and Bing's involvement was rampant. Turns out, there might have actually been something to the rumors for once. According to the folks over at The Financial Times, Microsoft is willing to grease Murdoch palms to go exclusive with Bing, a move that newspapers will no doubt welcome.
The idea is essentially to force Google to pay for content, something it has historically never done. The news certainly came to the disappointment of Google which tends to endorse the "openness of the web", but Google's UK director Matt Brittin told a conference last week that Google doesn't need news content to stay afloat. "Economically it's not a big part of how we generate revenue" he said. In the end Google will likely still gain indirect access to the content by crawling third party websites that link to News Corp stories, but it will certainly impact Google News and start a new and possibly disturbing trend.
Steve Ballmer has admitted that he is willing to spend heavily for many years to make Bing a serious rival to Google, and Rupert Murdoch is but one of many struggling old media mongrels eager to cash in on the competition in search. If the two parties do end up inking an agreement, expect to see Bing advertise heavily as the only place to find The Wall Street Journal and possibly more deals to come.
Will this earn Bing market share? And what effect do you think this will have on the open web?
Can you say
Submitted by MeTo on Mon, 11/23/2009 - 11:12am
Can you say monopoly? If it was done for free it would be in the clear since there is money involved it could get real interesting in court.
Submitted by immersive on Mon, 11/23/2009 - 2:26am
I tell you what. If this becomes a trend I will never use bing again. I don't know why but hearing this just pisses me off. Not the fact about it being news corp I could care less but the fact that MS is throwing cash around to hurt someone else. I don't like trends like that.
Submitted by Tekzel on Mon, 11/23/2009 - 6:51am
Its called "doing business". They aren't doing it maliciously, dispite Ballmer's image as the devil, they are doing it to grow their search engine property. Something that is "good and right" for a business that has shareholders to answer to. NewsCorp has a product, their news, and Microsoft is buying an exclusive access license to it. Whats wrong in that?
Submitted by LVmonkey on Mon, 11/23/2009 - 11:17am
if you can't see the forest for the trees... go back to enron
Submitted by Tekzel on Mon, 11/23/2009 - 1:29pm
Be careful with that word "morality". It is a many headed hydra.
Maybe you are hallucinating a forest where there isn't one. Metaphors are such fun devices.
Submitted by highsidednb on Mon, 11/23/2009 - 2:22am
I was really excited about BING when it first came online. It was nice to have another alternative to Google. Google sucks. Let's be honest. It's an advertising machine, not a search engine. But, I abhor Rubert Murdoch and everything he's created. If there's an alliance between Murdoch and Bing I'll stop using Bing. I can't stand Fox News and all the other horrible conservative propaganda machines Murdoch has created.
Submitted by Mighty BOB! on Mon, 11/23/2009 - 12:07am
This can only hurt News Corp. If people can't get their content from Google, well, most of them will probably not go out of their way to find it. They'll just switch to other sources and News Corp will make even less money on either adspace, or from whatever percentage of people who viewed their content for free decided to pay for something later (like a physical copy of their publication from a store shelf).
Submitted by mono on Sun, 11/22/2009 - 11:39pm
This means News Corp publications will effectively disappear from the Internet for a lot of people, and other sources will rise to the top. Google is bigger than News Corp, including WSJ.
Submitted by PC_destroyer on Sun, 11/22/2009 - 10:03pm
Sounds like something the FTC is gonna have some fun pretty soon.
Submitted by Neufeldt2002 on Sun, 11/22/2009 - 9:15pm
On today's web kids look at things they can get for free. I also look to see what I can get for free. Murdoch and his cronies are a dying breed. They need to disappear so better models come into place. I pesonally hope that bing pays billions to watch it flop. Everyone I know uses google exclusively, asked about bing, they just laugh.
I wanted a signature, but all I got was this ________
Submitted by Tekzel on Mon, 11/23/2009 - 6:54am
Bing isn't a bad search engine in my opinion. Its just that I have been using Google for years and Bing doesn't do anything so much more awesomely that I feel the need to switch. I do like the way they do their image search though, and will often flip over there to do that. Other than that, I pretty much exclusively use Google too.
Submitted by Craig-g on Sun, 11/22/2009 - 8:57pm
I don't want a situation where I have to routinely run a web search through multiple search engines to make sure I include their exclusive content in my results.
If this story is true I may have to avoid Bing on principle :)
Submitted by TheZomb on Mon, 11/23/2009 - 12:00am
Then a new search site consolidators will arise allowing you to search across multiple search engines. the search engines will then get payed by the consolidators to delist from other consolidators which give rise to consolidating the consolidators. Its a vicsious cycle and everyone loses :(
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