Rupert Murdoch is pointing a gun to Google’s head, and Microsoft is helping him pull back the trigger. For the past few weeks, Murdoch and his officers at News Corp. have been very vocal about their distaste for Google and their desire to lead other media companies in a boycott of sorts.
Murdoch keeps threatening to stop letting Google index the WSJ.com and his other media sites, and wants other news sites to join him in this self-imposed silence. The folks at Microsoft’s Bing think this is a great idea. Not only that, but the FT reports that Microsoft is in fact in discussions with News Corp. and other publishers about the possibility of paying them to remove their sites from Google’s search index. This report comes on the heels of a meeting in Europe where Bing dangled the prospect of premium spots in search results to publishers and outright money for search R&D.
Microsoft is not afraid to buy search market share, which is what it’s doing with the Yahoo search deal and even its Cashback program. But with these latest talks, it is literally trying to buy the news, or at least exclusive access to the news.
Bing can’t buy all the news, it can only buy certain brands. If Bing can somehow become the only place you can find news results and working links to the Wall Street Journal and other top papers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times, for instance, that would be a big reason to switch for a lot of folks. But it’s not clear how much Bing would have to pay the news companies of the world for them to give up all the traffic Google sends them in return for a fraction of that traffic and some cash.
Even Google couldn’t afford to strike such deals. Says Murdoch, of Google, “If they were to pay everybody for everything they took from every newspaper in the world, and every magazine, they wouldn’t have any profits left.”
In order to actually make a dent in Google’s market share, Bing would have to pay such exorbitant sums to so many different news companies that it would be difficult to recoup its investment. Bing certainly get some marketing buzz out of any such move, but that’s about it.
The big problem with a search engine trying to buy market share by buying parts of the news is that information spreads so quickly these days, exclusives last about 30 seconds. That information will end up on a site that is indexed by Google. Or the same news will be broken by someone else on the Web before the WSJ.com even gets to it.
Exclusive indexing goes against the Web’s inherent openness. Companies that try to curtail that openness don’t last long on the Web.
Image via PhotoXpress.
and News Corp can save a some money by laying off all the loser SEO experts
companies being pissed at google is the BEST thing to happen for microsoft. the timing couldnt have been better. Microsoft has the best opportunity to have exclusive content and be the exlusive provider of media on bing, and this could accelerate bings growth dramatically.
if you think google could live without a bunch of big media companies leaving their news site, open your eyes. noone will click links from no-name sites. if bing advertises that they are the only site with so-and-so authoritative articles, that would be a selling point for bing news.
(facepalm) You just posted on one of those “no-name” sites, idiot troll. Also good luck if you want to get your tech news from any “big media” site, as they are usually late and wrong, and definitely not worth paying.
The world does start and end with TECH NEWS ! And yes today if TC started a subscription model – couple of bucks a month – there will be scores who will sign up.
Subscription model can work if you have loyalty. There are real reporters in various parts of the world who sometimes get killed to get the news that you and I will not able to get /produce by checking twitter, fb etc every 20 minutes
If Murdoch were smart, he would just buy a search engine like http://www.yauba.com or Kosmix.
Just get rid of all the privacy stuff on Yauba that no one cares about, and he would have a killer search engine.
The world does [NOT] start and end with TECH NEWS !
Fixed it for you.
Actually, this is a smart move. Sell first rights to a buyer that can use the search power. Then license the searchable data to other search engines. This way they can leverage some base of income.
Another interesting method would be to move all of the news content to its own searchable database. Then either charge for content using credits or on a subscription basis.
“The internet views censorship as damage and routs around it.”
This is all an illusion by Murdoch, and Microsoft is drinking the kool-aid. If I were Google, I would preempt Murdoch and just drop all of his properties from the index preemptively.
See how he likes it. There is just about no reason to read the WSJ over the financial news blogs anyway, and any news the WSJ might by accident be breaking, shows up say on CNBC in minutes later.
Murdoch, you cannot hold the Internet down…there’s just too damn many of us…
http://businessmindhacks.com/post/how-wrong-is-rupert-murdoch-to-think-old-media-pay-wall-the-answer-very
Dropping the Murdoch links preemptively would be censorship.
Every news source he has owned he has in short order destroyed its journalistic integrity. I do not read the WSJ anymore- no idea what is news and what is bowing to the petit dictator. I dont worry about that from the FT or NYT.
I wish *I* could strike certain sources from Google news.
Wow, Microsoft has their marketing company hiring minimum wage drones sitting around in forums spreading their retarded talking points again.
With the failed re-launch of their old search product they had the pathetic minimum wage losers doing the:
“I’m a long time Google users and never ever thought I would switch. I gave Microsoft’s search a try and BY GOLLY I’M SWITCHING!”
LOL
And now every social media site has those same pathetic sods with a new set of talking points:
“companies being pissed at google…”
Paying people to sit around trashing Google on the Net.
Paying Yahoo not to use their own search engine.
Now trying to pay newspapers to block Google.
No wonder they are in last place even with all the power of being able to leverage their desktop monopoly and drive/force people on to their crappy search engine.
Bing is not last place. After the yahoo search deal, bing marketshare is about 30%.
and yea their paying to have exclusive content. Youre just pissed because noone wants google STEALING their content then selling it on their site (they have text ads on google news search pages). that is bs.
“bing marketshare is about 30%.”
just in your small world my friend.
yeah (windows) is right… yahoo is down to about 21% and microsoft up by 9%. So if the yahoo-bing search deal goes thru then bing will be well above 30%
“noone wants google STEALING their content”
Rupert? Is that you?
Google can go ahead and steal my content! As long as they link back to my page, I won’t complain about free advertising!
Lets make a note here. A group, of which I am a part, did some research recently on Google and Bing. This research involved searching for various types of products. We did not search specific bands, just the product type, to see what came up. Google consistently came up with comprehensive lists, while Bing came up with very limited lists, topped by enough MS product results that it was difficult to find anything else.
The bottom line is that you are not going to get a very good variety of things searching on Bing. They are not ordered by popularity or relevance. Bing may be decent for traditional searches (although experience tells me it is even poor at this), but it is advertised as being a way of searching for products and finding information to help you decide what you want. In reality, it is deciding for you, by only listing what it wants you to buy.
I can hear you retorting that this is just good marketing by MS for their own products. In reality, this is monopoly. MS has already gotten in trouble for making products that favor their OS or their other products, this is no different, although rather more blatant. I do not care whether MS is using effective marketing tactics; I care that they are using illegal business tactics and I care that I am able to find what I want to find, not what MS wants me to find. If you want your buying habits controlled by MS, go ahead and use Bing, I am going to continue using the search engine that lists results based on consensus of users, since it generally ends up with the most relevant results at the top.
All of that said, any news agency who excludes them self from Google searches will experience dramatically reduced results. Most computer users now generally rely on Google searches to find news, and do not care where the news comes from. If a bunch of news sites suddenly disappear from Google, these people will not even miss them. Some of the older generation and a few business majors might notice and Google will probably loose some market share, but it will not give Bing the majority, nor will it put Google under.
Interestingly, I will not be affected by this. Since I generally avoid US news sources, something like this would reduce the effort it takes to find accurate and complete news. European news sources are generally more accurate than US ones, and if MS does get a few European ones to sign with it, the more major European ones are only marginally better than US ones, so no loss there either.
Again, Google can go ahead and ’steal’ my content. I’ll take any free advertising I can get!
Lord Rybec
Google used to be and to my knowledge still is the BEST search engine for researchers. I spent a number of years working as a medical transcriptionist and among the enormous number of other MTs I knew in the business, we all used google.
Even after I had to leave the business due to health issues that prevented me from continuing to work in medical transcription, I was able to turn my time and talent to freelance writing including publishing my first novel. About 99.9% of the research I needed to do my work went through google.com. It was and I hope it will continue to be the “researcher’s search engine.”
It was always nice to type in some obscure or series of oddities and in return get information back that was actually useful and on target vs nonsensical and having nothing to do with what one wanted to learn more about. It’s why I stopped using Yahoo; it’s why I NEVER used MSN’s website.
In the end, Microsoft is all about the money. It wants nothing to do with actually providing a service that will produce a decent result. Screw MS! I wish someone would come along and squish them completely out of the market. It’s obvious our government’s courts can do the job. Hopefully some major company with brass balls and the $$$ to kick Microsoft to the curb will come along sometime in the near future. I’d like to see Bill Gates’ dynasty get what’s coming to him. He stole to get where he is. It’s long overdue for someone to come along and break that glass house he lives in and take those millions he stole from others away from him.
It’s sad that he stole the code that make him rich yet he bitches when everyone gripes about how shoddy his products are. I truly hope OS’s like Ubuntu will catch on for the average user and put the squeeze on Gates. It’s time someone put that man and his glass house dynasty in it’s place – preferably in the dumpster where it belongs! If he can’t pay legal goons enough to keep his monopoly, he spreads propaganda or buys up the competition after running them out of business. It’s time someone takes him down. It isn’t as if it is not possible. Donald Trump had his clocked cleaned… I just hope Bill Gates is next…. I’d pay $$ to watch someone clean Bill Gates’ clock the way Trump was cleaned out. Sure, ole Don isn’t on the soup line but he was clearly put in his place and I think in the end he felt the pressure enough to stop being as much of an ass and a bully as he was the first go around.
In a stunning turn of events Atheists everywhere have admitted while they’re still skeptical about god, they’re pretty sure that Rupert Murdoch is actually Satan. In other news, most people don’t consider anything Murdoch has touched to be an actual news venue and are dismayed that such a loathsome individual should posses the money and clout to effect their world whether they want him to or not.
Good riddance to all the News Corp Murdoch sites! Someone should explain to Murdoch how the internet works, nobody major is going to follow in his lead.
I wish google would just remove this guys sites all together to stop his bitching, he can un-index himself any time he wants, yet he chooses not too.
Go to Bing, that will make users like myself stay at Google where there is a neo-con free news sources.
hey guys, stop bitching the poor old fella! His build a media conglomerate employing thousands of journalists who have families that they must care for. You cant just allow some young lads sitting in mountain view, california, just programing robots to crawl all these sites for free and earn all the money living the real journalists and hardworking guys with nothing.
From where i come from, theirs an adage for this kind of rip-off – “monkey dey chop… baboon dey work”
I think you’ve really hit on something here, ivoice247. That’s what this is *really* about: Rupert Murdoch cares about the families of his employees. He’s such a bleeding heart; I doubt this has anything to do with his own assets. He’d probably just be volunteering in a soup kitchen someplace if he didn’t have all those families to worry about.
Ha ha very funny. Holden as a last name too – perhaps from Murdoch’s home land?
Let’s be clear. The problem isn’t advertising driven news. We’ve had that for years. ABC, NBC etc are free to air and never charged us for their nightly news. When was the last time you “paid” anything to listen to the news on the radio? (Pledges to PBS don’t count)
The problem for Murdoch is that newspapers were dependent upon both advertising revenues AND subscription revenues. A large part of that was justified by the fact that they had to produce and ship physical content. Obviously some % on top of that was profit.
I think this is an odd $*#& match to get into. I think the go forward model is ad driven free content on the web and subscription ad free content on a reader device. I’d pay $5 – $10 a month for the NY times or WSJ to be digitally delivered to my device each morning before breakfast.
Murdoch should have done an AAPL and done for digital readers what Jobs did for music. That would have been creative vs destructive and could have been a huge boon for all. I can see 100′000 of “hipsters” on the train or plane each day with their “reading devices” proving their super dialed in cool people.
here ill explain to YOU how the internet works. it doesnt revolve aruond google stealing content though.
You have to break Google’s stranglehold. A deal like this for 3 years say would break that stranglehold. Unlike all the “hip” technophiles here most folks just see it on their Yahoo homepage or Cable News Channel “Bing is the only place for the WSJ” etc and go “Oh, I’d better search through Bing then”
After 3 years you’ve retrained (enough) of the masses.
first suckas!
fail
u idiot
i love these comments
)))
lol
+1
time up for WSJ !
Good. Google is an amazing company that has found the most creative ways to leach money out of the internet economy by producing….the world’s greatest Yellow Pages. The problem is that the people who actually produce useful content don’t make money – only Google does. If MSFT can put even a small chink in the Google Economy then I’m all for it.
john gapper at the FT (a paper i pay to read
nailed this last week -
“Price is a signal that publishers have been ignoring online for too long. If they can charge for their content, they need to do so as fast as possible. If they cannot, they should stop publishing content that consumers regard as valueless and produce something else instead.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/91ed15c6-d08a-11de-af9c-00144feabdc0.html
-ben
i’m laughing at this comment because it is SO TRUE! i saw/read the FT article on murdoch pitching this to Bing and other search companies but i don’t think i understood that quote. thanks for posting it.
And what do you think MS is trying to do with Bing?
Google is not the only one making money. Millions of people who own the websites that can be found using Google are making money from the free advertising. Google is the best invention since the search engine. Originally, you had to register to get on a search engine (it was free). Everyone with a web page was doing it, because otherwise no one would ever find their page (I know, I registered many times with various search engines).
Besides that, Google is even offering people the ability to advertise on their own web pages, for money. And better yet, Google does all of the work of setting up the advertisements. All you have to do is place a little line of HTML into your web page where you want the adds.
If Google was the only one making money with their search engine, no one would be using it. money can be made by people with web pages and by people doing the searching. Not only is Google good for advertising, it is good for doing business research. I benefit from Google for free. I do not pay to use it for searching and I do not pay to have it advertise my web sites. These are both things people used to pay for. If anything, you should be paying Google for the advertising, and I should be paying them for the use of their network for doing research. Instead, they are kind enough to do both for free.
Also, please note that most web pages belong to people who do not expect to get money for their content. They are offering it for free in hopes that it will be useful to someone. Without Google, no one would ever see a majority of their pages, and their work would have been useless.
And, if you do not like Google giving you free advertising, Google robot.txt and learn to exclude your web page. Of course, if you suddenly get no more business, do not blame me.
i think the biggest problem is that people obviously feel entitled, rightly or not, and that everyone wants to make money. the money some people make, like rupert murdoch, isn’t enough so they want more, and as we all know if you’re just a little startup trying to get a bit of the shares of a larger competitor or make your mark, you’re wanting your share/a bigger share of the overall pie. the point is that everyone (not me) wants money and it’s up to them to determine how much they think they should make/not make, making the decision up to them and ideally not up to goolge, despite the fact that gogole was the one who implemented this model (based on other models) to make money of their own and to also benefit others. it’s actually amazing what they’ve done.
one idea which might be crazy… if Bing were to tell the papers that they’ll index traditional media with higher preference over blogs, or even give them some sort of special ranking, they may be able to get the papers on board. on top of it, there is a certain user base who prefers that when he searches for headline stories, he gets it from the traditional sources, rather than the blogs. THAT becomes a win-win for both Bing and the consumer (the one who wants old media).
shouldn’t you be leaving this comment on the WSJ?
yeah but he wants his comments to be searchable on Google because that’s where the people are …
its searchable on bing too jackass
No, you’ve missed the point… he said ‘he wants his comments to be searchable on Google because that’s where the people are …’ meaning not JUST on Bing, which is apparently the direction the WSJ is heading. Right?
problem is a lot of MS’s euro critics also dont like murdoch this might be MS giving critics a rod to beat it with
Unlike myself, who is looking for more accurate media, generally from foreign sources.
I think this can work. All it takes is a few important sites to not be indexed on Google and people will start searching with Bing/Yahoo.
Also, Microsoft will only have to pay off those important sites – others will simply not have the bargaining power to make anything happen. When you get those few, important websites to block Google’s indexing, the rest should take care of itself.
Plus, that assumes that Microsoft will make rational decisions in regards to capital allocation. The fact is that things don’t always happen rationally – sometimes there is emotion involved. I mean, Hotmail sold for hundreds of millions, but has it been a profitable investment for Microsoft? Probably not.
It will take more than a few sites for me to switch search engines. There are a lot more good news sites than there are good search engines.
Wikipedia will not agree to such an idiotic plan. Game over.
Ah but Bing already indexes all of Wikipedia and formats it into a far superior view (http://bing.com/reference/), I only started using it yesterday but I’m impressed with the reference tool.
Bing doesn’t need wikipedia exclusivity.
nice john. bing reference is a useful tool.
Comon guys you both work for msft…
Nah. He’s just an OS and I’m just a productivity suite.
Other distinguishing features:
- Farecast: http://www.bing.com/travel/
- Bird’s Eyeview: http://www.bing.com/maps/
- cashback: http://www.bing.com/cashback/
So, according to some comment that say that Google is stealing money from people who are actually doing some work ; MSFT is doing the same with Wikipedia and moreover, they are trying to pay people so that the web isn’t open anymore and not a place where knowledge is available not under the control of a single company?
I’m just thinking, I do not say I’ve got the answer but that makes me feel quite bad as we see that we are now facing a new kind of deontological problem.
wrong, because wikipedia is open source
Awesome, that layout looks as good as Cuil!
I could care less about news. My experience with Bing is that it is just an engine for advertising MS products. In some research I recently took part in, it was discovered that Bing only included proprietary products when searches for software were entered, and a majority of those results were for MS products, if such products existed. Bing is a corporate advertising engine, not an unbiased search engine that orders data by relevance and popularity. As such, Bing is not useful to me. I generally use the internet for research, and I cannot trust a search engine with so much bias that it excludes results that it does not agree with.
Lord Rybec
Kind of reminds me of how Coke and Pepsi work with many restaurants, universities, venues, etc for the exclusive rights to sell only their products.
Actually, this is a Coke-Pepsi kind of story… but its not about exclusive rights at all!
it is about exclusive rights, one is blocked completely, one isnt.
Why doesn’t Rupert just opt-out, update his robots.txt and put all his content behind a pay-wall already?
We’ll see how long it lasts if he does… there are a heck of a lot more good news sites than there are good search engines.
Updating his robots.txt would not result in him going off of Google just that new content would not be included.
And ya I don’t think it will last long.
Because his goal is not to opt-out, but to force search engines to pay him for indexing rights.
he wouldn’t do that because that would be the ultimate cards down play in this high stakes game of chess. and this is exactly what it is, a game, except that it deals with people’s lives and money and for that everyone should be concerned. what he’s doing is he’s trying to out manouver the already implemented method(s). he’s trying to think out of the box, or try something new, but since i don’t take him seriously, i don’t think he would seriously take all his properties and robot.txt them out of sight and out of people’s mind but existing in some realm of the internet for people who use other search engines aside from google. the problem with all his talk is that there’s actually no action to say he’s serious, to which if he is, he really should robot.txt all his properties, and he’s really not being innovative. the way he’s going about this is definately remise of that of an old man who will leave the earth hopefully sooner than later, who might leave us all a lasting legacy that might very well be damaging. it’s not that i don’t want to pay for content. it’s just that all these content providers need to be smarter. i will always be a potential customer/consumer for as long as i am alive. it’s not my problem if you can’t figure out how to monotize my time spent on your damn site.
Much ado about nothing, again, from the traditional news world and from Microsoft.
it is no secret that Microsoft has traditionally been happy to pay for their success, or for their competitors failure.
Here is the thing that most newspapers just simply don’t get: you cannot save your way to prosperity. News is free, get used to it, change your business model and rebuild yourself. Newspaper circulation has been declining for nearly 40 years, and of course show no signs of stopping. It is just now, many years after all of us that knew warned them, that they are trying to save themselves.
My company distributes our video content in a ton of places that do not generate revenue because it drives long-term traffic back to our site in the end. Google drives about 100,000 clicks back to Newscorp,PER MINUTE. Does Murdoch really think he is going to flip that model around by blocking content?
I can hear the smaller newspapers right now that do get it. they are saying one thing: THANK YOU.
Murdoch just got out of the way to let their content rise to the top.
I have preached until i am blue in the face consulting for companies about how important it is to get in front of your audience, regardless of where they are rather than forcing them to come to you, because it won’t work any other way.
Sad, the timer for the employees of News Corp. just sped up.
Erik Boles
http://ErikBoles.com
http://twitter.com/ErikBoles
DISCLAIMER: I worked for the nations 5th largest newspaper company at the director level for 7 years.
erik youre a moron. they will get paid by ms and everyone will win. this deal is the best opportunity to happen for every company involved except google.
Yep, he’s a moron
Being paid by MS does not take people to your site. If News Corp gets less traffic, advertisers will pay less. Then, what happens when MS is tired of paying? News Corp decreased their traffic and screwed up their advertising, and dug themselves into a hole.
The way this is good for everyone is that fewer people will read the manipulative BS on Murdoch’s sites.
First, MS and Murdoch cannot with this without changing US copyright law, since fair use rights state that it is entirely legal to quote small excerpts from copyrighted works, and to reference those works (actually, the reference is required by the law) with owing any royalties. If these organizations try to forge Google to exempt them from their searches, I am sure they will meet legal resistance, and they will loose. In addition, even if they do edit their robots.txt files to be excluded, Google is still within their legal rights to ignore the exclusion, again within fair use rights of US copyright law.
If this issues is pressed by MS and/or Murdoch, it will end badly for them, not Google.
Lord Rybec
Erik you make sense, belive me, I will not go to bing to find wsj. I am sure they are scared as hell to walk away from Google, they are just trying to make noise, you do that when you are going down.
Yep, if someone was going to go somewhere to specifically search the WSJ, why go to Bing? How about wsj.com?
There’s two problems here. First, I don’t think many people go to Google to search for news. They go to the news sites they normally go to, such as cnn.com, msnbc.com, etc. So this wouldn’t really make a big difference in their search engine marketshare, I don’t think.
The second problem is that even if this did make a big impact on Google’s marketshare for searches, it wouldn’t affect their profits that much. 99% of their revenue comes from their advertising business. While less queries would result in less ads being shown on their search result pages, a very big part of their advertising platform is showing ads on other sites. Rupert thinks Google makes all of its money by “stealing” content from news sites, man, talk about one out of touch mother fucker. This wont’ make a dent in anything for Google.
I forgot to say, I’m not against Microsoft doing this. Bing is a good product and having some “exclusive” content may help them gain a very small amount of marketshare. If that’s how they want to do that, I don’t have a problem with it, since Bing is a good product. If it was a piece of crap, then I would probably be more against it, but that’s not the case here. More power to them.
My main point here is that Rupert is stupid.
I agree with you that Rupert is stupid.
But search engines having “exclusive” content (where it’s not because of how good a search engine is, but because one is blocking the other one) is against the idea of search. I don’t wanna think about what search engine is good for searching news, which one is good for music etc. when I want to search for something. If Bing can become better than Google without this content blocking then that means they’ll get their share in the market. That’s the only fair way I see.
Nick,
The idea of search doesn’t mean search only @ Google.com, thats not the idea of search, thats the idea of laziness!
Plus, you don’t have to remember which search engine is good for news or music: if its a search that matters to you, just use more than one search engine and you will find better results (I bet you already do it that way!)
Maybe not, but searching Bing only gets results that MS agrees with. In my experience, Bing searches include little or no results that do not agree with MS.
I fully agree with Nick,
Luis, tomorrow you are telling us that it’s just laziness that we expect to reach a Verizon subscriber with an AT&T phone “just get 2 phones”!
I hate companies who think they can dictate what product I should use just to protect their market share. In a different setting it’s just vendor lock-in, except that there are now multiple vendors involved.
Hi Jan,
There’s nothing wrong with using 2 different sources of information (Google & Bing, Google & Wikipedia, Yahoo and Recipes.com). It is NOT THE SAME as using 2 phones. If your vision is that you have to have all your info in the same place, then you are probably not really aware of the size and scoop of the internet. Searching info on the web today is not as simple as searching for a name in a database. That’s why there are different approaches to search, and different niches as well.
Regarding your hatred for companies that “think they can dictate what products you should use”, you got it absolutely wrong, and I got great news for you: you can use any search engine you like! Also remember this: just they way MSFT can make a deal, GOOG can match it (they’ve been doing it for quite some time). If the creators of x or y content believe it is worth whatever money, then they -as the creators- are free to choose or block outlets for that content. That’s not even up for discussion, and thats why you can opt out of Google.
Also, when you say “just to protect their market share”, you do realize this is a business, right? It is really disappointing watch how a lot of people seem to think Google is a non-profit, and believe me, they are a regular multi-billion dollar company.
Bottom line… it’s only a search engine, not the person you will share your life with. You are free to use more than one and you don’t need to commit yourself to Google (it’s not even cool anymore). Same goes for Apple.
Bing is a good product [-X
?
Rupert is Stupid
nick, this is a free market. if these companies are pissed at google, then I hope they block them, even if it means a little persuasion from ms.
I hope they block them as well. Any company stupid enough to argue with free advertising deserves to die!
This has got to be a publicity stunt. It just doesn’t make financial sense.
A bad publicity stunt, maybe. Not even the MS shills around here can spin this move as good for consumers.
is it illegal to index it anyways? i mean how can sites prevent google from indexing them? really, i want to know.
by modifying the robots.txt file? Google will ignore it.
Google has Chrome out there. All it needs to do is push out a new privacy policy and the people that agree to it will become spiders. everybody who uses chrome will send the sites back to Google for indexing.
Unless Microshaft and Fux can get a court to side with them that google must comply with the robotx.txt file, then i think this is futile.
I really want to know the answer to this too and I can’t find it anywhere. I would think that Google could just start ignoring robots.txt, and there wouldn’t be anything newscorp could do? Is indexing public websites and linking to them protected by fair use or something else?
The issue is not technical – even if Google *did* start ignoring robots.txt (very unlikely), NewsCorp could just as easily block Google’s IP range.
The issue is that Murdoch doesn’t think that his end-users are willing to pay him for his content, so he’s trying to extort some cash out of the middleman instead. Problem is, getting his sites removed from the Google index would cost him far more than it would Google.
Hard to see why he’d be making such weak threats, but then I’m not a bajillionaire business genius.
this is completley right on the money. rupert murdoch makes some money off of google. the problem is he doesn’t make enough (maybe he doesn’t make enough to recoupe his expenses) and he knows that the general populus including the upcoming generation is very opposed to paying for content or content they deem as valuless because now (due to the internet) there are so many channels for point of consumption. so because rupert murdoch isn’t making enough money from already implemented methods of innovation such as pay for content via paywall like the wsj, he’s panicking. this is what i called a panicked flurry of comments from it seems a not so stable man because it doesn’t seem like he’s marked out the pros and cons of the plans he’s coming up with. it’s okay if he’s got ideas but then he has to plan them out and then see if something is a go or not. he’s a business man, so obviously he should know better, but the fact of the matter is that rupert murdoch is negotiating in public and using his platform to wield a bigger stick than what he has to work with. he wants to be the first to change the ecosystem so he can make the most out of it and for all our sakes i hope he doesn’t win. i mean i’m a googler. i convert everyone i know to google, but i’m quite aware that there are other search alternatives out there for me and some that might be better. fine. but i don’t want to be forced to use something and i don’t like the way rupert murdoch is going about this conflict. it’s not because i want to be (what did apple call their consumers that jailbreak their phone) a criminal and steal content and deprive people who make their livelihood out of creating content. i just really think that there has to be other alternatives for the media markets. the sooner they get new models that consumers approve of and will easily adapt to, then it’s a go. there will always be a blackmarket for content, but if these guys like rupert murdoch come up with something reasonable that we like don’t you think then we can all exist in the ecosystem peacefully? it’s too bad though because that peace obviously won’t last when someone like rupert murdoch is trying to grow his money at the expense of anything. so i’ll be happy if all his properties go to bing or if he tells google to no longer scrape his site. i’m fine with it because i personally don’t think it’s good for the internet but it might make people realize some truths and it might drive innovation instead of stiffling it.
you sir, are an idiot
+1
Google strictly follows robots.txt right now. What makes you so certain they’d suddenly ignore it? That bad press would be way worse than the loss of the search results.
Yes, and thats what this is all about: press!
I think GOOG can turn the press around and say we’re ignoring it because microsoft is trying to pay for us to serve you worse search results.
and on the IP address issue, I think with IPv6, google will have plenty of new IP’s to choose from everytime they index!
No, indexing is not illegal. It is as legal as quoting a small excerpt from copyrighted material. The one stipulation of free use rights in US copyright law is that you are required to credit the source. This does not mean pay them royalties, it means you must give a reference. Google does this by providing a hyperlink to the page where the content was obtained.
Google could choose to ignore robots.txt entirely legally. The fact that they do follow it is because they care, not because they have to.
For a comparison of fair use copyright law, consider reference materials that quote other articles or books. If the quote is small, they are not required to pay royalties, as long as they give a reference for the quote. Since copyright law does not specify between written materials from books, or from the internet, fair use does apply the same way it does to these books.
Yes, they could block Google’s IP addresses. Google could easily buy more or use proxies. Even better, someone suggested that Chrome could send indexing data to Google whenever a user accessed a web page. This would give the users IP, not Google’s. If Google made a plugin that did this, to get around IP blocks, I would use it, to maintain free exchange of information.
Lord Rybec
There are not many people who need WSJ so badly that they would drop Google and switch to Bing for all their search queries just because WSJ is exclusive to Bing. In fact if you specifically want the WSJ reportage then why search? Just go straight to WSJ.com. Furthermore, if WSJ cuts itself out of Google searches, why would competing news outfits follow it to Bing? (Our competitor has made itself harder to find on the internet, let’s follow his example! — Not!)
The most sensible thing I read here =)
its not just wsj idiot. add in fox news, Marketwatch, barrons, allthingsdigital etc. possibly myspace and photobucket.
Any idea what % of traffic those sites get are search originated?
WJS gets around 20% of their traffic from Google. Instead of looking into the future, they are hoping to be able to go back to the prosperous past and be able to blame their failure to transform on Google! May be they should stop their websites and see if it drives people to going back to buying the physical paper.
And most of those sites either are big enough that users have them bookmarked, or are not big enough for anyone to care, except people that have them bookmarked. Nobody searches for information on those sites through Google. I doubt anyone would even notice if they suddenly disappeared from Google searches (except me; they really get in the way of relevant data).
Naïve!
This is about publicity for Bing and bargaining chips for NewsCorp.
Publicity for Bing, yes… barganing chips for newscorp? How?
The nature of the internet is Fragmentation, and with the changing behaviour of consumers, who will utilise Google as a portal to content… WSJ need Google, more than GOogle need them…hence how is this a bargaining chip?
i don’t understand why people think that others will wholeheartedly change their ways. i don’t read wsj. i read the economist and the FT sometimes but if need be i can get it in paper format and if need be i can also pay for them. the only times i go to the wsj (for someone like me who searches for everything on the google homepage) is when i actually type in wsj in the search box on the goog frontpage or when i type it in my address bar. the only other time i might read something from wsj is if i’m searching for something and it comes up in my search result with a blurb from the article linked to google news which links back to the wsj article if i choose to read it via wsj.com instead of on google news page.
I am not impressed by this whole thing. Reducing readers’ access to your content is such a bad idea. I keep wanting to make comments about how Microsoft and News Corp deserve each other, but the truth is we’re all a lot more likely to switch which media we read than we are to switch search engines. For the most part, it’s not about where you read the content, but the content itself. This is a bunch of hullabaloo about nothing.
+1
noones being blocked from fox, nothings stopping u from typing foxnews.com
Rupert Murdoch is not someone to be trifled with. But he will ultimately lose this battle.
Your last paragraph says it all.
That last paragraph says nothing but dogma. Not all succesful web buinesses are open.
Erick,
You are wrong.
Bing is not really trying to buy the news: it is buying bragging rights.
In order to keep Google at bay, what they need is to get significant market share even if they don’t become No. 1, right?
Well, in order to get there, WHAT THEY NEED IS TO GET COMPARED WITH GOOGLE… IN THE MINDS OF USERS.
It wont matter if people compares both engines in their minds and think Google is still slightly better (or have nicer colors), because when you compare two quality products, it means you are putting them in the same league. And when you put products in the same league, it means you have a second choice (think Coke-Pepsi, Hertz-Avis). And when you have a second choice, well, you use it some times (again, think Coke-Pepsi, etc)… And when you use it, then you realize its not bad (assuming it has comparable quality)! And thats how number two´s build their businesses.
Live Search was really crappy compared to Google. But now that they have a quality search product, its all about marketing, positioning and mindshare.
And please don’t tell me regular bussiness principles don’t apply to this busines just becaue its on your cute internetz!
exactly, pop “and now the only search engine that provides Fox news and wsj” into a bing commercial and watch the magic happen.
who the fuck watches fox news for news, its only for entertainment.
+1
How come not mentioning ‘Microsoft’. When did Bing become the company?
Bing became the company in the minds of people when they got a better product and therefore credibility.
Bing! & decide
After butchering the “Live” trademark, Microsoft made a smart move rebranding its search technology.
I ran across this story from Google Fast Flip, which is out of beta now. Guess I won’t be seeing any WSJ stuff, oh well.
Murdoch is a dinosaur.
Melior,
You are an early adopter. Bing is not targeting you.
As a Microsoft employee I really hope this isn’t true. Paying for exclusive indexing rights is probably a losing financial deal, and it’s certainly bad for users. I like what Bing is doing to compete with Google through UI innovations and quality of search results. More of that please.
Jaime,
Dont forget this is a business. Innovation is great but its not everything.
And while exclusive indexing can look to you like a bad thing for users, I am not sure… maybe it will benefit them by pointing them to an alternative search engine. Why should the avg Joe have to find EVERYTHING at Google.com? Why not use 2 or more sources? Too much power in the hands of either engine is not good for users either.
If its legal, its good competition, and THATS GOOD FOR USERS!
I used to use multiple search engines. The reason I quit is that Google always had the most relevant results at the top. With everyone else I had to wade through a bunch of crap to find what I needed. With Bing, a few of the more relevant results are at the top, but they do not even include all of the relevant results, especially if they are not MS friendly.
I find using Bing to be a waste of my time. I could use both, but if I use the time I would spend on Bing looking through a few more Google results, I get much more information much more quickly (and without the ‘MS is god’ sentiment I find with Bing searches).
i think i am a google fanboy. Why ?
i start to ignore all the WSJ and all News Corp links in Google News, and start click other links from other website for similar topic (self delist myself from News Corp’s site)
(my firefox tab for TC always on for 8 hours a day, firefox tab for Google News on for 6 hours a day)
This sounds like a civil war in the making. A lot of people, like me, will refuse to use Bing for helping to keep newspapers alive while valuing their garbage over my brilliant blog postings (I mean this seriously – it is an afront to me to suggest the the NYPost writes better than I do and deserves to be paid).
Plus I don’t think Microsoft can afford to pay anything for a link.
Finally, on searching Google or Twitter Search I can easily find a tweet or other reference to a NYTimes or Murdoch article. I won’t need Bing for that purpose.
This is a mistake for Microsoft. It will hurt their image.
@Greg
“Finally, on searching Google or Twitter Search I can easily find a tweet or other reference to a NYTimes or Murdoch article. I won’t need Bing for that purpose”
Or you can go to wsj.com! but this is not about blocking anyone, it is about users thinking Bing has “exclusive” content, this is about marketing Bing!
Also, sorry but It doesn’t matter if you write better than the NYPost! They are a business, most bloggers don’t have one. Thats todays reality. And businesses are don’t win or lose because they “deserve” it!
this is about bing news more than blogs
No, really this is about WSJ and such offering to give bloggers the lime light by stepping out of the way.
Looks like Microsoft is back to its old tricks. Hopefully this will blow up in their faces like it always has.
A’men
Niche specific search engines/particularly google blocked sites could pay in my opinion – look at Ancestry.com they are a prime example – people will pay several hundred dollars a year to read content from them, they have free alternatives that all point towards the paid model, Ease of use/brand value to customers makes them buy a subscription rather than sieve through google and the free sites, people buy the package – rather like a person might buy a sky subscription.
Geez all these stupid ass comments. Rupert is absolutely right to do this, content deserves to be valued greater than what google values it.
You have to be blind not to see what google has done for the content industry.
All MS/Rupert are doing is trying to give “value” back to the system.
Regarding wether the content itself is valuable is a completely different argument and something well worth debating.
Similarly Blog content falls into this category, who’s to say that MS won’t provide the same levels of negotiations for popular blogs? They’d be stupid not to extend this to ALL CONTENT.
I really want to see this happen, and if it fails and everything ends up back in googles indexes. Atleast lessons will be learnt and onto the next big idea. Anything is better than what they have now!
give me a break. rupert murdoch is thinking about the endgame which is his bottom line. he’s thinking in terms of returns $$$. he’s not thinking about saving the media companies and their old models from themselves. he’s actually talking about being the first to try something so archaic it makes me roll my eyes at all his ranting and raving. he wanst to be the first so that he can be the one to control his properities and the effects/impacts of/on his properties while making the most amount of money possible. he is a business man. he didn’t get where he is by being nice and altruistic. it’s fine if he’s trying to drive value back into the ecosystem, but maybe he should try and ask why consumers have devalued content or think of content as valueless, and then work around that to a solution, one that would be viable and vibrant. one that would live on for a long long long long time. instead of trying to squeeze out more money. i want to see rupert succeed because i feel like it will deifnately split people into groups and that most people of this time and generation will not agree to his vision. it woul be great of all he speaks of became reality because i have a feeling that it would fail (in his perspective) and won’t get him the amount of money he’s looking for. it might get him some more money but definately not enough for someone like him.
All Rupert and MS are trying to do is infringe on fair use copyright laws. All these people are trying to do is divert all of the money Google worked hard for into their own pockets.
Please get your facts straight before you run your mouth. It seems that half the people here are ranting about content theft and rights. There is no infringement on copyright law if only a short quote is used and a reference is given. Notice that Google searches always link to the page (can you say reference), and quote no more than three lines?
this passage make senses.
Correction: Should read “Murdoch points a dry Mr. Burns -finger to Google’s head and threatens to pass gas.”
No, actually, it should read “Murdoch points a gun to the online news consumer’s head.”
Instead of trying to become more competitive himself, Murdoch is trying to force consumers to pay for his news by putting a spoke in Google’s wheel. Why can’t this old fool understand that people will pay for his news if he provides competitive value.
As for Bing and Murdoch joining hands, I can’t say that I am disappointed of the creation of this Axis of Evil. I actually look forward to reading about their embarrassing failures at squeezing money out of consumers in the future.
Murdoch’s a luddite.
the title should be. Bing tries to save the news industry.
another good point.
And they killed themselves in the process.
An experienced user or a professional will go to wsj no matter what, same for FT.
so who is going to wsj through Google ?
New (potential) user, future subscribers:
“According to Experian Hitwise data, over 44% of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google are “new” users who haven’t visited the domain in the last 30 days.”
source: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2009/11/newscorp_googleless.html
I will happily boycott Murdoch, Bing and their “Axis of Evil”!!
I’m already boycotting Google, Apple, and their “Axis of Evil”!!
Ironic that you should group Google, the epitome of openness with Apple, the epitome of secrecy. It is like trying to wed an angel to a devil.
Murdoch is loosing his touch. Instead of trying to bully people and companies to become paying customers, he should try to produce greater value to customers. That is what successful companies do when competition is increasing.
I don’t know if Murdoch’s and MSFT’s little plot will allow them to make more money without providing additional value. I doubt it. I, for one, will do what I can to make sure this doesn’t happen, by boycotting their products.